Teaching Racism - or Tackling it?: Multicultural Stories from White Beginning Teachers - Softcover

Jones, Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1858561299 ISBN 13: 9781858561295

Publisher: Trentham Books Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

How do beginning teachers in white areas come to understand issues of equality and particularly of 'race'? This book reveals the findings of research into two university providers of initial teacher education, one traditionally faculty-based and the other school-based. Russell Jones worked alongside students in 24 primary schools and he tells the stories of some of the students during their placements in primary schools over three counties. They are stories of a drive towards meeting National Curriculum demands and inspection criteria obliterating issues of 'race' equality.

The tactics by which Black and Asian children are made 'white by proxy' so that teachers can avoid recognising their ethnic status are catalogued in a typology of disappearance. These beginning teachers' stories illustrate patterns of helplessness, confusion and denial even in the face of overt racism. The author highlights the pitfalls in the teacher education process and indicates how universities and schools can face up to diversity in ways that will be positive for both the teachers and their pupils.

About this title

Synopsis:

This book unravels the institutional racism in education and shows how training student teachers in white regions leaves their stereotypical attitudes and racial prejudices unchallenged and even legitimates and reinforces them. The author shows how teachers describe their ethnic minority pupils as "thick as pigshit" and ignore racist abuse in their placement schools, while protesting that they aren't racist. So do the students - but all resist the antiracist teaching delivered in their training institutions and all opt to work in "nice" schools with pupils from their class and background. Their construction of race and ethnicity, left in place, allow the students to construct ethnic minority pupils as the problem, or when these children conform and have professional parents, as white.

About the Author:

Dr. Jones lectures in English at John Moores University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Trentham Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1858561299
• ISBN 13: 9781858561295
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160