Overcoming and Re-envisioning White Resistance to Antioppressive Teacher Education: Creating Transitional Spaces to Process Difficult Knowledge in Small Groups

This dissertation argues that a fundamental rethinking of how Antioppressive teacher education views white teacher candidate (TC) learning is necessary to diminish what has been called white resistance. Examining the inadequate models and methods deployed to transform TC thinking about difference and Otherness reveals how teacher educators (TE) adherence to traditional paradigms contributes to their refusal to learn and change. The addition of Psychoanalytic insights into subjectivity, thinking and learning, it is argued, can mitigate TC resistance while enhancing student engagement and instructor pedagogy. These insights are then further refined to frame a transitional space (in a small group setting) wherein TC's cognitive and emotional struggles can be attended to ethically. The body of this work draws directly on TC's experience in the highly lauded Urban Diversity Teacher Education Program (UD). Using a variant of discourse analysis informed by cultural theory and psychosocially defined ambivalence, TC thinking and their learning processes are considered within the UD curriculum, TE pedagogy, course work, and small groups. One year after the initial study, interviews and focus groups with former preservice teachers augment the research data while providing timely reflections on how small group processing impacts social justice teacher education. An analysis of how the particularized learning dynamics in small groups are informed by considerable external and internal forces throughout teacher training follows. This applied research concludes that if a transitional space within small groups is developed with care, white resistance decreases, and overall engagement with equity pedagogy increases. Consequently, UD graduates are more likely to reverse the disappointing outcomes for racialized students that birthed anti-oppressive efforts in their inception.