The Failure of Whiteness in Art Education:

A Personal Narrative Informed by Critical

Race Theory
SUNNY SPILLANE
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

“I entered each of This article explores failure from the

perspective of a white art educator interested
these phases of my in social justice and educational equity.
Interconnected notions of failure are
career feeling well explored, including: the author’s learning
from personal failure as a process of
prepared, only to be professional growth over the course of her
career; the specter of “school failure” and its
impact on K-12 students’ educational
repeatedly opportunities and experiences; entrenched,
systemic inequities in public schools and
chagrined at my their failure to serve marginalized students
and communities; and the potential
racial ignorance and complicity of the author’s individual
professional failures – if left unaddressed –
humbled by the in perpetuating racialized inequities in art
education. Whiteness, or white power,
extent to which my knowledge, and privilege, is implicit in all
these failures, both in the ways it shapes the
whiteness shapes uneven landscape of public education and in
the author’s own process of professional
growth as an art educator. The article is
my attitudes and structured as a personal narrative that
highlights salient professional failures over
assumptions about three phases of the author’s career,
including: her early years as an elementary
race.” art teacher in a low-income African
American community in Florida; her work
Correspondence concerning this article should be as a doctoral student, which was informed
addressed to the author: srspilla@uncg.edu by critical race theory; and her evolving
practice as a university art educator working
with racially diverse pre-service teachers.

Many interconnected notions of failure
contextualize
textualize and inform my practice as a
white art educator who is deeply invested in
educational equity for marginalized and
underserved students. Among the most
salient of these are: my own learning from
personal failure as a process of professional
growth over the course of my career
career; the
specter of “school failure” and its impact on
K-12
12 students’ educational opportunities and
experiences; entrenched, systemic inequities
in public schools and their failure to serve
marginalized students and communities; and
the potential complicity of my individual
professional failures – if left unaddressed –
in perpetuating racialized inequities in art
education. Whiteness, or white power,
knowledge, and privilege,
ilege, is implicit in all
these failures, both in the ways it sshapes the
unevenn landscape of public education
(Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995),, and in my
own process of professional growth as an art
educator. I began my career as an
elementary art teacher in a low-income
income
African American community ty in Florida
Florida.
This experience shaped my scholarship as a
doctoral student, which employed critical
race theory (CRT) in order to understand the
systemic, racialized educational inequities
that impacted my former students and others
like them. My K-12 teaching experience
experiences
and my scholarship continue to inform my
evolving practice as a university art educator
working with racially diverse prepre-service
and novice teachers. I entered each of these
phases of my career feeling well prepared,
only to be repeatedly chagrined at m my racial
ignorance and humbled by the extent to
which my whiteness shapes my attitudes and
assumptions about race.. This writing
discusses interrelated personal and systemic
failures of whiteness over three phases of
my career, and some of the insights these
failures yielded for my own work
work, with
implications for racially equitable art
education practice.
Failures of Whiteness in Art Education:
Education A
Personal Narrative
F(l)ailing as an Elementary Art Teacher
I came to art education from a fine
arts background. When I started my first job,
through an alternative certification program,
I had an MFA and a lot of enthusiasm but no
classroom experience or preparation.
preparation I
naively relished the opportunity to facilitate
meaningful art learning for my students
student and
quickly realized I had no idea how to
actually make this happen. I struggled with
even the most basic aspects of classroom
management and teaching. I marveled at my
colleagues’ facility with such things as
taking attendance, getting students’
attention,
on, making transitions from one
activity to another, distributing materials,
and minimizing class disruptions,
disruptions all of
which were confounding mysteries to me. me
My classroom management skills were so
poor, in fact, that fistfights occasionally
broke out in the art room during my first few
years of teaching. But my biggest struggle
was against time. With a class period of only
30 minutes, it was easy for me to spend half
or more of my instructional time on
discussion, attendance, and giving
directions, leavingg a pathetic ten minutes or
less for my students to work independently.
independently
The end of class always came too soon,soon and
cleaning up always
ays took longer and was
more confusing and contentious than I
anticipated. Not surprisingly given the
chaotic classroom climatee and minimal work
time, my students’ artistic achievement was
mostly lackluster,, which posed serious
challenges in grading their work fairly. In
my first years of teaching, I went home
many days in tears and wondered
despairingly what my students could
possibly
ssibly be learning from me.
 As with my veteran colleagues’
teaching and classroom management skills,
their cultural competence and connectedness
with the school community impressed me.
