Thesis advisor: Andrew Miller / Many White educators are not aware of their White privilege, and therefore they need support in developing their White racial identity and racial awareness so that they can identify problems associated with racism and participate in conversations about race and racism with an eye towards dismantling systemic racism. Data was collected from semi-structured interviews with educational leaders, document review, and focus groups with educators in order to discover how, if at all, school leaders support their White teachers in developing an anti-racist White racial identity. Finding suggested that despite professional development initiatives dedicated to racial identity development, there was a noted lack of formal opportunities designed specifically for White racial identity development and instead the schools relied on pockets of informal White racial identity development among White colleagues. The data revealed some insights as to why racial identity work specific to White people is not happening: (a) White educators think they already know this information, (b) White educators have a desire to focus on teaching content, (c) White educators shield themselves, and (d) White educators believe that the timing is not ideal for anti-racist work. One recommendation to support White staff in the development of their White racial identity could be for educational leaders in districts like this to introduce the staff to the scholarship about Whiteness, so White educators can use this new information about Whiteness to promote personal reflective practices about what it means to be White and progress to conversations with colleagues about what it means to be White and how their Whiteness impacts their daily lives and the daily lives of their students and colleagues. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

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The issue of special education in the United States has been a contentious issue, at best, for the past 40 years. In Ontario, to a lesser extent, there have been issues of equal access to education for minoritized and racialized students. Special education in the Toronto area has not been without its issues surrounding parental advocacy, the use of assessments, and disproportionate number of English Language Learners in special education. This project examines how racialized and minoritized families understand special education practices and policies, specifically within the Toronto, York, Peel, and Halton Regions. The investigation is informed by nine interviews with students in grades 7 to 12, their respective mothers, and five special education administrators and educators. Students and parents identified themselves as Black, Latino/a, and South Asian. Within these categories, parents identified themselves as Somali, Trinidadian, Jamaican, and Punjabi-Sikh. Students were identified with a range of disabilities including learning, behavioural, and/or intellectual. This research focuses on ways to interrogate and examine the experiences of minoritized students and their parents by bringing forward otherwise silenced voices and understanding what it means to “speak out” against the process of identification and placement in special education. The findings of this investigation suggest a disconnect how policies and practices are implemented, and how, parents’ rights are understood. In particular, policies are inconsistently applied and are subject to the interpretation of educators and administrators, especially in relation to parental involvement and how much information should be released to families. The issue of language acquisition being read as a disability was also a noted concern. This investigation points to implications for teacher education programs, gaps in parental advocacy and notions of parental participation within schools, and re-examining special education assessments, practices, and policies.

The issue of special education in the United States has been a contentious issue, at best, for the past 40 years. In Ontario, to a lesser extent, there have been issues of equal access to education for minoritized and racialized students. Special education in the Toronto area has not been without its issues surrounding parental advocacy, the use of assessments, and disproportionate number of English Language Learners in special education. This project examines how racialized and minoritized families understand special education practices and policies, specifically within the Toronto, York, Peel, and Halton Regions. The investigation is informed by nine interviews with students in grades 7 to 12, their respective mothers, and five special education administrators and educators. Students and parents identified themselves as Black, Latino/a, and South Asian. Within these categories, parents identified themselves as Somali, Trinidadian, Jamaican, and Punjabi-Sikh. Students were identified with a range of disabilities including learning, behavioural, and/or intellectual. This research focuses on ways to interrogate and examine the experiences of minoritized students and their parents by bringing forward otherwise silenced voices and understanding what it means to “speak out” against the process of identification and placement in special education. The findings of this investigation suggest a disconnect how policies and practices are implemented, and how, parents’ rights are understood. In particular, policies are inconsistently applied and are subject to the interpretation of educators and administrators, especially in relation to parental involvement and how much information should be released to families. The issue of language acquisition being read as a disability was also a noted concern. This investigation points to implications for teacher education programs, gaps in parental advocacy and notions of parental participation within schools, and re-examining special education assessments, practices, and policies.

