Becoming racially aware: explorations of identity and whiteness with pre-service teachers

This dissertation reports on the use of dialogic forms of engagement with white pre-service teachers in exploring the processes and events that led to self-awareness of the racialised aspects of their personal identities. The nature of whiteness as a structural system of privilege and of white racial identity as an individual dimension of identity in the Australian context forms a major part of the contextual background to this study. The study concludes that white racial self-awareness is a necessary pre-requisite to white identity reconstruction and that certain types of experiences seem to provoke and promote this awareness. Giroux’s notion of identity trauma and Spivak’s ‘moments of bafflement’ provide major planks of the conceptual framework here. Based in life history techniques, the main evidentiary material was elicited by the use of learning conversations and was analysed with the assistance of the NUD•IST 4 software package. Considerable attention is paid to methodological issues of transcription, the role of the researcher and the incorporation of researcher presence into the study and the report thereof.