ERIC Number: EJ1439186
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Oct
Pages: 29
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0007-8204
EISSN: EISSN-1943-2216
Available Date: N/A
Embodying English: Performing and Positioning the White Teacher in a High School English Class
Elisabeth Johnson
English Education, v46 n1 p5-33 2013
Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient, resistant, naive, and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher's racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English classroom. Drawing on post-structural performance theories of identity and subjectivity, I pinpoint the material and sociopolitical forces that constrain the white teaching body and reorient attention to the power of people in daily motion: subverting, making themselves known in multiple ways, always and already becoming. This performative perspective may provide productive lenses for white teachers in antiracist higher education who support teachers living and working in white skin.
Descriptors: English Instruction, English Teachers, High School Teachers, White Teachers, Politics of Education, Power Structure, Racism, Social Justice, Popular Culture
National Council of Teachers of English. 1111 West Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096. Tel: 877-369-6283; Tel: 217-328-3870; Web site: http://www.ncte.org/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: High Schools; Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A