My dissertation focuses on the needs of Black women pre-service teachers (BWPSTs) because their experiences are often overlooked in teacher education. This chapter concludes with recommendations for new directions for teacher education researchers centered on BWPSTs. How Black female pre-service teachers (BWPST) are experiencing and learning in teacher education programs.
I summarized each woman's case, and I made recommendations for how teacher education programs could have better supported each woman.
Literature Review Introduction
These themes included: (1) lack of identity—who are these black women? 2) experiences of BWPSTs in inadequate teacher training; and (3) limited transformative learning environments. Except for this sentence, these women's identities are left out of the analysis, which in turn contributes to the absent presence of black women. When researchers engage Black women's identities more fully, they often identify ways in which teacher education programs have been inadequate to meet their needs.
In this review, I have outlined three themes in the literature on teacher education and its focus on Black women: (1) missing identity – who are these Black women.
Conceptual Framework
Because of their intersectional existence, Black women are often on the receiving end of state-sanctioned violence (Yoon & Chen, 2022). Mapping the experiences of black women's education for teachers is particularly complex because most of them were black girls in school. Because black women often do not have the space to greet these ghosts, they are constant.
At BWT, Black women reflected and shared their experiences as Black girls and Black women.
Methods
Due to the interpretive nature of this research, it was important to understand one's role in the construction of meaning. With an ethics of care (Noddings, 2015), I do not want to show/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze. In this step of the listening guide, I used each participant's interview transcripts to construct the “I” poems.
In this phase of analysis, I began to question the many layers of participants' expressed experiences that related to my research questions.
Caresha
In this interview, Caresha expressed that she no longer felt that there was a culture of care or joy in the school. The main purpose of this program was to train teachers quickly to help fill vacancies in the school district. The use of the word correct signaled the need to fix something, and in this case. it referred to the knowledge students were building at home.
Even with teachers they trusted, respect was important in the quest to succeed and "get out" of East Town: He warned them against going out on the streets and acting "too grown up" because they couldn't imagine afford to make money. This teacher – seemingly unprovoked – told the girls at school that they thought they were "acting adults" because they simply existed.
From these instances, she discovered that she had to learn how to communicate in order to be successful. She was bright and determined in school, but learned to use her voice in ways expected in that system as a means of defense. On several occasions during our interviews, she described her approach to teaching using the word "control". She explained that a successful classroom or a successful teacher must "correct".
In the beginning, like the first six or seven cycles, we learned how to have classroom management, things like that, and we moved on to how to structure our classroom. She said that there were times when she had to submit an assignment, but she did not have a clear concept of how to actually do it in the classroom.
Taylor
In addition to the distance from this school, her mother began working outside the home, which limited her ability to volunteer as much. As I listened to and researched Taylor's educational stories, I discovered that she was haunted by the ghosts of merit and competition. She knew she was treated decently, but that was because she had no behavioral problems and was a hard worker.
Because of who she was (a black girl), she was treated poorly and did not receive the support she deserved. Taylor seemed to be overworked in that environment, especially because she felt like she wasn't very successful at this high school. She made this choice consciously because she wanted to avoid the overly competitive environment she experienced in high school.
She reflected on her experiences and used her spirits to guide her educational ideologies. In this quote she said, “It is a privilege for me to work with them.” This was important because she wasn't treated that way at school. Taylor went to her teacher training college because they advertised themselves as a liberatory program that aimed to “take the whiteness out of education.” Taylor was drawn to this program because of its values, but she also witnessed alumni faculty from the program and was impressed with the way they interacted with students.
Because Taylor had already begun to greet her ghosts, she was able to push back against the white supremacy that permeated this program. There were times when she wanted to try new teaching strategies but was told they wouldn't work.
Tanya
She felt tension trying to be a good student and participating in class and extracurricular activities and wondering if she was doing too much. In the second semester of her program, she was offered a long-term substitute position with a school in the local district. Tanya was haunted by hypervisibility as she was singled out in various ways throughout her schooling experience.
She said she "wasn't the best or the worst at math" but was still happy to be ahead of many other students. Tanya hoped to be intentional in her classroom to ensure that she was breaking down her negative experiences as a student. In K-12, she was invisible when she was ignored by her teachers or overlooked in theater.
Her ideologies were strongly shaped by the ghosts that haunted her, but she was also influenced by specific professors in her teacher training. Due to instances where she was made to feel small because of her achievements and work ethic, she considered shrinking herself as a way to protect herself during her teacher training classes. I have to stop talking.” (Interview I, lines 84-85) She asked if she was taking up too much space in her graduate classes.
She was yelled at by a white mother, and her academic integrity was questioned by her white classmates. She sometimes second-guessed herself in her teacher education program because of the specter of hypervisibility that forced her to question whether she was receiving attention based on her identity.
Sade
In particular, she was haunted by a system of insecure elitism and the silencing of her voice, and these ghosts shaped her teaching ideologies and her experiences in her teacher education program. Because Sade realized her worth early on when she was at a charter school -- she was labeled as smart and good at math -- her school poured resources into her. She often didn't want to ask because she didn't want to look like she didn't know.
In high school, due to her success in the school's insecure elitism system, she was chosen to attend many extracurricular activities. As one of the only black women in her program, she was often infantilized by her black male professors. At the same time, even in her senior position as a teacher, she was haunted by the specter of a silent voice, as she was often not treated as an equal at school.
With the support of her teacher training program, Sade expressed how she disrupted her own beliefs about what it meant to engage in mathematics. She didn't want to silence their voices, she wanted them to explore and be curious – things she couldn't get as a student. During her teacher training, she often felt like she didn't deserve breaks or extensions because she was told so many times in high school that she didn't deserve these things.
She was even asked to put aside her philosophical beliefs before meetings, as school leaders did not want to engage in conversations that disrupted the systems in the school. She was taught to always work harder, regardless of what might happen personally, and therefore, she adapted these coping strategies into her teacher education program.
Freedom Dreaming: Building an Unimagined Future in Teacher Education
Teacher education programs have a responsibility to provide a space for BWPST to witness each other's stories. In order to re-articulate their ideologies of teaching, teacher education programs should create space for BWPSTs to do the work of unwinding, re-remembering and reconciling. Already engaged in this reflective and critical work, she resisted some of the practices and policies in her teacher education program.
When the microaggression was shared with a trainer in a teacher education program, the trainer immediately internalized race. Teacher education programs can change to better support black women's dreams of freedom. Professors of color in her teacher education program helped her find her voice.
And finally, "teacher education must decenter the focus of the curriculum beyond the needs of white, female teachers" (p. 350). She engaged in critical work in her teacher education, and she was able to do so because of the resources and support embedded in the program. Throughout much of this thesis, I have discussed how teacher education should resist oppressive systems in the quest to create more liberating learning spaces.
Teacher education programs can adopt policies that disrupt our capitalist way of working in higher education. Teaching of color: A critical race theory in educational analysis of the literature on preservice teachers of color and teacher education in the US. Talking in the company of my sisters: The counterlanguages and intentional silences of Black female students in teacher education.
Structuring disruption within university-based teacher education programs: Opportunities and challenges of race-based cohorts.
