Research: High Fidelity: Factors Affecting Preservice ELA Teachers’ Commitment to Antiracist Literature Instruction

As the U.S. grapples with a racial reckoning, teacher educators need to know what education programs can do to send preservice teachers into the field committed to engage in antiracist teaching and confident that they can do it well. This semester-long, bi-institutional qualitative study of preservice teachers in two white-dominant methods courses for the preparation of English teachers examines the research question: What factors contribute to preservice teachers’ commitment to teaching about racism in the context of literature study? Defining commitment as a combination of intention and demonstrated ability to enact antiracism in future antiracist teaching through Love’s concept of abolitionist teaching, as well as Kant’s conception of a categorical imperative, this study identified four factors affecting participants’ commitment to antiracism: 1) knowledge about race and racism; 2) the role of participants’ racial identity in doing antiracist English teaching; 3) experience with antiracist pedagogies; and 4) field-based experiences tied to race. Implications from the study focus on the need to connect teachers’ racial identity understandings to discipline-based teaching; modeling discipline-centered antiracist pedagogies; and helping candidates to racialize field experiences as part of their preparation.