Teaching in a predominantly African
American context made me acutely aware of
my race as a white person and painfully
conscious of my lack of cultural knowledge
about my students and school community.
Because people of color, and particularly
African Americans, outnumbered me in this
context, I assumed this must be similar to
being a person of color in a predominantly
white context. What I did not understand at
the time was that whiteness is not just
another racial category; it is the axis around
which other races are constructed in
hierarchical relations of power and both
material and psychological privilege (Haney
Lopez, 2006; Wildman, 2000). After
reviewing a century of legal decisions
related to prospective immigrants’ racial
identities, and living his own life on the
margins of whiteness as a multiracial Latino,
Haney Lopez (2006) concluded the
following:
Whiteness exists as the linchpin for
the systems of racial meaning in the
United States. Whiteness is the norm
around which other races are
constructed; its existence depends
upon the mythologies and material
inequalities that sustain the current
racial system. The maintenance of
Whiteness necessitates the
conceptual existence of Blacks,
Latinos, Native Americans, and other
races as tropes of inferiority against
which Whiteness can be measured
and valued. (p. 132)
Other critical scholars, particularly those
whose work is grounded in critical
pedagogy, have discussed social class as
another axis of power, with middle-class and
upper-class status, mores, and values,
positioned as normative (Aronowitz, 2009;
Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2009;
McLaren, 1989). However, it is important to
note that critical race scholars have asserted
that whiteness in and of itself is a category
of privilege that shapes public discourse
around such interrelated topics as race,
poverty, crime, and education (Haney
Lopez, 2006; Wildman 2000). In order to
understand the impact of racial
discrimination, it is important to recognize
its function in securing and maintaining
white privilege. This may be a challenge, as
many whites – including myself – are
neither accustomed to nor comfortable with
thinking about ourselves in racial terms
(Haney Lopez, 2006). Writing from her
perspective as a white CRT legal scholar,
Wildman (2000) described the many ways
whites are privileged, including the privilege
to ignore race, and to choose which racial
battles to fight. Although I was numerically
a racial minority in my particular teaching
context, I have the privilege of ignoring race
in other contexts – a privilege people of
color rarely have, in any context. In the
midst of my cognitive dissonance as a new
white teacher in a predominantly black
school, I failed to understand the difference
between being a raced individual and
experiencing racial discrimination.
During my first year of teaching I
entered my district’s mentoring program for
first-year teachers, where I connected with
many skilled veteran art educators who were
eager to help me succeed. However, not
many of these folks had experience teaching
in schools like mine, in which 95 percent of
my students were African American and 97
percent of my students received free or
reduced lunch. Those who did seemed to
attribute many of the challenges I faced to
my students’ backgrounds and the school
culture rather than to my own failings as a
new teacher. And nearly all of them were
59
now teaching in schools in affluent suburban
neighborhoods that enrolled far fewer
students of color and low-income students
than the Title I schools where they began
their art education careers. Their negative
perceptions of my students and school
community implied several things to me at
the time: I should not really expect good
behavior or strong academic performance
from my students because of their racial,
socioeconomic, and/or cultural backgrounds;
even if I improved my teaching skills, I was
not fully responsible for my students’
learning because of their limited educability;
I was in a hopeless teaching situation where
success was impossible; and my
professional life would only improve by
transferring to a “better” school. While I did
not completely buy in to this mindset, I
certainly was overwhelmed and
underprepared for teaching. At times I felt
hopeless. Combine these feelings with my
acute sense of being a racial outsider at my
school, and my veteran colleagues’
perceptions did not seem too outrageous. It
was not until I encountered critical race
theory, and particularly Valencia’s (1997a,
1997b; 2010) work, during my dissertation
research that I understood these perceptions
and assumptions as deficit-based.
The construct of deficit thinking as
elucidated by Valencia (1997a, 1997b;
2010) and others (Foley, 1997; Menchaca,
1997; Ronda & Valencia, 1994) was a
“threshold concept” (Meyer & Land, 2006)
that changed my thinking about social
justice and educational equity. Cousin
(2006) described threshold concepts as:
transformative, irreversible, integrative,
bounded, and “likely to involve forms of
‘troublesome knowledge’” (p. 4) that are
counter-intuitive or defy commonsense
understandings. Deficit thinking is at the
core of the most pervasive and damaging
“commonsense understandings” about
marginalized students and communities.
