[Download] "White Pre-Service Teachers and "De-Privileged Spaces" (Report)" by Teacher Education Quarterly ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: White Pre-Service Teachers and "De-Privileged Spaces" (Report)
- Author : Teacher Education Quarterly
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 215 KB
Description
In their classic article, "Culture as Disability," McDermott and Varenne (1995) retell the fable of the seeing man who, upon finding himself in the "country of the blind" thought he could easily rule it. His efforts were fruitless because he could not make sense of their world. Daily life was set up for the blind to be successful. The seeing man was shocked by the idea that what was considered a privilege (his eyes) in one setting could be his handicap in another. Although McDermott and Varenne used this story to illustrate how culturally determined the notions of "able" and "disabled" are, I believe the seeing man's arrogance has further application to how teachers and teacher educators can approach White privilege. The story I tell is my own version of the seeing man (with a gender and race twist). It is about a small group of White pre-service teachers in a mostly Latina(o) teacher education cohort as they began their first semester in the Multicultural Teacher Training (MTT) (1) program at a large public university in the southwest. It is about how Whiteness can become both a handicap and an opportunity instead of a privilege. This process, which I refer to as "de-privileging Whiteness," pushes White pre-service teachers to re-examine their own perspectives as culturally constructed (Geertz, 1973) and their version of the world as just that, a version.