| dc.description.abstract | In this PhD thesis, I study the workings of Whiteness in teacher education discourses through
the usage and meaning making of one term: cultural diversity. As such, I draw attention to the
importance of a minimal and assumingly unimportant aspect of Our habitual social
communication. A basic presumption herein is that the imperial and colonial legacy of race
and racism remains a historical pedagogy of amnesia that manifests through subtle discursive
patterns in Our everyday dysconscious racist usage and meaning making of terms. To study
the usage and meaning making of terms is important because conceptualisations of terms
constituted in knowledge-producing institutions work through educational curricula and
practice, and teachers’ dispositions are fundamentally about meaning making related to
feelings that affect pedagogical behaviour in ways that ultimately effect social and racial
justice.
The workings of Whiteness are interrogated through the usage and meaning making of
cultural diversity produced in educational discourses via three discursive knowledgepromoting
domains of teacher education: (1) international research articles, (2) policy and
curriculum documents, and (3) teacher educator interview transcripts. The thesis includes four
articles: one critical interpretative literature review, one policy and curriculum document
analysis, and two discourse analyses of individual teacher educator interviews.
In the first article, I review the use and meaning making of cultural diversity across 67
international research studies on teacher education published in the period of 2004–2014. In
this analysis, I find that cultural diversity is generally not defined but is related to a set of
other undefined terms. Moreover, cultural diversity (and its related set of terms) is used
extensively as part of binary oppositional discourses that, on the one hand, represent cultural
diversity through notions of detriment – of racialisation and Othering, difference and
inferiority – and, on the other hand, represent student teacher(s) and student(s) through
notions of privilege and assumptions of superiority. Based on these findings, I discuss how
the undefined nature of cultural diversity and its usage, as part of binary oppositional
discourses, reveal how cultural diversity is assumed to be about a racialised Other (contrary to
student teacher(s) and student(s)) in teacher education research discourses. I argue that this
discursive production is one way in which Whiteness works through researchers’ discursive
practices of division and exclusion, produced by their initial dysconscious choices and
investments in terms. I also argue that this extensive practice of Othering is “evidence” of the
way in which Whiteness is persistently promoted through a discursive ideology of White
supremacy produced in articles that generally claim to promote social justice.
In the second article, I analyse the usage and meaning making of cultural diversity in six
Norwegian policy and curriculum documents considered to be part of the 2010 teacher
education reform. In this analysis, I find (similar to the findings of the review article) that
cultural diversity is neither explicitly elaborated on nor defined according to its ubiquity of
usage but is related to and used interchangeably with a set of other undefined terms that all
connote notions of Otherness. However, in this article, the main focus is on the finding related
to how Whiteness – in the way it works through the usage and meaning making of cultural
diversity – is manifested in three discursive patterns of representation. Importantly, these
patterns highlight (1) three hierarchically arranged pupil group categories, (2) descriptions
that place these pupil group categories as either superior Norwegian or as inferior non-
Norwegian, and (3) the role of student teachers as political actors of assimilation. In this
article, I point to how these discursive patterns of representation – despite being covered by a
polished surface representing the Norwegian self-image as one of peace, solidarity, and
egalitarianism, part of the Nordic Model and Nordic Exceptionalism – work together in subtly
racist ways, thus promoting ideas of assimilation as racial stratification that, in turn, supports
an overall ideology of White Norwegian supremacy.
