Race and Education in the Twenty First Century Excavating Whiteness

Excavating Whiteness follows a group of White teachers as they learned about the role of race in education through an intensive summer course. Each teacher’s journey is represented in their own words as they worked to understand how White identity is constructed and often misunderstood as a part of teaching. Excavating Whiteness: How White Teachers’ Histories, Communities, and Relationships Frame Their Understandings about Race follows a group of sixteen teachers, fourteen White, one African American, and one Native American teacher as they participated in a university summer course centered on examining the role of race in education. The voices and experiences of the teachers powerfully demonstrate their various views and stages of racial identity development. The teachers’ interactions illustrate the difficulties they encountered, how they engaged with each other, and how and why they retreated from learning opportunities due their past, their relationships within previous learning communities, and within the newly created learning community of the course. Excavating Whiteness follows the story of a group of teachers working together to understand why race matters in their lives as educators. Their individual journeys through the course are representative of the myriad of ways White teachers respond to race and can provide others with insights into the nuanced ways race and identity are bound by personal history, experiences, and beliefs.