Studies in Art Education A Journal of Issues and Research ISSN: 0039-3541 (Print) 2325-8039 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usae20 Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent CounterNarratives of Art Teacher Identity Amelia M. Kraehe To cite this article: Amelia M. Kraehe (2015) Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent Counter-Narratives of Art Teacher Identity, Studies in Art Education, 56:3, 199-213, DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2015.11518963 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2015.11518963 Published online: 25 Nov 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 197 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 7 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=usae20 Copyright 2015 by the National Art Education Association Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research 2015, 56(3), 199-213 “In the midst of these prescripted storylines, there exist counternarratives, stories rendered marginal and inaudible by the normative din of stock stories. Counternarratives supply alternative sense-making structures.” Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent Counter-Narratives of Art Teacher Identity AMELIA M. KRAEHE University of North Texas This article presents case studies of two Black preservice art teachers and their racialized experiences in art teacher education. Drawing from a critical race theory perspective, their stories are conceptualized as emergent counternarratives of becoming an art teacher. The case studies are based on interviews from an ethnographic investigation of teacher identity at a predominantly White university’s art education program. The counter-narratives that emerged chronicle racial microaggressions that participants negotiated as each fashioned an art teacher identity. At a systemic level, the testimonies shed light on the invidious effects of race avoidance in art teacher preparation and art teacher research. The conclusion discusses future directions and implications for making art teacher education programs more inclusive and safe for students of color, while also supporting greater race consciousness among all teachers. Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author at Amelia.Kraehe@unt.edu Studies in Art Education / Volume 56, No. 3 199 D oes race matter in art education? As a focus of research, the field of art education tends to avoid the topic of race and its intersections with other forms of sociocultural difference (Alfredson & Desai, 2012; Knight, 2006; Kraehe & Acuff, 2013). This article takes up the problematics of race and racial silence within the context of becoming an art teacher. There are two major strands of inquiry that examine the process of becoming an art teacher. The first focuses on art teacher thinking, learning, and development (Bain, Newton, Kuster, & Milbrandt, 2010; Galbraith, 1997; Grauer, 1998; Hetrick, 2010; Powell & LaJevic, 2011; Zimmerman, 1994). The second uses identity as a heuristic for understanding how one becomes an art teacher. Scholarship under this rubric hinges on an artist/teacher binary (Anderson, 1981; Daichendt, 2009; Day, 1986; Graham & Zwirn, 2010; Hall, 2010; Hatfield, Montana, & Deffenbaugh, 2006). Both traditions tend to overlook race and its intersections with other sociocultural processes as influential factors in the development of art teachers. When race is addressed in the scholarship on becoming an art teacher, it is often within the context of supporting primarily White students’ racial knowledge (e.g., Briggs, 2012; Desai, 2010; Knight, 2013). The aversion to talking about race—what Pollock (2004) called colormuteness—poses consequences for art educators and policymakers.1 The collective practice of centering the interests, experiences, and ideologies of White preservice teachers without situating them as such masks the ontological, epistemological, and axiological specificity of research, policies, and practices set forth to represent all teachers (Ladson-Billings, 200 2000; Scheurich & Young, 1997).2 This valorizes an invisible White imaginary (Leonardo, 2004) by normalizing the realities, knowledges, and moral underpinnings of the dominant racial group. Racial silence, therefore, does not transcend racialized difference; rather, it imposes a standpoint that disregards and subordinates the worldviews and educational needs of nonWhites. Prospective teachers of color are rendered alien, insignificant, and thus irrelevant to policy decisions and program reforms (Milner, Pearman, & McGee, 2013). Though colormuteness is often enacted by well-meaning individuals and written into antidiscrimination policies, it is, in effect, a key mechanism by which White supremacy is institutionalized (Pollock, 2004). This study investigates how race and racism shape the development of art teachers. It breaks new ground by drawing insights from the experiences of preservice art teachers of color and extends current research on the lives and identities of art teachers of color (Bey, 2011; Bullock & Galbraith, 1992; Knight, 2007; Stokrocki, 1990). The study is guided by the question: How do preservice art teachers negotiate race and racism in art teacher education? Critical race theory is used to interpret the racialized experiences of two Black preservice art teachers. Following a description of the research methodology, two emergent counter-narratives are presented along with a concluding discussion that considers the implications of racial silence for the field of art education. Emergent Counter-Narratives and Critical Race Theory Art teacher narratives help to portray the complexity of teaching and teacher agency (e.g., Anderson, 2000; Lampela & Check, 2003; Stout, 2002). As a way of making sense of their lives, people routinely reconstruct their experiences Kraehe / Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent Counter-Narratives of Art Teacher Identity in narrative form (Czarniawska, 2004). Narrative processes play a crucial role in the construction of identities (Gee, 2000-2001; Sfard & Prusak, 2005) because they enable us to “tell a story that informs others of who we are, where we come from, where we are going, and what our purpose may be” (Rolling, 2010, p. 6). Forging a sense of self through narrative is not without constraints, however. As Hicks (2012) noted, “we must usually contend with narratives we have not authored ourselves” (p. 91). The narrativized self is entangled in dialogue with received stories that engender particular ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking about one’s self in relation to others. In the midst of these prescripted storylines, there exist counter-narratives, stories rendered marginal and inaudible by the normative din of stock stories. Counter-narratives supply alternative sense-making structures. These structures contest the legitimacy of stock stories “by contradicting the insinuation of hierarchical and self-preserving meaning over contextual and anomalous meaning” (Rolling, 2011, p. 100). Counter-narratives are imbued with transformative potential as they generate spaces of rupture from/within oppressive structures. In this study, attending to moments of rupture—both large and small—in which preservice teachers worked to sustain and alter themselves within discordant identity spaces was important. Becoming a teacher is often experienced as a discordant, liminal period of self-transformation (Atkison, 2004; Britzman, 1991). It stands to reason that preservice teachers may not possess fully developed or coherent plot lines that are characteristic of recollections told with the reflexivity afforded by the passage of time. However inchoate, partial, and fleeting they may seem, emergent counter-narratives provide a glimpse into the dynamic, unfolding processes involved in negotiating an art teacher identity. To understand preservice art teachers’ emergent racial counter-narratives, this study drew from critical race theory (CRT) and its methodology of storytelling. CRT grew out of critical legal studies in the 1970s and made its way into the field of education in the mid 1990s (LadsonBillings & Tate, 1995). CRT is relatively new to art education research (Kraehe & Acuff, 2013). A brief introduction to some of its key concepts is beneficial for understanding how racial counternarratives are conceptualized in this study. First, a central premise of CRT is that race and racism play fundamental structuring roles in society within the United States (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). Though a substantive review of the history of racism is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note that contemporary scholars of race have demonstrated that racism is not a social relic from a bygone era. On the contrary, racism has taken new forms in response to shifting historical and political circumstances (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). Whereas overt and conscious forms of racism (e.g., racial slurs, physical attacks, and written policies of racial exclusion) were at one time quite common, in our present post civil-rights context, it tends to take more covert and unconscious forms (Sue, 2010). Racism is deeply ingrained within American institutional policies and cultural practices such that the existing social order appears natural and inevitable. Racism is not so much a deviation from the norm as it is an ordinary part of life (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). Second, CRT rejects racial essentialism and the long-discredited genetic view of race as fixed or natural. On the contrary, race is understood as a social construction, a set of categories and ideas formed historically by human relations (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). Ideas and meanings associated with racial differences are ascribed to arbitrary biological markers. Over time, society continues to imbue racial categories with meaning, recycling and discarding them in different contexts as needed, giving each racial category a distinct history (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). Third, CRT conceptualizes race as interdependent with other social categories such as class, gender, and sexuality. This concept of intersectionality is an important move away Studies in Art Education / Volume 56, No. 3 201 from thinking of race as having the properties of a static, singular identifier. Intersectionality poses more complex understandings of identities as they are formed through the interaction of multiple subject positions. Fourth, the concept of “voice” holds particular methodological significance in CRT (Parker & Lynn, 2002). It refers to expressions of individual and shared experiences structured by racism. Through storytelling, CRT recognizes “voice” as an asset (Chapman, 2007; Delgado, 1989; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). It serves as a counterhegemonic strategy that helps destabilize colormute discourses that can camouflage inequities. From this perspective, counter-narratives are stories told from the vantage point of those who have been subjugated, disparaged, and forgotten. They expose hidden institutional and cultural mechanisms of racial injustice as they are understood at the level of everyday experience. The concept of microaggression is used to describe these small—though cumulative— units of experience. Solórzano (1998) defined microaggressions