An Exploration of Teacher Sense-Making Around Whiteness During a Critical Professional Development Course

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious

The article examines how practicing P-12 educators make meaning of whiteness while learning theories underpinning Youth Participatory Action Research during a critical professional development course. Using a critical whiteness studies lens, the study identifies educators’ recognition of links between systemic racism and student harm, alongside patterns of both naming and avoiding explicit discussion of whiteness. Findings emphasize CPD complexities and support the need to help educators interrogate and name whiteness without centering it while building capacity for actionable anti-racist practice.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Critical professional development and equity

Teacher sense-making around whiteness

Research question and study framing

Inquiry into how teachers interpret whiteness in CPD

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–16 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251338817 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) An Exploration of Teacher Sense-Making Around Whiteness During a Critical Professional Development Course Jami Carmichael Carlos R. Casanova Justine Parnell Arizona State University Jordan King University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Molly Cashion Montana State University Robert McGehee Pierce County Public Works There is a dearth in research on how practicing teachers understand and grapple with whiteness during critical professional development (CPD). To address this, we explored P-12 educators’sense-making around whiteness as they learned about the theories that underpin Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) during CPD. Utilizing a critical whiteness studies lens, we found that educators recognized the connection between systemic racism and student harm, and both named and avoided naming whiteness as they navigated its influence. Our findings highlight the complexities of how educators engage with whiteness during CPD, revealing both an awareness of systemic racism and its consequences and the challenge of explicitly naming whiteness. We underscore the need for CPD to help educators interrogate and name whiteness, without centering it, and to build teacher capacity to support students of Color. Future research should explore how CPD can sustain these efforts and support educators in developing actionable anti-racist practices. Keywords: professional development, critical theory, equity, social justice, teacher education/development, qualitative research, critical whiteness studies, critical professional development, systemic racism, educational equity, youth participatory action research Students around the world are seeking educational experiences that respond to pressing societal issues such as climate change and social injustice (Verlie & Flynn, 2022) . To meet the needs of students, teachers play a pivotal role in supporting them to engage with the complex challenges of the present and future. More specifically, the training and continuing professional development of teachers represents a crucial intervention point in building the capacity of teachers to competently prepare students for the urgent and dynamic challenges they face (Fischer et al., 2022) . If teachers are to fulfill the transformative role in reorienting educational systems—a role advanced by researchers and policymakers (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] Digital Library, 2022)—strategies are needed to strengthen the ways professional development programs engage with societal challenges and new pedagogical possibilities. To achieve the breakthroughs that are needed for teachers, students, and the transformation of educational systems, teachers must reflect on social justice issues with their peersand communities in professional development opportunities (Stapleton, 2018). Referred to as critical professional development (CPD; Kohli et al., 2015), this approach centers the need for teachers to improve their awareness of the personal, educational, and sociopolitical implications of injustices, as well as to act to address these inequities (Kohliet al., 2015) . Amidst the evolution of new approaches to professional development, considerations of dysconscious Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified o

FAQs

What is the main focus of the study?

The study focuses on how practicing teachers engage in sense-making around whiteness during a critical professional development course.

What lens and approach does the study use?

It uses a critical whiteness studies lens to examine how educators interpret whiteness as a racial and social construct with material consequences.

What do the findings suggest about teacher engagement with whiteness?

Educators recognized connections between systemic racism and student harm, but they also showed difficulty in explicitly naming whiteness while navigating its influence.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious