Confronting Race and Colonialism: Experiences and Lessons Learned From Teaching Social Studies

Abstract

Literature on teacher education and encounters with race highlight some of the difficulties that teacher candidates face when they confront their own racialized subjectivities. However, many of these projects focus exclusively on Whiteness studies, explicating how White teacher candidates come to witness their own racialized Whiteness in relation to their epistemological understandings of the world. In this paper, I diverge from this pattern of thought, exploring a subset of the tenets of critical race theory, that of silences and exclusions, pervading my own teaching in a primary/junior social studies methods class and exploring how these structured my lessons. Specifically, I look at how counternarratives, critiques against liberalism, and multiculturalism and encounters with racialized and colonial supremacy were involved in my pedagogical strategies. I conclude by suggesting that although these methods may seem daunting for the primary/junior classroom, they can provide valuable insights for teacher candidate orientations to their own pedagogies.

     Keywords: social studies pedagogy; anti-racism in practice