Rhetorically speaking: on white preservice teachers’ failure to imagine an anti-racist English education

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to identify how white preservice teachers’ inability to imagine an equitable space for Black and Brown children contributes to the ubiquity of whiteness in English education. Further, the authors contend that the preservice teachers’ responses mirror how the larger field of English education fails to imagine Black and Brown life.

Design/methodology/approach

Using abolitionist teaching as a guide, the authors use reflexive thematic analysis to examine the rhetorical moves their preservice teachers made to defer responsibility for anti-racist teaching.

Findings

The findings show preservice teachers’ rhetorical moves across three themes: failure to imagine Black and Brown humanity, failure to imagine a connection between theory and practice, and failure to imagine curriculum and schooling beyond whiteness.

Originality/value

By highlighting how preservice teachers fail to imagine spaces for Black and Brown youth, this study offers another pathway through which teacher educators, teachers and English education programs can assist their faculty and students in activating their imaginations in the pursuit of anti-racist, abolitionist teaching.

Citation

Toliver, S.R. and Hadley, H. (2021), "Rhetorically speaking: on white preservice teachers’ failure to imagine an anti-racist English education", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 485-500. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-09-2020-0112