Teaching and Learning Faculty Publications and Presentations

What Is Theorizing White Teachers' Life Histories?

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2010

Abstract

This research reflection on theorizing white teachers' life histories is an essay within an essay. The outer essay articulates the historical embeddedness or human sciences, like curriculum studies, that work within bounded communities and practices. Through their work, curriculum theorists participate in a process or subjectification structured by curriculum studies, other disciplines, departments, dissertation chairs, psychic landscapes, personal desires and insecurities, and mainstream research communities that would normalize meritorious practices and make them invisible.

The inner essay articulates how poststructuralist work provides a more sophisticated and dialectical approach to understanding white teachers' interview transcripts. Respondents and their language emerge from, reflect, and are constituted in outer discourses and practices. The inner essay, then, affirms subjectification as a dynamic historical process in which “white teachers” comply and resist, get along and fight, and make do.

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Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

https://www.tandfonline.com/share/ZEVUBJEZWQUHCMCU6PH8?target=10.1080/15505170.2010.10471344

Publication Title

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy

DOI

10.1080/15505170.2010.10471344

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