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The authors, who teach majority White college students preparing to become elementary school teachers, reflect on their pedagogical practice of using children's middle grade novels to accompany Paul Gorski's (2013) Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap. The question they raise is whether the use of the novels in the context of teaching and learning about racial and socioeconomic equity builds empathy and breaks down resistance.
TEACHING FOR EQUITY IN THE MILIEU OF WHITE FRAGILITY: CAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE BUILD EMPATHY AND BREAK DOWN RESISTANCE?
We are university English education professors who teach a course titled "Critical Issues in K-12 Literacy" to undergraduate teacher education candidates. The course content is intended to teach three broad topics in which literacy regularly intersects in K-12 schooling: (1) racial equity, (2) language equity, and (3) poverty. The overarching goal of the course is for university students to learn to teach for equity within an English language arts context. Students read texts on the racism of low expectations (Delpit, 2013), specific strategies for building the English language skills of L2 students (Gibbons, 2014), language varieties and dialect bias, strategies to teach Standard American English while still honoring students' native varieties of English (Wheeler & Swords, 2006), and assets-based perspectives to tackle poverty and class equity in literacy classrooms (Gorski, 2013). We engage a multifaceted approach to an incredibly complex educational challenge.
Students often react to the course curriculum with some level of resistance. Many students' initial responses align with DiAngelo's (2011) analysis of White reaction to learning about issues of privilege and inequity, which she has labeled as "White Fragility," while others' responses align with Flynn's (2015) notion of resistance, which he has called "White Fatigue." For example, in a class discussion about microagressions, a student responded, "Don't you think if you look for racism, you will find racism?" suggesting that people of color who experience microagressions are simply looking for something that would not exist if they did not look. Our challenge, as we teach about privilege and inequity, is to move our students from a state of White Fragility or White Fatigue to a state of acting as allies in the efforts toward creating equity for marginalized students in U.S. schooling....