Despite abundant evidence of structural/institutional discrimination and racism throughout the Swedish society, these conditions have so far not attracted much interest within library and information science in Sweden. Significantly more interest has been devoted to research, as well as reports by practitioners, on the integration of ”immigrants”. The aim of this paper is to examine how library discourses on integration of ”immigrants” affect the understanding of– and the approach to – racism. I have taken on this task by performing a discourse analysis, specifically Carol Bacchi’s ”What’s the problem represented to be” (WPR)-approach. The empirical material analyzed is a report on integration produced within the National Library of Sweden’s work with the national library strategy (Nationella biblioteksstrategin). Drawing on postcolonial and intersectional critiques, as well as critical library and information science research, I interrogate the problem representations, the production of ”Swedishness” and the silences around racism in this report on integration. In my analysis, I show that structural/institutional discrimination and racism is made invisible through two particular discourses on integration. I have named these two discourses ”the problem discourse” (problemdiskursen) and ”the helper discourse” (hjälpardiskursen). These two discourses constantly locate ”the problem” with the ones who are to be ”integrated”. Libraries are portrayed as institutions able to help the problematic ”Others”, for example through teaching them ”modern values”. In effect, issues such as housing and working  life discrimination, increasingly restrictive migration policies and the reproduction of colonial representations of ”the Other” are made irrelevant within these discourses – and ”Swedishness” is (re)produced as an unproblematic norm. My results show that the integration discourses not only make discrimination and racism invisible – in fact they uphold a racist discourse. Finally, my results confirm the findings by several North American LIS researchers, who have shown that library discourses on diversity, multiculturalism and integration prevent the library field from addressing issues of discrimination and racism.

This thesis aimed to investigate the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in an Australian context. The first principal aim of this thesis was to further establish the psychometric properties of the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale (Fraser & Islam, 1997b). Study 1 revealed good psychometric properties for the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale as a measure of symbolic (modern) racist attitudes in Australian populations. The study also found support for incorporating modern racism items within a 'social issues' questionnaire format to reduce reactivity concerns associated with self-report measures. The second principal aim of this thesis (Studies 2 and 3) was to explore the nature, prevalence and potential sources of contemporary racist attitudes, and associated discriminatory behaviours, in an Australian context. Study 2 detected a sizeable proportion of modern racist attitudes in both the University and ACT Secondary College student samples. The nature of modern racist attitudes in the population samples maintained clear consistencies with key tenets of contemporary theories of racial prejudice. Overall the study provided further empirical evidence of the nature, tenets and potential socio-demographic sources of modern racist attitudes in Australian populations. Study 3 explored modern racists' discriminatory behaviours in conditions of low racial salience. In an employment-hiring task, high and low prejudiced participants (university undergraduates) revealed significantly different employment hiring preferences for an Aboriginal applicant. In providing Australian empirical evidence of modern racists' discriminatory behaviours, the study also discussed methodological implications for future Australian research investigating the discriminatory behaviours of modern racists. The third principal aim of this thesis was to provide further analysis of the measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, specifically to examine concerns pertaining to the measurement of racial attitudes through implicit techniques. Implicit free-response measurement of Australian racial stereotypes in Study 4 revealed that high and low prejudiced participants (as measured by the SR-E) were equally knowledgable of the cultural stereotypes of Aboriginals, Asians and immigrants. Cultural knowledge of the implicit stereotypes was found to be predominantly independent of prejudicial beliefs, lending support to concerns (Devine, 1989; Devine & Elliot, 1995) that implicit measures of racial prejudice may actually be measuring an individual's cultural knowledge of the primed racial group, rather than his or her prejudicial beliefs. The fourth principal aim of this thesis was to investigate the content of Australian racial stereotypes. Study 4 revealed the implicit content of the cultural stereotypes of Aborigines, Asians and immigrants to be predominantly negative in nature. In response to the predominantly negative content of the Aboriginal cultural stereotype, Study 5 investigated whether the recategorising of ingroup boundaries and disconfirming information, relating to Aboriginal Australians, observed in the recent Sydney Olympic Games would result in changes to the content of the cultural stereotype. The study found significant decreases and increases in the negative and positive traits respectively reported as being part of the cultural stereotype of Aborigines, two weeks following the Sydney Olympic Games. Together, the five studies contributed to empirical research on the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in Australian populations. A number of theoretical and practical implications of the present findings for Australian prejudice research are addressed and discussed. Furthermore, a number of practical recommendations for future research are identified to further investigate the modern nature of racist attitudes in Australian populations.