as subtle insults, slights, and everyday exclusions encountered when navigating dominant group spaces. They are “so pervasive and automatic… that they are often dismissed and glossed over as being innocent and innocuous” (Sue, 2010, p. 25). According to Sue (2010), microaggressions are communicated through verbal interactions, nonverbal behaviors, and environmental cues. Environmental microaggressions are transmitted indirectly through symbolic references dispersed throughout the visual culture and other nonhuman elements. Sue argued that these are the most pernicious and invalidating because they “exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of certain groups” (Sue, 2010, p. 37; see also Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000). Counter-narratives foster healing after racial microaggression. They provide a way for the storyteller to reconstruct a more enabling sense of self. Counter-narratives also contribute to shared knowledge by “unmoor[ing] people 202 from received truths so that they might consider alternatives” (Ladson-Billings, 2013, p. 42). They present opportunities to rethink institutional norms and policies and provide fertile ground in which justice-oriented change can begin to take root (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005). Research Design This article focuses on data drawn from a 3-year critical ethnographic case study (Carspecken, 1996; Stake, 1995) of art teacher preparation at a large university in the southwestern US. The study investigated how preservice art teachers negotiated their emerging art teacher identities and how social positions were implicated in the process of becoming an art teacher. The research purposefully sampled (Patton, 2002) a demographically varied group of preservice art teachers from a single cohort. I draw from in-depth, semistructured individual interviews conducted with two participants, Brianna and Cherise, from the time they entered the art teacher education program until the culminating semester of student teaching. Both women were Black middle-class women in their early 20s.3 When I met them, they were just beginning their coursework in art education at Southwest State University, a predominantly White institution. The art faculty was disproportionately White and male. As in most art teacher education programs, the art education program was largely comprised of White female students (Galbraith & Grauer, 2004). I invited Brianna and Cherise to be part of the study because, as visible members of a racial group underrepresented within the fields of art and art education (Galbraith & Grauer, 2004; Lindemann et al., 2012), their social locations could engender different experiences and dispositions than those portrayed in the literature on art teachers (Johnson, 1990). Data Collection Brianna and Cherise participated in seven 2-hour interviews. Each interview was transcribed in full, and member checks were incorporated into the final representation of Kraehe / Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent Counter-Narratives of Art Teacher Identity participants’ narratives. A significant challenge in eliciting information about identity at this site stemmed from the absence of dialogue about social positioning as an aspect of self-identification. The conventional manner in which participants responded to questions about identity was to talk narrowly of being an artist (I see myself as just an artist.). Distinctions were sometimes made when identifying with a particular art process (I’m a sculptor. I am into artist books right now.). When open-ended identity questions were asked, participants’ responses generally contained little or no references to social positions (e.g., race, class, and gender). As someone who studies power relations, I felt it was important to note these absences as a key dimension of the discourse in use; the principal idea being that what goes unsaid in the data is as important in framing reality as what is said. The silence was a productive ideological force (Charmaz, 2005) that reflected and circumscribed the range of acceptable and desirable identifications for art teachers. One example of silent ideological framing appeared in the art teacher education curriculum. The first half of the 4-year program was devoted to coursework in studio art, art history, child development and individual differences, and general undergraduate studies. Courses specifically covering art education content comprised only about one quarter of the art education major (see Figure 1). As I participated in these required art education classes alongside the preservice teachers and reviewed program documents related to all the courses, I observed that none of them dealt directly with issues related to sociocultural differences or educational equity. These seemed striking omissions, given that most schools in the surrounding districts served high percentages of Black and Latino children, many of who lived in racially isolated and economically vulnerable communities.4 These schools were the very sites in which the preservice art teachers would conduct their field placements and student teaching. Figure 1. Coursework for preservice art teachers (percentage of required course hours). Researcher Positionality When I approached the art education faculty about carrying out this study, I was welcomed with the understanding that the research would focus on students’ experiences in the program. Over time, my relationship with the student participants became increasingly reciprocal, though initially I withheld information about my background and my reasons for doing the research. I was concerned about two things. First, I worried that speaking too directly about my