Excavating Whiteness: How Teachers’ Histories, Communities, and Relationships Frame Their Understandings about Race

Excavating Whiteness: How White Teachers’ Histories, Communities, and Relationships Frame Their Understandings about Race follows a group of sixteen teachers, fourteen White, one African American, and one Native American teacher as they participated in a university summer course centered on examining the role of race in education. The voices and experiences of the teachers powerfully demonstrate their various views and stages of racial identity development. The teachers’ interactions illustrate the difficulties they encountered, how they engaged with each other, and how and why they retreated from learning opportunities due their past, their relationships within previous learning communities, and within the newly created learning community of the course. Excavating Whiteness follows the story of a group of teachers working together to understand why race matters in their lives as educators. Their individual journeys through the course are representative of the myriad of ways White teachers respond to race and can provide others with insights into the nuanced ways race and identity are bound by personal history, experiences, and beliefs.

Julie L. Pennington is professor of literacy studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Cynthia H. Brock is professor at the University of Wyoming where she holds the Wyoming Excellence in Higher Education Endowed Chair in Literacy Education.

Elavie Ndura is a professor of education at the University of Washington Tacoma.