Deficit theories attribute social inequities,
such as the disproportionate experiences of
school failure among low-income students
of color, to their own supposed internal
defects of intellect, moral character, culture,
or familial socialization (Shields, Bishop,
and Mazawi, 2005; Valencia, 2010). By
essentially blaming the victim, deficit
thinking masks the role of societal factors,
such as under-resourced public schools and
systemic discrimination, in placing these
students at risk of school failure (Bastos,
Cosier, & Hutzel, 2012; Duncan-Andrade &
Morrell, 2008; Kraehe & Acuff, 2013; Nieto
& Bode, 2008; Pollack, 2012; Shields,
Bishop, & Mazawi, 2005; Valencia, 2010;
Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman,
2011).
This kind of deficit thinking is
especially damaging when it plays into the
“commonsense” notion of meritocracy.
Meritocracy is the idea that in the United
States, education is the great equalizer that
levels the playing field so that anyone who
works hard enough can achieve every level
of success in life. This idea has considerable
allure, especially in the era of Barack
Obama’s presidency. Indeed, Zamudio,
Russell, Rios, and Bridgeman (2011)
described the meritocracy as one of the most
powerful master narratives in United States
society. However, they declare meritocracy
to be a myth because of the glaring
inequities in the allocation of educational
resources between schools in affluent, white
(mostly suburban) areas and schools in
poorer (mostly urban) neighborhoods that
serve predominantly students of color.
Kozol (1991) most notably exposed these
“savage inequalities” in his searing expose
of the insufferable conditions of inner-city
schools in St. Louis, Chicago, and New
York, compared with the well-heeled
suburban schools in neighboring districts. In
the contemporary educational rhetoric of No
Child Left Behind (2001) urban schools
60
such as those that Kozol profiled are
characterized as “failing schools.”
However, given the disparities in the
allocation of educational resources (funding,
facilities, teachers, educational materials)
between urban and suburban public schools,
Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008)
asserted that urban schools are not failing
but are “doing exactly what they are
designed to do” (p. 1) – preserve the status
quo in an inequitable, racialized social
hierarchy.
Like many schools serving low-
income communities, and particularly
communities of color, my school bore the
brunt of high-stakes accountability measures
under No Child Left Behind. Although our
school was not among those identified as
“failing” based on standardized test scores,
we fought hard to maintain our academic
standing and reputation against the threat of
restructuring and lost funding. The pressure
to avoid school failure created a high-stress
educational environment for students,
teachers, and administrators in which arts
education was marginalized in favor of rote,
skill-and-drill learning from scripted
curricula in language arts and mathematics,
or what Haberman (1991) described as “the
pedagogy of poverty.” Against this
backdrop, I felt an acute sense of
responsibility to my students because of the
ways the specter of school failure impacted
their educational experiences and quality of
life at school. If they were able to have only
30 minutes of art class each week, those 30
minutes had better be spectacular.
Over time, and with support from
many mentors, I did grow to develop a
relatively healthy teaching practice that
included productive relationships with my
students and colleagues. As my teaching
skills improved, so did my students’
behavior and artistic achievement. I settled
into the school community and felt more and
more at home and less and less an outsider. I
also felt as though I was succeeding more
often than I was failing, and that I might
have something to offer as an art teacher
educator. This general feeling of success,
which I then defined as competent
classroom management, curriculum
planning, teaching skills, and productive
relationships, and my sense of responsibility
to my students informed my decision to
pursue a Ph.D. in art education. I started a
doctoral program intending to focus my
research on art education in low-income
communities.
Engaging Critical Race Theory as a
White Doctoral Student: New
Frameworks for
Understanding “Failure” and Cringing
Reflections on “Success”
When I entered graduate school, my
experiences of practice shock (Hagiwara &
Wray, 2009) as a new art teacher were still
fresh. These formative experiences
influenced my early scholarly work, which
attempted to identify “best practices for
working with urban students” (Spillane,
2010). Although I acknowledged my
personal failures as a new teacher, my early
scholarship made the implicit assumption
that the challenges I faced were unique to
the context of my school and the
characteristics of my students. In my case,
my deficit-based common sense
understanding was that teaching in urban
schools was hard work and teachers needed
adequate preparation for the conditions they
might encounter in order to succeed in these
contexts. My perspective was self-centered
and disproportionately focused on
supporting white teachers, without
consideration of teachers and students of
color. This is not surprising given that the
deficit-based “culture of poverty” notion,
exemplified in Payne’s (2005) A Framework
for Understanding Poverty and heavily
critiqued by scholars such as Foley (1997)
61
and Valencia (2010) formed the cornerstone
of my diversity training as a public school
teacher. I also failed to connect teacher
(under)preparedness to the systemic
inequities that contribute to conditions of
chronic “underservedness” (Kraehe &
Acuff, 2013) that impacted my former
students and school community. In sum, my
participation in deficit discourses prevented
me from critically examining my complicity
in unjust social structures, making it
unlikely that my work could meaningfully
transform them.
