Enactments of Whiteness in Pedagogical Practice: Reproducing and Transforming White Hegemoney in the University Classroom.

Abstract

I conduct a conceptual and empirical inquiry into some of the ways enactments of Whiteness in the pedagogical practices of white faculty who have been recognized as successful teachers serve to reproduce or transform White hegemony in the university classroom. My effort is both descriptive and pragmatic: I illustrate racialized pedagogies by reviewing prior writings on this topic, create a categorization system of racially reproducing and transforming pedagogical practices, and apply this system to interviews with 18 white faculty talking about their racial identities and pedagogical practices. I use this analysis of the 291 enactments of Whiteness in the pedagogical practices of this group of white faculty to suggest that: reproducing enactments reinforce and transforming enactments challenge White hegemony, both reproducing and transforming enactments of Whiteness are present in pedagogical practice, and that together these enactments act as forces of agency that support and alter the White hegemonic influences in this institutional space of Higher Education. I offer some insight into the intersections of gender and discipline with Whiteness, especially in the struggles of translating transforming pedagogy into practice. This dissertation contributes to 1) the sociology of race and critical White studies by identifying ways Whiteness is constructed through reproducing and transforming enactments of Whiteness that, respectively, reinforce norms of Whiteness and, through a rearticulation of Whiteness, challenge their hegemonic influence. This dynamic offers insight into the long standing sociological inquiry into the interplay between structure and agency by identifying mechanisms that demonstrate how agency both supports and alters larger social structures, and how structures constrain this movement. The struggles translating transforming pedagogy into practice described by the white faculty in this study provide an opportunity to examine these points of movement where agency starts to push against structure. This research also contributes to 2) the field of higher education by identifying transforming pedagogical practices that can inform and facilitate the incorporation of anti-racism pedagogy by individual white faculty or through larger faculty development efforts at this level of educational attainment.