Good Moves for Bad Habits: Interrupting Normative Practice To Disrupt Racialized Inequity

Abstract

Racialized gaps in education are produced by normative teaching, which describes the practices of the majority of teachers, the majority of the time. Yet, teachers claim ignorance and innocence in the production of inequity, leading traditional approaches to focus on racial beliefs. Instead, I suggest that normative teaching practices are the enactment of racism and best understood as habits of whiteness.Whiteness is a system of exclusion designed for the purpose of domination. Habits are actions and behaviors that are enacted without conscious thought. Habits of whiteness are ways of being oriented towards social and economic dominance that are routine, default, and automatic. Fortunately, there is a process for intervening on habits. This research focuses ontwo steps:raising awareness of the harm done by normative teaching and identifying, naming, and describing alternative teaching moves. Interrupting habits is a step towards disrupting racialized inequity in education.