Critical race theory (CRT) shaped
my understanding of deficit thinking and its
role in systemic, racialized educational
inequities. CRT is an interdisciplinary body
of scholarship developed primarily by
scholars of color with roots in critical legal
studies (Bell, 2000a, 2000b; Crenshaw,
1995; Delgado, 2000a; Delgado &
Stephancic, 2001; Espinoza & A. Harris,
2000; Gotanda, 2000; Haney Lopez, 2000,
2006; A. Harris, 2000; C. Harris, 1995;
Perea, 2000; Wildman, 2000). Scholars in
many fields who are concerned with human
rights and social justice have since adapted
and expanded CRT’s tenets to address
racialized social inequities in education and
other areas of society. Critical race theory
recognizes racism as a normal and ordinary
part of life in the United States, although
one that is often difficult to recognize and to
remedy except in its most egregious
manifestations (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001).
Racism serves the interests of whites by
securing and maintaining white privilege.
Although CRT characterizes racism as a
normal part of life, it holds that the concept
of race is socially constructed, with no basis
in biology or genetics. Not only does society
create races, it does so differentially,
racializing different groups of people at
different times in response to different
societal needs, such as the labor market.
CRT rejects racial essentialization,
recognizing that all people have overlapping
and intersecting identities and allegiances
beyond their race, including gender,
religion, language, sexual orientation, and
social class, among others, some of which
may result in intersecting experiences of
oppression. At its core, critical race theory is
concerned with effecting social change and
eradicating discrimination of every kind. As
such, it is not purely theoretical; rather, it
emphasizes activism and the practical
applications of social theory.
Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995)
introduced critical race theory to the field of
education because of their conviction that
race and its role in educational inequality
were undertheorized. Contemporary
education scholars have built on Ladson-
Billings and Tate’s work, recognizing that
CRT offers a powerful framework for
understanding and redressing the persistent
educational inequities impacting students of
color (Acuff, Hirak, & Nangah, 2012;
Bagley & Castro-Salazar, 2011; Brown-
Jeffy & Cooper, 2011; Desai, 2010a, 2010b;
Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Kohli &
Solorzano, 2012; Knight, 2006a, 2006b,
2013; Kraehe, 2015; Kraehe & Acuff, 2013;
Lopez & Parker, 2003; Lynn, 2004; Milner,
2008; Parker, Deyhle, & Villenas, 1999;
Parker & Stovall, 2004; Solorzano & Yosso,
2001, 2002; Preston & Chadderton, 2012;
Stovall, 2006; Yosso, 2005; Yosso, Parker,
Solorzano, & Lynn, 2004; Young, 2011;
Whitehead, 2012; Zamudio, Russell, Rios,
& Bridgeman, 2011).
According to Solorzano and Yosso
(2001), “critical race scholars in . . .
education acknowledge that schools operate
in contradictory ways with their potential to
oppress and marginalize co-existing with
their potential to emancipate and empower”
(p. 3). My readings in critical race theory,
and particularly Valencia (1997a, 1997b;
2010) and others’ (Foley, 1997; Menchaca,
1997; Ronda & Valencia, 1994) scholarship
62
on deficit thinking, helped me look beyond a
narrow focus on mitigating new teachers’
practice shock to see teacher performance as
a component of educational equity. These
frameworks helped me reconceptualize the
knowledge, skills, and dispositions pre-
service art teachers may need in order to
work successfully with low-income students
and students of color and moved me into the
next phase of my career as a university art
educator.
Failing as White Art Educator Working
with Racially Diverse Pre-service
Teachers
When I began my current art
education faculty position two years ago, I
felt much more prepared to succeed than I
did as a new elementary art teacher. I had
six years of public school teaching behind
me and substantial theoretical grounding to
do the work I wanted to do: preparing pre-
service art educators to successfully teach a
diverse student population and help them
understand and fight their complicity in
systemic educational inequities. My own
process of engaging with critical race theory
and rethinking my practice was quite recent,
and I looked forward to discussing these
issues with my art education students. I also
was excited to share some of the specific
insights I gained through critical (race)
reflection on my years as an elementary art
teacher, which included:
• Understanding individual teachers’
failures in relation to systemic
educational inequity as a factor
contributing to the marginalization of
low-income students of color.