interest in social identities and unequal power relationships would make people uncomfortable and close off opportunities for observation and genuine conversation. My second concern stemmed from not wanting to direct the identity discourse within this setting. By withholding information, I realized that I was perpetuating the same evasive practices that I was critiquing, rather than helping to catalyze more just relationships and self-determination among participants (Lather, 1986). It became ethically necessary and, ultimately, more constructive to disclose aspects of my own Studies in Art Education / Volume 56, No. 3 203 life and my critical stance as a researcher. When asked, I shared with participants my experiences of being a Black teacher in various contexts, and how being light-skinned, biracial, middle-class, and heterosexual afforded me certain advantages—even as my racial identity likely worked against me. Once I revealed myself, participants seemed to have much more to say, as though permission had been granted to talk about previously taboo subjects. They became openly reflective and more vulnerable, wondering aloud about the awkward, difficult, and even painful encounters they experienced on their journey to becoming art teachers.5 I related to participants as an ally, asking questions and listening to their stories without shock and without imposing my own academic discourse on their narratives. This dialogic interaction was important in building trust and sustaining fruitful conversations with participants. Data Analysis Constant comparative method guided the analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). The interview data were summarized under the general categories of events, strategies, perspectives, and setting (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Within each category, the data were coded based upon their content, form, and function, with particular attention to the ways in which individuals resisted, accommodated, and reinvented identity narratives. The thematic patterns that emerged were then analyzed in terms of their connection to dominant racial discourses, patterns of discrimination, and structures of inequality. Findings In this section, I interpret Brianna and Cherise’s stories as emergent racial counternarratives. This means that their stories are not left to speak for themselves. The account offered here is, like all re-presentations, a type of translation from one social location or field of meaning to another that, at times, privileges the logic of one over the other (Skeggs, 2001). This interpretation of Brianna and Cherise’s counternarratives is an attempt to describe how, in an 204 environment defined by racial silence, making sense of race and racism becomes an integral— but often hidden—part of negotiating an art teacher identity. Acquiring Unsanctioned Racial Knowledge When I met Brianna, she was just beginning her art education coursework. She had already taken numerous studio art courses. Brianna enjoyed drawing and saw it as her area of strength. In describing the studio art classes, she noted that she was nearly always the only Black person. I asked Brianna to tell me what that was like. She recalled an introductory drawing course she had recently completed in which all the other students were White, led by a White male professor: [When] I came from high school, I was used to drawing the outside of the face, drawing the eyes perfect, doing it slow and making everything where it’s supposed to be. [My professor] wanted me to be gestural and to be outside of what I was used to.… He just kept telling me to start over, telling me I was wrong, or pointing out everything that was wrong. And so then I tried to draw lightly, but he wanted me to go dark, everything dark. (Brianna Interview 1, October 2008)6 Brianna complied with the professor’s request, making more gestural marks and going outside of her range of comfort. She said that eventually “it helped me because when I got into my life drawing class [the next semester], I was able to apply some of the things that he taught me.” She went on to describe an upper level life drawing course that she took the following semester. It was also taught by a White male art professor: I was used to being gestural and making things dark and using dark colors. Everyone else was still, from their high school days, trying to make everything perfect.… I felt good because [the professor] was… showing [my artwork] in front of everybody. He’s like, “This is really Kraehe / Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent Counter-Narratives of Art Teacher Identity good.” Eventually everybody’s [drawings] started being similar to mine. Brianna recounted the positive critiques of her work as a backdrop to a more vexing encounter: There was this one time in my life drawing class [when] we did a drawing, and we turned it around for everybody. The [professor] was like, “Your art reminds me so much of African art. It’s the way you draw. Did you study African art?” I was like, is he just saying that because I’m Black? As she spoke, shifting in her seat, Brianna appeared bothered by the incident, uncomfortable even with the uncertainty of how to interpret his comments. She went on, saying, “but he explained why he thought so—it wasn’t pointing me out as the Black girl.” Brianna’s face still bore an expression of annoyance. After a brief pause, she continued incredulously: “I don’t know. He said that my marks were “so aggressive,” like I was carving into it like a wood sculpture.