Date of Award
5-2024
Document Type
Campus Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Education/Leadership in Urban Schools
First Advisor
Patricia Krueger-Henney
Second Advisor
Abiola Farinde-Wu
Third Advisor
Panagiota Gounari, David O. Stovall
Abstract
The K-12 teacher demographic is over 80% white, female, mono-lingual, and middle class, and many reported being under-prepared to work with and serve marginalized students. In response, teacher education programs added one or two semester-long multicultural education classes to their curriculum that present marginalized communities as problems and encourage diversifying posters on the wall and books in the library. The isolated courses, however, evade discussions of whiteness and ideology as social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate inequities. This research employed an appreciative inquiry informed critical ethnographic case study methodology to examine a single teacher education program in the northeastern U.S. that committed its curriculum to tackling whiteness and ideology. The participants included 13 faculty members, 8 students, 6 alumni, and 27 alumni survey respondents. Grounded theory method was used to analyze interviews, seminar transcripts, survey responses, artifacts, and documents. The main findings of this study revealed that the faculty used “investigative pedagogy” and “a praxis of ‘bringing the world into the classroom” to probe ideas and ideologies that students brought to the seminars. Analyzing the data through the theoretical framework of dialectical materialism and anti-coloniality, the implications point to pedagogies for teacher education and social movements.
Recommended Citation
Kunimoto, Nina M., "Unsettling Teacher Education: Cultivating Teaching as Resistance, Epistemic Disobedience, and Counterhegemonic Practices" (2024). Graduate Doctoral Dissertations. 908.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/doctoral_dissertations/908
Comments
Free and open access to this Campus Access Thesis is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this thesis through resources like Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global (https://www.proquest.com/) or through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the "Off-Campus UMass Boston Users