Doing the work

This qualitative case study of eight teacher educators who collaboratively taught a foundations course on identity, race and culture focuses on the teacher educators as learners. Using grounded theory, the study examines the learning history of these eight individuals in relation to the forty-year evolution of multicultural education in the U.S. It examines how they learned to meet the challenges of teaching antiracist content that was, for students and administrators, "contested" and "discomforting," highlighting distinct challenges for teachers of color and for white teachers. It examines, finally, the role of the teachers' intentional community of practice in their process of learning to teach the antiracist multicultural foundations course. The study finds discontinuities in the evolution of multicultural education that shaped the learning of the eight teachers, such that--depending on which "pockets" (de los Reyes & Gozemba, 2002) of the multicultural legacy each encountered--they brought different levels of historical understanding and self-awareness to the antiracist teaching project. It finds that in order to meet student resistance and institutional ambivalence the teachers needed to learn to theorize their experiences of teaching in a "pedagogy of discomfort" (Boler, 1999), a learning process that is at once "intellectual, personal and political" (de los Reyes, 1999). It finds the benefits of an intentional teaching community in which the teachers' differences of history and knowledge, identity and experience contribute to their learning as individuals and as a group. It finds a necessary tension between the role of elders in protecting the core vision of the course and the role of newcomers in bringing fresh ideas.

Finding evidence of ongoing institutional ambivalence towards the discomforting content and process of this antiracist multicultural foundations course, the study suggests that teaching about power, race and culture in 2008 remains marginal within the dominant discourse of teacher education and can involve significant professional vulnerability for its teachers.