… I don’t see myself as an aggressive person.” As she questioned and countered the insinuation of the professor’s words, Brianna was drawn into an internal contest over how to construe the negative racial overtones of what was, on the surface, delivered as a compliment. This vacillation between possible meanings is a common feature of microaggression. It can be emotionally and psychologically detracting for the recipient of double-coded messages (Sue, 2010).7 It is not possible to know the precise origins of the professor’s thoughts on the subject of African art. Indeed, there is no evidence that the comments were made with malicious intent or conscious bias on the part of the professor. It is doubtful he realized that his appraisal of Brianna’s artwork perpetuated stereotypes. However, in genealogical terms, the confluence of the terms “aggressive” and “African art,” when referring to Brianna’s embodiment of expressive mark making, carried traces of dominant European and Euro American cultural con- structions of the Black female body as uncontrollable, emotional, and hypersexual. These tropes of an exotic, untamed Africa have been repeated throughout the history of colonization and modern art (Araeen, 2000; Feagin, 2010; Hammonds, 1997). These discursive traces triggered dissonance in Brianna’s self-concept. After another year in the art education program, it seemed Brianna still tussled with two contradictory subject positions with which she might identify. The first position appeared in her emergent counter-narrative where she questioned the manner in which her artist identity was read by her life drawing professor. His comments positioned Brianna in a manner that, for her, was highly racialized. From the tone and content of her remarks, she initially resented and resisted his reductive response to her and her artwork. The second subject position, the one Brianna ultimately took up, showed greater deference toward the professor’s narrative. Many months after the jarring critique with the drawing professor, Brianna, stated, “I didn’t see the connection to African art, but he said he’d studied it. He probably knew better than I did, anyway” (Brianna Interview 3, May 2009). Brianna’s rationalization of her professor’s comments seemed to be shaped by an assumption that, as an art professor, he had more (objective) knowledge about the character of African art. At the same time, it seems likely that his role as professor also conferred greater power and status. With this status comes the authority to name reality and impose one’s (subjective) point of view. Brianna’s ambivalence about how to attribute racialized encounters continued. For example, she wound up in a painting class with one of the few Black studio art professors. She explained how nervous and intimidated she was by his stature in the art world, and what she thought he would expect of her as a Black artist: I was like, “Oh, my gosh, he’s going to have such high expectations of me, and I have to work so hard.”… He does this African American art, and it’s about slavery and Studies in Art Education / Volume 56, No. 3 205 all this stuff. I feel like he’s going to want me to do something “Black.” Like he’s going to want me to produce something Afrocentric or African American, like his work is. (Brianna Interview 1, October 2008) Her prior studio art experiences taught her that race mattered in how she and her artwork would be read, even if no one ever uttered the word “race.” She explained, “When I took [his] class and I was painting, he was like, ‘I don’t see any of you in this painting’” (Brianna Interview 3, May 2009). Picturing the politically charged Black imagery that the painting professor used in his artwork, Brianna interpreted his critique to mean that he wished to see references in her work to an inner Black essence. Since studying with a Black art professor was such a rare opportunity, it was possible that she internalized his critique in more affirming ways than the racistsexist insinuations from the life drawing professor. Ironically, Brianna’s reading of this statement was no less essentializing than the statements by her White male professor. Whether or not there was conscious racial intent from either art professor, both men’s comments provided a catalyst for her identity development. From that point on, Brianna took it upon herself to learn more about Black artists. With little extra time or money to spend taking additional courses beyond the required art education sequence, Brianna used the assignments in her art teacher preparation courses as a space for learning about Black art. She focused on trying to decode the work of Black artists, deciphering how they used visual imagery and mark making to communicate about and make sense of Blackness: Almost all of the artworks that I presented [for the art education assignments] were of African American artists.… I don’t know too much about art history in general and especially African American artists. I mean I know some, but I don’t feel like I know as much as I need to know. I’m going to be researching art [for this class] anyway, so it’s for my own personal use as well as for 206 informing other students in the classroom. (Brianna Interview 3, May 2009) Black artists and their artwork were not a part of any of the coursework that Brianna and the other art education students were expected to take in order to become an art teacher. Brianna appropriated the art education assignments for her own personal development. The class activities became a self-directed identity space, infusing her work with newfound social meaning: There was stuff that we were required to do, but this was something that I could do for myself because I want to. Outside of the class, I probably wouldn’t have done it because, you know, I’m in other classes and then working. Indeed, Brianna was the only student I knew of who held a full-time job throughout