This research explores the use of memories of past school experiences to help identify unnamed and unchallenged incidents of oppression that occurred in elementary and high school. What are the implications for educators when past school experiences indicate that racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and other harmful practices took place, but went unexamined and unclaimed as such? Three inter-related reflective analyses are used to investigate the experiences of teacher candidates, the thesis author, and practicing teachers to fully explore this query. <p>The first section examines teacher candidates reactions to anti-oppressive education. Negative reactions by students are most often defined by scholars as resistance. This section reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of this definition. The memories students shared about their past schooling suggest looking beyond the current scope of theories that define negativity as resistance. The second section includes a retrospective analysis of the authors past school experiences where oppressive practices went unidentified and unchallenged as such. In the third section, Narrative Inquiry is used to gather stories from practicing teachers whose memories also indicate unnamed examples of oppression. Participants identify school memories that helped shape their current teaching practices and enhanced their commitment to addressing racism, classism, sexism and other issues in schools today.

My thesis argues that a shift has taken place in white supremacist rhetoric post September 11, 2001. I focus on the pre-9/11 rhetoric of Jared Taylor, the post 9/11 rhetoric of Patrick Buchanan, and identify the attacks of September 11th as a catalytic event in the history of white supremacist rhetoric. Through careful rhetorical analysis, I identify the 9/11 shift as a shift in placement vis-à-vis the political mainstream.

Race and racism inform our subjective realities and structure unequal material relations in contemporary society. While researchers have developed substantive theories to explain racism as systemically pervading institutions within society and permeating our consciousness, studies must also examine how people with privilege deny or admit the existence of racism within their institutions in different environments. Studies of how educators understand racism have been emerging; however, there remains a paucity of scholarship addressing this topic in the Canadian Prairies. In this thesis I use discourse analysis to investigate how prairie teachers negotiated the troubling topic of racism in their schools. The data was collected through open-ended surveys and focus-groups exploring teachers understanding of racism and anti-racism within two mid-sized prairie city high schools. First, exploring survey responses, I use text-based discursive analysis techniques to analyze how participants minimize the unsettling presence of racism in the school. In their responses, teachers used techniques of individualization, blaming the victim, displacement, and situating racism as a student problem to avoid implicating themselves or their school within racism. Teachers preserved the colour-blind image of education, maintaining the benevolence of the educational institution and its employees. However, different images of education emerged from focus-group discussions with educators interested in exploring anti-racism in the school. Focus group participants shifted from minimizing racism to problematizing privilege and power within the building. Multicultural, psychological, and institutional approaches to anti-racism emerged, emphasizing the need to engage individuals, cultures, and institutional structures. Exploring how teachers articulated different versions of the school environment, the identities of students, and their own identities within and between these different anti-racist discourses exposed how versions of each approach could be constructed to situate racism as external to education, and how critical conceptualizations of the school opened opportunities for individual, cultural, and institutional change within education. This research develops the understanding of race in the Canadian Prairies, discourse analysis within geography, anti-racist education, the geography of how teachers situate racism, and how teachers construct the relationship between school, teacher identity, and racism.

This research explores the use of memories of past school experiences to help identify unnamed and unchallenged incidents of oppression that occurred in elementary and high school. What are the implications for educators when past school experiences indicate that racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and other harmful practices took place, but went unexamined and unclaimed as such? Three inter-related reflective analyses are used to investigate the experiences of teacher candidates, the thesis author, and practicing teachers to fully explore this query. <p>The first section examines teacher candidates reactions to anti-oppressive education. Negative reactions by students are most often defined by scholars as resistance. This section reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of this definition. The memories students shared about their past schooling suggest looking beyond the current scope of theories that define negativity as resistance. The second section includes a retrospective analysis of the authors past school experiences where oppressive practices went unidentified and unchallenged as such. In the third section, Narrative Inquiry is used to gather stories from practicing teachers whose memories also indicate unnamed examples of oppression. Participants identify school memories that helped shape their current teaching practices and enhanced their commitment to addressing racism, classism, sexism and other issues in schools today.