• The impact of deficit frameworks on
school re-segregation and white
teacher flight from “failing” schools.
• Valuing failure as a learning
opportunity for K-12 students,
especially in the kinds of complex,
creative problem-solving often found
in quality art education.
• Viewing failure as a natural part of
learning and growth instead of an all-
or-nothing proposition.
With these grand ambitions, I was
thrilled to discover that my first Foundations
of Art Education class comprised a racially
diverse group of pre-service teachers evenly
split between white students and students of
color. In addition to this favorable racial
dynamic, I was lucky to have a particularly
engaged and thoughtful group of students
who undertook the readings and discussions
earnestly and respectfully. Over the course
of the semester however, several students of
color pointed out in frustration that many of
the assigned readings were written from a
white perspective and seemed intended to
prepare white teachers to work with racially
diverse students. Kraehe (2015) supports my
students’ perceptions, noting “when race is
addressed in the scholarship on becoming an
art teacher, it is often within the context of
supporting primarily White students’ racial
knowledge (e.g. Briggs, 2012; Desai, 2010a;
Knight, 2013)” (p. 200). Additionally, after
reading several articles focused on African
American artists, students, and school
communities, a Latina student in my class
commented that there are more races than
black and white and more complex racial
dynamics at play in the contexts of public
schooling.
These failures were humbling, but I
addressed them openly with my students,
asked for their continued feedback, and
adjusted the remaining readings for that
semester in an attempt to redress their
legitimate concerns. Because of this, I felt
even better prepared to teach this course in
my second year. But this was not to be. The
new class was skewed toward a
predominance of white students, with one
student of African descent and one Asian
63
American student. Although I felt better
prepared to address racial issues in my
second year as an assistant professor, the
racial dynamic(s) at play in this particular
class proved challenging for all of us to
navigate. One student of color expressed to
me privately that they felt particularly on the
spot, as though all eyes were on them during
any discussion of race(ism). At the same
time, several of my white students expressed
privately that they were uncomfortable with
such things as an art exhibition focused
exclusively on African American
contemporary artists. Although I tried to
create a safe atmosphere for discussing race
in art education, I failed to understand that a
“safe space [rarely] exists for people of
color when it concerns public race dialogue”
(Leonardo & Porter, 2010, p. 139). For
white people, discussions of race are often
intellectualized and detached; whereas for
people of color, race(ism) is a lived
experience. According to Leonardo and
Porter (2010):
By sharing their real perspectives on
race, minorities become overt targets
of personal and academic threats. It
becomes a catch-22 for them. Either
they must observe the safety of
whites and be denied a space that
promotes people of color’s growth
and development or insist on a space
of integrity and put themselves
further at risk not only of violence,
but also risk being conceived of as
illogical or irrational. Thus, white
privilege is at the center of most race
dialogues, even those that aim to
critique and undo racial advantage.
(p. 140)
These failures revealed some of the
many ways whiteness continues to obscure
my ability to discern racial inequity. These
failures included: (1) centralizing whiteness
in diversity pedagogy, using my own
experience reckoning with white privilege
and my complicity in deficit thinking as
indicative of all my students’ needs; (2)
discussing race in terms of a black-white
binary, a construct critical race scholars
(Perea, 2000; Espinoza & Harris, 2000) have
critiqued; (3) creating classroom conditions
that essentialized the experiences and
perspectives of students of color; and (4)
failing to appropriately scaffold white
students’ learning about racialized
educational inequity.
It is well documented that the public
school student population is growing
increasingly diverse, and that this diversity
is not equally reflected in the teaching force
(Davis, 2009; Hagiwara & Wray, 2009;
Kozol, 1991; National Education
Association, 2003; Zumwalt & Craig, 2008).
Pre-service art teachers, like most pre-
service teachers, are predominantly white,
middle class women (Galbraith & Grauer,
2004). However, teaching to the white
majority of pre-service teachers “imposes a
standpoint that disregards and subordinates
the worldviews and educational needs of
non-Whites” (Kraehe, 2015, p. 200) and
further entrenches white art teacher identity
as normative.