her program of study. Moving beyond the approved art teacher education curriculum, Brianna pursued unsanctioned racial knowledge in order to counteract the dissonance she felt from prior art experiences. This identity practice helped her to achieve a more expansive sense of personhood while also fulfilling the requirements set forth by the art education program. Race was salient in Brianna’s development during this period, though she stopped short of incorporating her budding racial consciousness into her emerging teacher identity. Brianna had difficulty articulating the relationship between racial knowledge and the role of an art teacher. This may have been, at least in part, because there were not any curricular content or living examples of race-conscious art teachers available to students in this art teacher preparation program. Nor was there course content related to art and teaching in the context of racial inequality. Acquiring and integrating unsanctioned knowledge of race into her vision for teaching was a difficult process that went unnoticed by others. Nonetheless, Brianna conducted art inquiries on her own, an act that can be understood as an attempt at self-actualization and cultural maintenance (Feagin, Vera, & Imani, 1996). Kraehe / Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent Counter-Narratives of Art Teacher Identity Transgressing Racial Silence For her elementary-student-teaching practicum, Cherise was assigned to an elementary school in a predominantly White, affluent neighborhood. She immediately noticed that most of the teachers were White, with only a handful of Latinas. Cherise was the only Black member of the faculty. Among the students, she detected racial patterns as well: You can definitely tell especially by how they’re dressed and how they interact with other kids. I felt like the Black kids stayed more to themselves. They didn’t really interact with their White peers or anything like that. They were pretty quiet most of the time, not all, but most. (Cherise Interview 7, May 2011) Though her cooperating teacher (CT) was one of the few Latina teachers at the school, Cherise did not talk about these observations with her: [Race] wasn’t something that we talked about. It wasn’t my classroom, and sometimes I felt like I had to kind of tiptoe and please my CT, but at the same time kind of stay true to myself. I don’t know. I could see [race], but at the same time, it wasn’t brought up between us. Cherise negotiated race and racial tensions in this school, while at the same time being mindful of always needing to be viewed favorably by her CT. There were material consequences for how Cherise comported herself as a student teacher. After all, the CT’s evaluation of Cherise would impact her grade for student teaching, her ability to graduate and apply for teacher certification, her letters of recommendation, and her future job prospects. On the other hand, as she said, she wanted to stay true to herself, so when the CT gave her the opportunity to teach her own 1st-grade lesson, Cherise used that opening to experiment with creating a more internally resonant teacher self. She did this by trying to address race in her teaching practice. Cherise enthusiastically recalled a lesson she taught based on the work of Romare Bearden, declaring, “It really turned out well, surprisingly. Collage for 1st graders, you know!” Then, I asked her to tell me more about how this lesson came about, and her initial gloss gave way to a more complicated reflection. Cherise explained that the lesson was intended to be racially inclusive as well as empowering for Anthony, the only Black child in the class. She described how the lesson unfolded. First, she modeled for the students how to create a self-portrait using papers hued to match different skin tones: When I was doing my demonstration, I picked a skin color that was similar to [Anthony’s] skin color. At first they were like, “Well, why are you picking that? That’s not your skin color.” And I was like, “Well, I like this color. It’s your project. It’s how you see yourself.” And they were like, “Oh, okay”.… This one girl—a White student— was like, “Well, what if we’re not African American?” They always want to emulate what it is that I’m doing, and I’m like, “Well, that’s why we have all these different skin tones available for you.” She’s like, “Oh, okay”.… Other students made some comments because I had some darker brown skin tones that were available, and one of the students started laughing and they were like, “Oh, that’s Anthony’s color.” Anthony’s darker skinned. I went up to the student, and I just asked, “So why are you laughing? How is that funny?” and just kind of questioned him and things like that. [He answered with] “Oh, I don’t know.” Cherise was certain Anthony had overheard the comments of the White students. I asked what she gathered from Anthony’s response. