Excuse me whiteness: attempting to transform pedagogies through critical professional development

ABSTRACT

While Students of Color are the largest college-going population, their rates of persistence and graduation remain lower than their white peers. As an intervention into this inequity, many colleges and universities have implemented anti-racist and culturally sustaining professional development. Yet, little empirical research exists to explore the impact(s) of these learning opportunities. This paper explores the promises and perils of professional development in higher education. Drawing on dueothnographic conversations between two facilitators of what Rita Kohli has framed as Critical Professional Development (CPD), the co-authors of this study present analyses that highlight the strengths of CPD in higher education settings while also illuminating the ways that whiteness propertied permeates these settings, preventing authentic learning and healing from taking place. The paper concludes with recommendations to both illuminate and dismantle reifications of whiteness in CPD contexts by way of racial affinity spaces and institutional accountability.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical professional development
• whiteness
• higher education
• racial affinity
• professional learning
• duoethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We use the term Students of Color (borrowing from Kohli et al. 2017) to reference the shared racialisation(s) of African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Latinxs, and Native Americans in U.S. P-20 schools.

2. Cabrera et al. (2017) and Bonilla-Silva (2006) use the term ‘colorblind’. We counter this ableist term by using the term ‘race evasiveness’ while still honouring these authors contributions to our analyses.