Conclusion
I began writing this article, in part, as
a way of modeling a “growth mindset”
(Dweck, 2006) for my students, discussing
my personal failures in order to scaffold
their understandings of some of the systemic
failures of whiteness in art education, and to
own my complicity in them. This resonates
with my day-to-day teaching practice, in
which I encourage my students to embrace
failure as a natural part of learning and
growth, especially in such complex learning
processes as those involved in becoming an
artist and/or a teacher. Artists and theorists
have also written about the generative
64
possibilities and radical freedom inherent in
failure as an artistic practice and way of
being (Halberstam, 2011; Le Feuvre, 2010).
Unfortunately, failure is rarely understood or
experienced as a natural part of racial
learning and growth, but rather as a high-
stakes, all-or-nothing proposition – and for
good reason. Not only does whiteness shape
the uneven landscape of public education,
including access to and quality of arts
education, it tends to hijack the very racial
dialogues intended to dismantle its power.
Nevertheless, as Kraehe (2015) argues:
Prospective art teachers…need
opportunities to acquire critical
conceptual frameworks in order to
understand their own personal and
professional identities in relation to
racialization and other intersecting
sociocultural processes. Without
such opportunities, important aspects
of art teachers’ identities are
suppressed. This is not only
invalidating to preservice teachers of
color, but it also diminishes the
capacities of all prospective art
teachers to teach equitably and
reflexively in the context of social
inequality. (p. 209)
As this narrative demonstrates, failure
permeates the complex and deeply personal
learning processes involved in developing
nuanced critical race understandings. Merely
acknowledging the role of failure in racial
learning, however, is not enough.
Transforming the racial landscape of art
education demands that we all assume
responsibility for the failures of whiteness as
we continue to grow as individual art
educators and as a profession.
. Darder, M. P. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres
References
Acuff, J.B., Hirack, B., & Nangah, M. (2012).
Dismantling a master narrative: Using
culturally responsive pedagogy to teach the
history of art education. Art Education,
65(5), 6-11.
Aronowitz, S. (2009). Against schooling: Education
and social class. In A. Darder, M. P.
Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The
critical pedagogy reader (2nd ed.) (pp. 106-
122). New York, NY: Routledge.
Bagley, C., & Castro-Salazar, R. (2011). Critical arts-
based research in education: Performing
undocumented historias. British Educational
Research Journal, 38(2), 239-260.
Bastos, F. M. C, Cosier, K., & Hutzel, K. (2012).
Introduction. In K. Hutzel, F. M. C. Bastos,
& K. Cosier (Eds.), Transforming city
schools through art: Approaches to
meaningful K-12 learning (pp. 1-9). New
York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Bell, D. A. (2000a). After we’re gone: Prudent
speculations on America in a post-racial
epoch. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.),
Critical race theory: The cutting edge (2nd
ed., pp. 2-8). Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Bell, D. A. (2000b). Property rights in whiteness:
Their legal legacy, their economic costs. In
R. Delgado and J. Stefancic (Eds.) Critical
race theory: The cutting edge (2nd ed., pp.
71-79). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press.
Briggs, J. (2012). Preparing white preservice art
educators to teach in urban classrooms.
Yearbook of Urban Learning, Teaching, and
Research, 15-25.
Brown-Jeffy, S. & Cooper, J. E. (2011). Toward a
conceptual framework of culturally relevant
pedagogy. Teacher Education Quarterly,
38(1), 65-84.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1995). Mapping the margins:
Intersectionality, identity politics, and
violence against women of color. In K.
Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K.
Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: They
key writings that formed the movement, (pp.
357-383). New York, NY: The New Press.
Cousin, G. (2006). Introduction to threshold
concepts. Planet, 17, 4-5.
Darder, A., Baltodano, M. P., & Torres, R. D. (2009).
Critical pedagogy: An introduction. In A.
(Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (2nd
ed.) (pp. 1-20). New York, NY: Routledge.
Davis, D. E. (2009). Preparing white student teachers
through a critical consultative interaction
65
 model. International Journal of Progressive
Education, 5(2), 1-23.
Delgado, R. (2000a). Storytelling for oppositionists
and others: A plea for narrative. In R.
Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical race
theory: The cutting edge (2nd ed., pp. 60-70).
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race
theory: An introduction. New York, NY:
New York University Press.
Desai, D. (2010a). The challenge of the new
colorblind racism in art education. Art
Education, 63(5), 22-29.
Desai, D. (2010b). Reflections on social justice art
teacher education. In T. Anderson, D.
Gussak, K. Kelly Hallmark & A. Paul
(Eds.), Art education for social justice (pp.
172-178). Reston, VA: National Art
Education Association.
Dixson, A. D., & Rousseau, C. K. (Eds.) (2006).
