Building Inclusive Communities in Rural Canada by Clark Banack

Author:Clark Banack [Clark Banack and Dionne Pohler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

III

Practical Tools for Building Inclusive Rural Communities

6

A Noisy Silence

Challenges for Rural Teacher Education

Michael Corbett, Jennifer Tinkham, and Claudine Bonner

ACROSS CANADA, teacher education has instituted sociologically informed equity and inclusion courses as core features of the preparation of professional teachers. This chapter explores key tensions identified by the authors to query and analyze the particular challenges of current programming relating to race and racialization in the context of rural communities. In this writing, we explore the tensions between rural community sensibilities, the intersection of popular local settler histories and critical historical narratives, and the difficulty of finding a voice that many university-age, rural youth exhibit in challenging conversations about race, racialization and equity.

Our point of entry into this conversation about rural teaching is the persistent challenges we have faced working with undergraduates, most of whom are learning to be professional teachers, as they enact what Tuck and Yang (2012) call “moves to innocence.” We find that rural undergraduates often tend to imagine their communities and their lives as largely disconnected from the issues of racialization, which they imagine to be either the misguided bigotry of marginal individuals who operate outside the mainstream of polite community opinion in their home places and/or things that happen in distant times (i.e., the historical past) and places (e.g., in the United States or in large cities) from which they are removed. Discussions of the structural nature of racism and social inequality are subsequently framed in a psychological register that blames aberrant individuals, ignoring the need for both taking personal responsibility and understanding how racism is systemic.

Complicating common psychologized understandings of racism requires an engagement in a different kind of conversation—one that requires both “breaking the silence” on racism and developing insights into how ordinary social institutions such as schools and workplaces unintentionally reproduce that silence, often through practices considered to represent progressive whiteness (Han and Laughter 2019; Matias 2016). We conclude by cautioning against blaming rural preservice teachers for what they do not know, and recommending increased attention to the social sciences and humanities in teacher education.

Method

Educators often sit together over a meal. The conversation often turns at some point to classroom practice. While for many this is simply “shop talk,” it is also a way of working through our teaching practices, problems we encounter, and our frustrations and challenges with colleagues who are understanding yet constructively critical. The process of seeking to improve our practice is, at its heart, self-study research (Lassonde, Galman, and Kosnik 2009; Mitchell, O’Reilly-Scanlon, and Weber 2005). This method seeks to “understand the relationship between the knower and the known” and to “understand what is the form and nature of reality” (Kuzmik and Bloom 2008, 207). According to Brown (2004, 520), “self-study is uniquely suited to contribute to an understanding of race and social class issues in education.” In coming together to think critically about issues of equity and social justice and what they mean to us as educators, we created a space of critical collaborative inquiry geared toward improving

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