Asilia Franklin-Phipps

Ph.D., Education Studies, 2018

This dissertation is an exploration of how teaching and learning about race and racism happens in the context of a particularly racially charged political and cultural climate—Black Lives Matter rallies and activism, the Presidential Election and subsequent election of Donald Trump, and shifting racial discourse and logic. Using a 2016 course on racism as a site of inquiry, I consider how experimental and arts-inspired approaches to pedagogy open up new possibilities for how teaching and learning about race can happen. The course, made up, of undergraduates in their senior year, planning to become elementary school teachers resisted dominant discourse about becoming anti-racist as became a space for young, white, mostly women to learn through encounters with texts, moving their bodies through space in ways that they might have otherwise avoided, and participating in ongoing, persistent, nuanced race dialog through a variety of modes—digital, art, music, film, literature, and public events. This learning was often not conclusive but provided ongoing practice for engaging race in ways that allowed for meaningful shifts in how they notice and know the world, implicating how they imagine becoming a teacher in a raced world.