Dialectical Perspectives of School Ethnic-Racial Socialization

Abstract

Schools are important sites of ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) for adolescents (Saleem & Byrd, 2021), where messages about race, ethnicity, and racism permeate every attribute of schooling, from instructional content and teacher-student relationship building to disciplinary policies and school mascots. Furthermore, research demonstrates that schools and teachers that promote cultural competence, critical consciousness, and other culturally relevant practices can positively impact students’ academic outcomes and psychosocial development (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Byrd & Ahn, 2020; Byrd & Legette, 2022; Sieder & Grave, 2022). However, school ERS literature largely focuses on student outcomes and perceptions. Furthering our understandings of the positive potential of school ERS must include investigations of how teachers experience this process, including relationships between teachers’ racial identities, attitudes, and their socialization practices. This dissertation attends to this gap by contributing theoretical and empirical perspectives on the mutually influential relationship between teachers’ racial identities, beliefs, and their school ERS practices. Paper 1 proposes the dialectical model of school critical racial consciousness socialization (SCRCS). By applying the dialectical model of intergenerational transmission (Kuczynski & de Mol, 2015) in parent-child relationships to critical pedagogies of race (Freire, 2010; Jennings & Lynn, 2005), the paper conceptualizes SCRCS as a mutually influential and bidirectional process between teachers and students. Within the model, novel stimuli and contradictions that emerge during teacher-student interactions have the potential to incite revisions in their personal belief systems, or schemata, related to race and racism. The model offers a new conceptual framework for future investigations of how school critical racial consciousness socialization and ethnic-racial socialization experiences overall can shift teachers’ and students’ beliefs and values. Paper 2 utilized reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; 2022) to explore White American ninth- and tenth-grade teachers’ (N = 21) perspectives on racial mismatch in teacher student relationships. Findings indicated that participants believed racial mismatch between themselves and students of color posed challenges to relationship building. Specifically, participants felt that experiential differences with race and racism produced disconnection and misunderstandings between themselves and students. In response to these challenges, participants described adopting three primary strategies—conflict avoidance, cultural humility (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998), and color-evasiveness (Neville et al., 2013). Additionally, findings indicated variation in how participants applied these strategies, in part due to differences in their personal characteristics. Of the adopted strategies, cultural humility seemed best positioned to facilitate culturally relevant educational practices among teachers.