Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance is unique in bringing together these three important topics in the context of communication teaching and scholarship with an eye toward interdisciplinary perspectives. In fourteen chapters, the leading whiteness scholars in the field of communication analyze the process of teaching and learning and the complicated intersections of whiteness, racial identity, and cross-racial dialogue. Toward these ends, these essays offer a variety of theoretical and practical approaches to the analysis of identity construction, racial privilege, and pedagogies toward equality and social justice. Above all, for teachers, students, and anyone interested in these issues, this book is a challenge to re-think the ways our curricula, texts, disciplinary boundaries, and moreover, how our interactions and performances re-inscribe racial privileges. Chapters provide innovative and accessible analyses of teaching and learning that will appeal to students, teachers, administrators, and anyone interested in how race works.

At the start of the twenty-first century, government mandates and corporate practices are resulting in growing inequities in the U.S. educational field. Many view this as being driven by whiteness hegemony. Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom is a comprehensive effort to bring together, in one volume, educultural practices and teaching strategies that deconstruct whiteness hegemony, empower individuals to develop critical consciousness, and inspire them to engage in social justice activism. Through music, the visual and performing arts, narrative, and dialogue, educulturalism opens us up to becoming more aware of the oppressive cultural and institutional forces that make up whiteness hegemony. Educulturalism allows us to identify how whiteness hegemony functions to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite, and reproduce inequities and inequalities within education and wider society.

This book employs a narrative approach to recount and interpret the story of an innovative teaching and learning project about whiteness. By offering a first-hand description of a nationally-recognized, high school-based Youth Participatory Action Research project—The Whiteness Project—this book draws out the conflicts and complexities at the core of white students’ racial identities. Critical of the essentializing frameworks traditionally given to address white privilege, this volume advances a distinctive and theoretically robust account of ‘second-wave critical whiteness pedagogy’.

Based on a two-year critical ethnography, Performing Purity: Whiteness, Pedagogy, and the Reconstitution of Power demonstrates the potential of a performative conceptualization of whiteness - a way of seeing whiteness in production, in the process of reiteration. This book builds on prior studies by searching for the repetitions of whiteness in our daily communication. The move to the performative is an explicit detailing of whiteness in and through the repetitious acts that work to reconstitute whiteness as a communicative ideal. Performing Purity creates a critical space of dialogue, shifting the conversation to how we make race, as a construct, matter.

This pioneering volume applies critical whiteness studies in a variety of educational contexts in the United Kingdom. The author uses ethnographic, biographical and documentary research to show how whiteness ‘works’ in education. The book also considers policy issues, and discusses how critical whiteness studies might function in anti-racist practice, shows how ‘white supremacy’ continues to dominate educational discourse and practice and discusses how this can be resisted.

As educators, how do we challenge and interrupt the social construction of whiteness in ourselves, in the classroom, in schools, and in the wider society? Coming from diverse backgrounds, the contributors in this volume draw on their own well-examined experiences of race, racism, and whiteness in developing effective antiracist pedagogies and classroom activities that interrupt and contest whiteness. They have explored their own lives from the selective position of their own memories and have traced the ways in which their assumptions - which they use to mediate and interpret the world around them - have been constituted by public ideological forces. They have collaborated with others in building alternative pedagogies and support systems, enabling them to teach, and at the same time, reflect on the assumptions behind and the effects of their teaching. The result is the work collected here.

We need to name whiteness, in order to move toward antiracism. For too long, white educators have relied on people of color to make change to a relentlessly racist school system. Racial equity will not come until white educators recognize their role in supporting racist policies and practices, and take responsibility for dismantling them. Learning and Teaching While White is an accessible guide to help white educators, leaders, students, and parents develop an explicit, skills-based antiracist practice. Through their own experiences working with school communities, and the strategies and tools they have developed, Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi share how white educators can gain greater consciousness of their own white racial identity; analyze the role of whiteness in their school systems; rethink pedagogical approaches and curricular topics; address the role of white parents in the pursuit of racial literacy and equity; and much more. Their book will empower white educators to be part of creating a more equitable educational system for all students.

Historically, white women have had a tremendous influence on establishing the ideological, political, and cultural scaffold of American public schools. Pedagogical orientations, school policies, and classroom practices are underwritten by white, cisgender, feminine, and middle to upper class social and cultural norms. Labor trends suggest that students of color are likely to sit in front of many more white women teachers than males or non?white teachers, thus making it imperative to better understand the nature of white women’s work in culturally diverse settings and the factors that most profoundly impact their effectiveness. This book examines how white women teacher dispositions (i.e. knowledge, beliefs, and skills) intersect (and/or interact) with their racial identity development, the concept of whiteness, institutional racism, and cultural perspectives of racial difference. All of which, as the authors in this volume argue, matter for nurturing a teaching practice that leads to more equitable schooling outcomes for youth of color. While it is imperative that the field of education recruits and retains more nonwhite teachers, it is equally important to identify research?supported professional development resources for a white woman?dominated profession. To that end, the book’s contributors present critical insight for creating cultural contexts for learning conducive to effective cross?cultural and cross?racial teaching. Chapters in the first section explore white women’s role in establishing and maintaining school environments that cater to Eurocentric sensibilities and white racial preferences for learning and social interaction. Authors in the second section discern the implications of white images, whiteness, and white racial identity formation for preparing and professionally developing white women teachers to be effective educators. Chapters in the third section of the book emphasize the centrality of race in negotiating academic interactions that demonstrate culturally responsive teaching. Each chapter in this book is written to investigate the intersectionality of race, cultural responsive pedagogies, and teaching identities as it relate to teaching in multiethnic environments. In addition, the book offers solution?oriented practices to equip white women (and any other reader) to respond appropriately and adequately to the needs of racially diverse students in American schools.

Although the sciences have long understood the value of practice-based research, the arts and humanities have tended to structure a gap between practice and analysis. This book examines differences and similarities between Performance as Research practices in various community and national contexts, mapping out the landscape of this new field.

This book theorizes and describes the concept of transformative critical whiteness pedagogies that are rooted in theories and practices of improvisation. It shows how these pedagogies invite people, especially white people, into the urgent work of resisting the ongoing production and affirmation of white supremacy. Using the frameworks of storytelling and story analysis, this book uses narrative to invite the reader into ongoing work to design and make sense of teaching and learning about whiteness that would meaningfully account for a grapple with white supremacy. Chapter 1 offers the conceptual framework rooted in theories and practices of improvisation that allow for new ways to think about engaging whiteness in anti-racist pedagogies, which the authors name transformative critical whiteness pedagogies. Chapters 2–4 tell and analyze the stories that emerged out of this work to design and facilitate transformative critical whiteness pedagogies with white elementary students, white college students, and then black elementary students in the US. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the challenges of developing and implementing transformative critical whiteness pedagogies in K-12 contexts. The final chapters offer a discussion of the improvisational ethos, as well as an overview of the authors’ ongoing work to engage people, especially white people, in getting smarter about whiteness. Using simple, straightforward language to address complex ideas about anti-racist pedagogies, this volume will be important reading for pre-service teachers and teacher educators in Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Multicultural Education, Social Foundations of Education, Elementary Education, and Race and Culture Studies.