Engaging Preservice Teachers in Critical Dialogues on Race

Rarely do White, middle-class Americans, the population from which most teachers are drawn, have the opportunity to consider themselves as racialized beings. Although personal experience is usually the best teacher, our increasingly homogeneous teaching population oftentimes lacks experience with diversity, and schools of education often struggle to find appropriate and meaningful diverse field experiences for their teacher candidates. This study uses a documentary in an attempt to provoke thoughtful conversations about race and racism in the United States among the mostly White teacher candidates. The study identifies racial themes that emerge from the conversations, explores the ways the groups’ racial diversity alters conversations on race, and explores how the race of the group’s facilitator may affect the conversations. The study suggested that racially diverse groups are more likely to explore greater numbers of racial themes and engage each other more deeply through polite disagreement. Although racial diversity of any kind seemed to promote deeper conversations, participants reported greater satisfaction from the conversations when the students themselves were racially diverse rather than with the facilitator alone.