Critical race theory in education: All God’s
children got a song. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R., & Morrell, E. (2008). The
art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for
moving from theory to practice in urban
schools. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology
of success. New York, NY: Ballantine.
Espinoza, L., & Harris, A. P. (2000). Embracing the
tar-baby: LatCrit theory and the sticky mess
of race. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.),
Critical race theory: The cutting edge (2nd
ed., pp. 440-447). Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Foley, D. E. (1997). Deficit thinking models based on
culture: The anthropological protest. In R.
R. Valencia (Ed.), The evolution of deficit
thinking: Educational though and practice
(pp.113-131). New York, NY: Routledge.
Galbraith, L., & Grauer, K. (2004). State of the field:
Demographics and art teacher education. In
E. W. Eisner & M. D. Day (Eds.), Handbook
of research and policy in art education (pp.
415-437). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Gotanda, N. (2000). A critique of “our constitution is
colorblind.” In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic
(Eds.), Critical race theory: The cutting
edge (2nd ed., pp. 35-38). Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.
Haberman, M. (1991). The pedagogy of poverty
verses good teaching. The Phi Delta
Kappan, 73(4), 290-294.
Hagiwara, S., & Wray, S. (2009). Transformation in
reverse: Naïve assumptions of an urban
educator. Education and Urban Society,
41(3), 338-363.
Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Haney Lopez, I. F. (2000). The social construction of
race. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.),
Critical race theory: The cutting edge (2nd ed.,
pp. 163-175). Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Haney Lopez, I. F. (2006). White by law: The legal
construction of race (10th anniversary edition).
New York, NY: New York University Press.
Harris, A. P. (2000). Race and essentialism in
feminist legal theory. In R. Delgado & J.
Stefancic (Eds.), Critical race theory: The
cutting edge (2nd ed., pp. 261-274).
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Harris, C. I. (1995). Whiteness as property. In In K.
Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K.
Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: They key
writings that formed the movement, (pp. 276-
291). New York, NY: The New Press.
Knight, W. B. (2006a). E(raced) bodies in and out of
sight/cite/site. The Journal of Social Theory in
Art Education, 26, 323-345.
Knight, W. B. (2006b). Using contemporary art to
challenge cultural values, beliefs, and
assumptions. Art Education, 59(4), 39-45.
Knight, W.B. (2013). Moving beyond preparing just
art teachers to preparing JUST art teachers:
Teacher education for equity and social justice.
In K. Tavin, & C. Ballengee Morris (Eds.),
Stand(ing) up, for a change (pp. 28-36). Reston,
VA: National Art Education Association.
Kohli, R., & Solorzano, D. G. (2012). Teachers,
please learn our names!: Racial microagressions
and the K-12 classroom. Race Ethnicity and
Education, 15(4), 441-462.
Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in
America’s schools. New York, NY: Crown
Publishers.
Kraehe, A.M. (2015). Sounds of silence: Race and
emergent counter-narratives of art teacher
identity. Studies in Art Education, 56(3), 199-
213.
Kraehe, A.M., & Acuff, J.B. (2013). Theoretical
considerations for art education research with
and about “underserved populations.” Studies in
Art Education, 54(4), 294-309.
Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a
critical race theory of education. Teachers
College Record, 97, 47-68.
Le Feuve, L. (Ed.) (2010). Failure. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
66
Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. K. (2010). Pedagogy of
fear: toward a Fanonian theory of “safety” in
race dialogue. Race and Ethnicity in Education,
13(2), 139-157, DOI:
10.1080/13613324.2010.482898
Lopez, G. R., & Parker, L. (Eds.). (2003).
Interrogating racism in qualitative research
methodology. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Lynn, M. (2004). Inserting the “race” into critical
pedagogy: An analysis of “race-based
epistemologies.” Educational Philosophy and
Theory, 36(2), 153-165.
McLaren, P. (1989). Life in schools: An introduction
to critical pedagogy in the foundations of
education. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Menchaca, M. (1997). Early racist roots of deficit
thinking. In R. R. Valencia (Ed.), The evolution
of deficit thinking: Educational thought and
practice (pp.13-40). New York, NY: Routledge.
Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (Eds.) (2006).
Overcoming barriers to student understanding:
Threshold concepts and troublesome
knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge.
Milner, H. R. (2008). Disrupting deficit notions of
difference: Counter-narratives of teachers and
community in urban education. Teaching and
Teacher Education, 24, 1573-1598.
