Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

When educators confront the implicit biases they carry, a deeper awareness emerges on their everyday decisions and behaviors based on these biases. For example, bias can affect beliefs teachers hold about students’ achievements, behaviors, and backgrounds. These biases, in turn, can influence teachers’ subjective thinking regarding students’ abilities and grades as well as reduce student expectations, thus, expanding the existing achievement gap between Whites and marginalized people (especially migrant and refugee children) in the United States. It is inevitable that preservice teachers (PSTs) will be teaching students with backgrounds, perspectives, and ideologies that are different than their own, especially since 80 percent of the U.S. population of teachers identifies as White, female, middle-class individuals. Discussing biases will potentially enable PSTs to recognize their personal bias and provide ways to avoid biases affecting their students. Negative stereotypes can be brought unknowingly into schools unless PSTs have the chance to explicitly challenge and reflect upon their own biases. “If we are to undo the racial inequities that continue to plague us, we must find constructive ways to talk about them and intervene constructively and consciously to end them” (Carter et al.,2017,p. 209). In college classrooms, controversial topics surrounding class, race, and gender are difficult to engage in, especially when students call into question their own privileges and power they carry with them in society. Therefore, this study investigated how engaging in discussions on race within a social justice framework impacts PSTs’ to confront their implicit biases to become aware global citizen educators.