UC Santa Cruz

Following the murder of George Floyd and the wide-spread recognition of systemic discriminatory abuse of power by police, organizations across the country were jolted into reviewing their own policies and practices for evidence of prejudice and racial injustice. Teacher education programs were no exception. As teacher education grapples with this critical historical conjuncture, it is imperative to deeply examine how logics of systemic racism are embedded in the social and political structures charged with preparing future teachers. This dissertation contributes to this investigation by exploring how teacher education state and program policies intersect with teacher educator pedagogies regarding the development of antiracist engagement in pre-service teacher practice. Framed by critical whiteness studies rooted in Black scholarly perspectives and Victor Ray’s conception of racialized organizations, the purpose of this research is to bring awareness to how education policy and pedagogical strategies in teacher education support or challenge the development of racial consciousness and engagement in antiracist education. This study draws on teacher education state standards and assessments, teacher educator focus groups and pre-service teacher interview data from three teacher education institutions in central California, all with a stated commitment to preparing teachers as change agents and social justice advocates. Teacher educator focus groups were composed of program administrators, social foundations and methods instructors and examined the structural and pedagogical ways in which their programs met their social justice and equity-centered missions. In addition, eleven pre-service teachers were interviewed three times each throughout the course of their teacher education program. Each of the three interviews included questions that directly inquired about the pre-service teachers’ experiences regarding race, racism, and equity within their teacher education program and student teaching placements. My findings indicate that state policies largely sidestepped addressing issues of race, racism, and whiteness directly. Despite this omission, teacher educators in these three programs sought to provide teacher preparation that centered justice and equity-oriented education. Often they were successful, but sometimes the disconnect between the state policies and the teacher education programs created confusion and internal conflict for the student teachers. This disconnect revealed several potential barriers to developing teachers committed to antiracism, notably (1) the reliance on whiteness as a norm in the teacher education state standards, (2) the dominance of the edTPA, an assessment that does not attend to race and racism, among teachers educators and pre-service teachers (3) isolating silos of teacher educators in teacher preparation programs, and (4) the dearth of antiracist teaching methods that interrogate whiteness provided to pre-service teachers. Ultimately, I argue that we can no longer afford to only focus on transforming individual teachers one at a time, but must also attend to the larger structures that uphold values embedded in white supremacy and inequality so that as many educators as possible can be prepared to be racially literate and justice-oriented. The findings from this study uncover the sites in need of transformation and provide important implications for teacher education and education policy preparing teachers to be justice and equity oriented change agents.