In the third article, we (my supervisors and I) analyse the usage and meaning making of
cultural diversity in transcripts of individual interviews with 12 teacher educators. Treating
the transcripts as empirical data, we find that cultural diversity is used through a double
meaning making pattern that, on the one hand, gives meaning to cultural diversity as
explicitly positive, important, and desirable for teacher education. Yet, on the other hand, the
term is assumed to be about the Other, who is subtly represented as negative and challenging,
cognitively less developed (than an assumed Us), and knowledgeless. Based on these
findings, we suggest that when cultural diversity is explicitly represented as something
positive, important, and desirable in Norwegian teacher education, this pattern of meaning
making, precisely because it rests on subtler assumptions and meaning of cultural diversity as
a racialised Other, can be interpreted to mirror the “ideal” Whiteness way in which cultural
diversity ought to be represented. Importantly, despite teacher educators seeming to express
their wish to approach cultural diversity in positive and inclusive ways, their dysconscious
usage and meaning making of the term nonetheless produce discursive patterns of Othering
and exclusion that reflect the opposite. Related to these findings, we question whether student
teachers’ subtle learnings about cultural diversity, obtained through their teacher education
programmes, may influence their future teaching.
In the fourth article, we (my supervisors and I) draw on the same sets of data as in previous
Article 3 and analyse these using a socio-cognitive linguistic theoretical framework. In this
article, we analyse how teacher educators use cultural diversity and reflect on what their
discursive practices might tell us about their conceptual understanding of it. Based on the
analysis of the transcribed interview data, we find that teacher educators talk about cultural
diversity as something relating to pupils and parents who are considered different from
themselves culturally, socially, linguistically, cognitively, “migrationally”, visibly, and
religiously. Thus, we theorise that teacher educators talk about cultural diversity through
seven discourse practices of Othering (DPOs). We point to how teacher educators, when they
talk about cultural diversity in this way, create two binary oppositional groups. Herein, the
teacher educators are placed in an Us-group, represented implicitly and described as
“ordinary”, and those whom they view as fitting into the cultural diversity category are placed
in the Other-group, represented explicitly and described as “unordinary”. We argue that
teacher educators need more than an appreciation of diversity to counteract discrimination and
inequality created through the usage and meaning making of terms such as cultural diversity.
In this thesis’ extended abstract discussion chapter, I discuss and compare the four articles’
main findings in relation to the wider Norwegian and international context. Here, I outline
two main points of this thesis: (1) how the usage of assumingly “innocent” terms might work
to support already wider social patterns of White supremacy and (2) how Whiteness actually
works in a “glocal” manner. That is, I argue that the core workings of Whiteness are quite
similar irrespective of national context – at least within so-called Western countries: It
discursively constructs a discursive object of racialised Otherness, whilst simultaneously
maintaining a polished surface mirroring ideas of Us (Whites) as supreme. Importantly, this
surface covers the realities of Our “dirty and violent” past and, hence, “blinds” Us to unjust
patterns of the present.
Drawing on discourse theoretical methodologies and critical Whiteness political perspectives,
the findings of this PhD-thesis contribute to empirically documenting how the historical
pedagogy of amnesia – the legacy of imperialism and colonialism – currently works through
the dysconscious usage and meaning making of assumingly “innocent” terms, such as cultural
diversity. The findings reveal how this, in turn, produces “hidden” racialised discursive
patterns that constitute discursive objects of Otherness, which simultaneously, implicitly, and
subtly construct ideas of Us as subjects and, as such, centre the workings of Whiteness as a
discursive ideology of White supremacy.
Methodologically, the thesis contributes a discursive methodology for performing a discursive
micro-analysis of the workings of Whiteness to the field of teacher education, both nationally
and internationally. Specifically, it also contributes to a “protocol”, a step-by-step description
of the analytical strategies that can be applied by research peers in future analyses of
empirical textual data.
The thesis contributes a thorough theorisation of the concept of Whiteness as a discursive
ideology of White supremacy to the field of teacher education research by combining poststructural
perspectives on discourse with critical perspectives on Whiteness. In the Norwegian
context in particular, it contributes to the research by introducing Whiteness as a theoretical
and analytical tool that allows researcher 8and other political knowledge-promoting actors) of
teacher education for “seeing” how the legacy of imperialism and colonialism – of race and
racism – currently works through subtle discursive practices of Othering and exclusion. | en |
