Behind the Mask and Beneath the Story: Enabling Students-Teachers (1) to Reflect Critically on the Socially-Constructed Nature of Their "Normal" Practice‪.‬

In this article, we present our on-going research into two different pedagogical projects within teacher credential courses: one in critical multicultural education and the other in foundations of education. The data were gathered in Northern California and in Colorado. Both projects were designed to help students-teachers become more aware of how they relate to their own students, and of the knowledge that they take for granted as normal. In particular we were interested in the body of knowledge that may be called "cultural whiteness." While the definition of whiteness is variously understood (Howard, 2000; Fine, 1997; Maher & Tetreault, 2001; McIntosh, 1989; McIntyre, 1997; Sleeter, 1993), we are focusing in this article, after Hytten and Adkins (1999), on its cultural dimension. Cultural whiteness is a collection of (usually less than conscious) norms, values, and beliefs, or cultural scripts that function in specific contexts to reproduce the practices and identities that support white institutional privilege and advantage. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that we, as teachers, tend to privilege students who are like ourselves in racial, class, and cultural terms. If we do not become more conscious of this tendency, we shall not be able to address, and if necessary modify, our role in reproducing current inequities and inequalities in education (Shulman, 1992). A lack of awareness in this area also means that we shall not be able to fully pursue the mission of becoming anti-racist, critical multicultural educators, a goal to which many of us are consciously committed. Given the above tendency, if we are going to meet the needs of all of our students in the classroom, we need to reflect on how our own social and cultural assumptions and our complex and often contradictory identities are influencing our teaching practice. Fulfilling the goal of education for social justice requires that we become self-reflective educators (Freire, 1993).