1st Edition
Critical Perspectives on White Supremacy and Racism in Canadian Education Dispatches from the Field
Critical Perspectives on White Supremacy and Racism in Canadian Education shows how K-12 schooling continues to produce and maintain white supremacist and colonial logics and questions the alternate future of schooling in Canada.
It argues that white supremacy and race in schooling are present in colonial-centered approaches to teacher education, formal and informal exclusion through curriculum development, and persistent failed commitments to racial justice and decolonization. These themes guide the organization of this collection, which is further underpinned by theoretical perspectives, including critical race theory, anti-Blackness theory, abolition, and anticolonial theory. Contributions are drawn from classroom teachers, community educators, and pre-service teacher educators and are powerfully informed by first-hand accounts as well as stories of teachers and teacher candidates.
Combining theory with practice, this edited volume will be important reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in social justice education, multicultural education, and Indigenous studies. It will also be beneficial reading for antiracist and Indigenous education researchers, as well as policymakers and practitioners within critical education.
Foreword
Diane Longboat
Introduction: Spatial and Abolitionist Invitations to Race and Field
Arlo Kempf
Part One: Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Education & Learning
Chapter One: Un/found/ed
Amanda Buffalo
Chapter Two: Deconstructing the ‘Other’: Truth Telling as Reconciliation
Heather Watts
Chapter Three: Teacher Unions and Anti-Racism Education in a Neoliberal Society
Olivia Darwin
Chapter Four: We Are All Racists: Calling Out and Undoing Whiteness in Teacher Education
H.L.J. Tsang & Ardavan Eizadirad
Part Two: Unsettling Curriculum
Chapter Five: What's Wrong with the Alternative Curriculum?
Cecilia Cheung
Chapter Six: The Persistence of Multicultural Rhetoric in Curriculum: An Analysis of the Changes to the Grade 10 History Curriculum from 1973 to 2018
Serothy Ramachandran
Chapter Seven: Indigenous Linguicide: An Ongoing Canadian Project
Scarlett Jean Louise Mackay
Chapter Eight: When Aunties Speak: Political Listening Matters
Clelia Rodriguez
Part Three: The Mask of Multiculturalism
Chapter Nine: Multicultural Education: A Tool for Colonial Violence in Canadian Schools
Meagan Hamilton
Chapter Ten: School as a Raceless Institution; The Operations of Multiculturalism on the Invisibilizing of Black Youth
Verne Hippolyte-Smith
Chapter Eleven: Multiculturalism in Contemporary Canadian School Boards
Vinuja Sritharan
Part Four: Constructions and Reconstructions
Chapter Twelve: The Nexus of Post-Racialism, White Supremacy, and Misogynoir in Education Destiny Mae Ramos-Alleyne
Chapter Thirteen: Deconstructing Chinese International Students’ Silence: Critical Race Theory, White Supremacy, Modern Minority Myth
Hong Shu
Chapter Fourteen: The Humanizing and Liberatory Violence of Authentic Race Discussions
Joe Pack
Conclusion: Dispatches from a Field of the Past
Heather Watts
Contributor Bios
Index
Biography
Arlo Kempf is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada.
Heather Watts is a third-year doctoral student in social justice education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada.
"This collection explores topics that are familiar and central to those who study social justice education with refreshingly unique scholarly voices and approaches that integrate the personal and the pedagogical. A fantastic teaching resource that will open up conversations in classrooms and within professional development reading groups."
- Özlem Sensoy, Professor and Faculty Chair of Education
"In this age of Conservative takeover of public education, Arlo Kempf and Heather Watts’ new edited collection, Critical Perspectives on White Supremacy and Racism in Canadian Education: Dispatches from the Field, is a powerful indictment of White Supremacy and its impact on schooling and education. We cannot have a democracy founded on racism and then ask us critical educators to be color blind. Let there be no doubt that race is about White Supremacy and the ‘expectations of Whiteness’ with its conformity, regulation, policing, surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of different bodies. The best antidote to fighting educational injustice and inequities in schooling and education is not only to speak about social justice but also to embark on concrete educational practice for human liberation. As educators, this book gives us food for thought that by not fighting White supremacy we perpetuate racism, gaslighting, and anti-woke fantasies in our school systems. It is a must-read for all serious about the education of young learners with a willingness and sincerity to do something fundamental and to create new educational futurities for all."
-George J. Sefa Dei, Professor of Social Justice Education and Director of the Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies, OISE, University of Toronto
