White Pre-Service Teachers and "De-privileged Spaces" (2008)

In their classic article, Culture as Disability, McDermott and Varenne (1995) retell fable of seeing man who, upon finding himself in country of thought he could easily rule it. His efforts were fruitless because he could not make sense of their world. Daily life was set up for blind to be successful. seeing man was shocked by idea that what was considered a (his eyes) in one setting could be his handicap in another. Although McDermott and Varenne used this story to illustrate how culturally determined notions of able and disabled are, I believe seeing man's arrogance has further application to how teachers and teacher educators can approach privilege. story I tell is my own version of seeing man (with a gender and race twist). It is about a small group of pre-service teachers in a mostly Latina(o) teacher education cohort as they began their first semester in Multicultural Teacher Training (MTT) (1) program at a large public university in southwest. It is about how Whiteness can become both a handicap and opportunity instead of a privilege. This process, which I refer to as de-privileging Whiteness, pushes pre-service teachers to re-examine their own perspectives as culturally constructed (Geertz, 1973) and their version of world as just that, a version. pre-service teachers I concentrate on were given a reason to see themselves as White and to see their own version of world as one of many. In their early MTT classes, they were misled and ill prepared by their own cultural understanding of education, especially when it failed to give them tools to participate successfully in class. They often made mistakes, putting their foot in their mouth so to speak. At same time, Latina(o) students were empowered to speak their mind and disagree with students, something that is less common in other education classes at same campus and at other universities in U.S. (Montecinos, 2004). How this de-privileged space was manifested in MTT classroom is focus of this article. Whiteness and Teacher Preparation Critical Race theorists and Whiteness Scholars (Delgado, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 2001; Pollack, 2004; Sleeter, 2003; Sleeter & McClaren, 1995; Tatum, 1999; Thompson, 2003) have been pushing teacher educators to look closely at reproduction of privilege, which often quoted Peggy Macintosh (1989) defines as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious (Maher & Tetreault, 1997; McIntyre 1997; Sleeter, 2001) These sets of privileges are passed from generation to generation, through family, classrooms and other institutions in society like banks, schools, and media. (Helms, 1990; King, 1991; Lipsitz, 1998) In her definitive article, Whiteness as Property, Cheryl Harris (1993) said The fundamental precept of Whiteness--the core of its value--is its exclusivity (p. 1789). In other words, Whiteness as identity (and a marker of power) is linked to its insistence on being only version of right, good, and worthy, to exclusion of other versions of being. Still, we know very little about contexts that push teacher education students to see themselves as racialized, cultural beings. Usually, as Ladson-Billings (2004) recently said, Most members of dominant society rarely acknowledge themselves as cultural beings. They have no reason to. Some argue there is urgent need to overturn the normalcy and neutrality of privilege (Villenas & Deyhle, 1999) but we have few examples of how this can happen. (See Hytten & Warren, 2003; Marx & Pennington, 2003) If we know that 85% of teachers are (NCEI, 2005) and students of color are growing at 43%, even 57% in west, then it seems problematic to graduate teachers who haven't thought deeply and critically about relativism of their own perspective. …