National Education Association. (2003). Personal
Life. In the status of the American public school
teacher (pp. 87-97). Washington, DC: National
Education Association.
Nieto, S. and Bode, P. (2008). Affirming diversity:
The sociopolitical context of multicultural
education (5th ed.). New York, NY: Allyn and
Bacon.
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-
110, 115 Stat. 1425 (2002).
Parker, L., Deyhle, D., & Villenas, S. (Eds.). (1999).
Race is . . . race isn’t: Critical race theory and
qualitative studies in education. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Parker, L. & Stovall, D. O. (2004). Actions following
words: Critical race theory connects to critical
pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory,
36(2), 167-182.
Payne, R. (2005). A framework for understanding
poverty, (4th Ed.). Aha! Process: Highlands, TX.
Perea, J. F. (2000). The black/white binary paradigm
of race. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.),
Critical race theory: The cutting edge (2nd ed.,
pp. 344-353). Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Pollack, T. M. (2012). The miseducation of a
beginning teacher: One educator’s critical
reflections on the functions and power of deficit
narratives. Multicultural Perspectives, 14(2),
93-98.
Preston, J., & Chadderton, C. (2012). Rediscovering
‘Race Traitor’: Towards a Critical Race Theory
informed public pedagogy. Race Ethnicity and
Education, 15(1), 85-100.
Ronda, M. A., & Valencia, R. R. (1994). “At-risk”
Chicano students: The institutional and
communicative life of a category. Hispanic
Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 16, 363-395.
Shields, C. M., Bishop, R., & Mazawi, A. E. (2005).
Pathologizing practices: The impact of deficit
thinking in education. New York, NY: Peter
Lang.
Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2001). From racial
stereotyping and deficit discourse toward a
critical race theory in teacher education.
Multicultural Education, 9(1), 2-8.
Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race
methodology: Counter-storytelling as an
analytical framework for education research.
Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23-44.
Spillane, S. (2010, January). Art education in urban
schools: A search for best practices. Paper
presented at the Art and Design for Social
Justice Symposium, Florida State University,
Tallahassee, FL.
Stovall, D. (2006). Forging community in race and
class: critical race theory and the quest for
social justice in education. Race Ethnicity and
Education, 9(3), 243-259.
Valencia, R. R. (Ed.). (1997a). The evolution of
deficit thinking: Educational though and
practice. New York, NY: Routledge.
Valencia, R. R. (1997b). Genetic pathology model of
deficit thinking. In R. R. Valencia (Ed.), The
evolution of deficit thinking: Educational
though and practice (pp.41-112). New York,
NY: Routledge.
Valencia, R. R. (2010). Dismantling contemporary
deficit thinking: Educational thought and
practice. New York, NY: Routledge.
Whitehead, J. (2012). Counternarratives: Considering
urban students’ voices in art education. In K.
Hutzel, F. M. C. Bastos, & K. Cosier (Eds.),
Transforming city schools through art:
Approaches to meaningful K-12 learning (pp.
34-42). New York, NY: Teachers College
Press.
Wildman, S. M. (with Davis, A. D.). (2000).
Language and silence: Making systems of
privilege visible. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic
(Eds.), Critical race theory: The cutting edge
(2nd ed., pp. 657-663). Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.
67
Yosso, T. J. (2006). Whose culture has capital? A
critical race theory discussion of community
cultural wealth. In A. D. Dixson and C. K.
Rousseau (Eds.) Critical race theory in
education: All God’s children got a song (pp.
167-189). New York, NY:: Routledge.
Yosso, T.J., Parker, L., Solorzano, D., & Lynn, M.
(2004). From Jim Crow to affirmative action
and back again: A critical
ical race discussion of
racialized rationales and access to higher
education. Review of Research in Education,
28, 1-25.
Young, E. Y. (2011). The four personae of racism:
Educators’ (mis)understanding of individual vs.
systemic racism. Urban Education, 46 46(6),
1433-1460.
Zamudio, M. M., Russell, C., Rios, F. A., &
Bridgeman, J. L. (2011). Critical race theory
matters: Education and ideology.. New YorkYork,
NY: Routledge.
Zumwalt, K., & Craig, E. (2008). Who is teaching?
Does it matter? In M. Cochran-Smith,
Smith, S.
Feiman-Nemser
Nemser & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.),
Handbook of research on teacher education:
Enduring questions in changing contexts (pp.
404-423). New York, NY;; [Manassas, VA]:
Routledge; Co-published
published by the Association of
Teacher Educators.

68