Racial Criticism as Part of Language Teacher Identity?

Pre-Service ELT Teachers’ Positionings towards Problematic Teaching Material

Abstract

The fact that teachers as disseminators of (racist relevant) knowledge (Scharatow, 2011, p. 19) not only could but, in fact, should make an important contribution to discerning, addressing, problematising, and ultimately deconstructing and reducing racism is shown by various promising approaches to racial critical work at schools and in the classroom. But do teachers feel ready to act racial critically? It is precisely this question that this article pursues by exploring the evaluative and epistemic positioning practices of pre-service English Language Teaching (ELT) teachers in relation to stereotypical teaching materials and racial criticism. On the supposition that critical perspectives on racism are closely connected to individual identitarian convictions, these positioning practices are used to shed light on the pre-service teachers’ Language Teacher Identity (LTI), which is an important concept in determining the relevance of study contents to pre-service teachers. The overall framework of the analysis is inspired by Weiser-Zurmühlen’s Positioning Analysis model (2021, 2022). Within this framework, Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) is used to analyse these positionings on a content-level. Key results include that the participants position themselves as harsh critics of problematic teaching materials and proponents of implementing racial critical teaching approaches into their (future) classrooms. Additionally, selected case-analyses are conducted to explain how these positionings are occupied, shedding light upon questions of social desirability and entitlement to take positionings. This article concludes by pointing out what the first phase of teacher education can do to include study contents that are likely to influence pre-service teachers’ teaching approaches sustainably.