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. She answered, “He felt ashamed of it.” In transgressing the racial norms of art education, Cherise relied upon a liberal art discourse of self-expression and individual freedom, instructing her students, “It’s your project; it’s how you see yourself.” This statement was strategic, simultaneously deflecting the conversation Studies in Art Education / Volume 56, No. 3 207 away from explicit race talk while defending Anthony from a veiled racial assault and refocusing students on representing themselves as autonomous artists. However, this normative ideological framing of the artist (Bersson, 1986) and the child (Norquay, 1999) did little to contest the imbalance of racial power that was playing out in her classroom. Cherise exemplified the myth of the teacher as a neutral figure (Bartolomé, 2008; Ginsberg, Kamat, Raghu, & Weaver, 1995) by deploying the objectivist language of formalism and media. This mobilized a decontextualized discourse about (skin) color that concealed sociohistorical meanings attributed to light (White) and dark (Black) bodies (Alfredson & Desai, 2012; Gude, 2000; Haney López, 1996; Harris, 1993). Cherise’s choice of a darker color to represent herself was not at all a neutral decision. She intended to teach all the students that dark skin is beautiful and valued, imbuing Blackness with greater social value and status by linking it to her position of power as art teacher. Cherise’s goal was to stand in solidarity with the lone Black child and to increase White students’ awareness and respect for people of color. As the lesson unfolded, however, Cherise’s desire to enact an affirming art pedagogy was not realized. Even though Cherise was committed to culturally engaged teaching, she was not equipped with the critical sociocultural knowledge needed to recognize, understand, and respond effectively to racial inequality (Kraehe & Brown, 2014). For instance, Cherise seemed unaware of the ways in which Anthony’s social location as the only Black (male) child could influence how he might be seen and positioned by others in a White dominant learning environment. Anthony’s relationship to his classmates and the self-portrait project were already structured by preexisting racial discourses and social hierarchies. Hence, the White students did not need to employ race words to disparage their Black classmate. They had already acquired the cultural devices of Whiteness and were now incorporating them in this art experience to make 208 sense of self and other (Bode, 1999; Lewis, 2003; Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001). Looking back on this incident, Cherise acknowledged, “I didn’t know how to talk about [race], plain and simple, and I wasn’t prepared for the potential questions or responses that I would receive from my students” (Cherise member check e-mail, 2013). Even as she transgressed the habitual evasion of race by teaching the Romare Bearden lesson and focusing attention on skin color, Cherise continued to participate uncritically in traditional art discourses, which undermined her capacity to mediate classroom discussion (Milbrandt, 2002) and defuse the ensuing racial microaggression. Conclusion At this point, it is worth reiterating that in this art teacher education program, there was no recognized forum for excavating, critiquing, and building racial knowledge. Brianna and Cherise broke the codes of racial silence when they recounted their stories, and they did this only with me in the context of the research project. Their stories show how, even in colormute settings, race operates as a coconstitutive process in the making of art teacher identities. That their counter-narratives surfaced in bits and pieces, rather than as full-blown social or institutional critiques, does not diminish their significance. On the contrary, this unpredictable, emergent quality highlights overlooked modes of student agency that students of color employ as they navigate the “overwhelming presence of whiteness” (Sleeter, 2001, p. 94) in art teacher education. These tactics may be similar to how members of other historically marginalized and underrepresented groups negotiate their art teacher identities. This study advances knowledge of how race and racism influence art teacher learning and identity formation. The findings suggest that when art teacher preparation programs and teacher education research ignore these and other sociocultural influences, the distinctive frameworks, idioms, and practices that define us as a field may also function surreptitiously as Kraehe / Sounds of Silence: Race and Emergent Counter-Narratives of Art Teacher Identity hegemonic tools of domination and exclusion. It seems clear from this study that such “race ignore-ance” is not innocent (Applebaum, 2006). Moving forward, teacher education policy and practice need to become attentive and responsive to emergent counter-narratives (Chapman, 2011; Milner, 2008). An important step in that direction is to establish curricular spaces for critical race reflection and dialogue and to integrate these into the heart of art teacher preparation. These spaces can enable preservice art teachers to recognize unjust race relations as they are mediated (and often reproduced) by the performance of subject matter expertise. Prospective art teachers also need opportunities to acquire critical conceptual frameworks in order to understand their own personal and professional identities in relation to racialization and other intersecting sociocultural processes. Without such opportunities, important aspects of art teachers’ identities are suppressed. 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As this study focused on the language and talk produced within interview data, I borrow from Pollock’s (2004) conceptualization of colormuteness in order to emphasize the inaudible presence of race in how preservice art teachers talked about and made sense of their experiences of becoming art teachers. See Delpit (1988) and Cochran-Smith (2004) for how this occurs within conservative as well as progressive teacher education discourses. Brianna self-identified as African American, and Cherise self-identified as biracial Black/Filipino. Pseudonyms were used for all participants and the research setting. Much of art teacher education was regulated by the state legislature and higher education accrediting agencies. For example, there was a ceiling imposed that limited the number of credit hours university programs could require for any undergraduate degree. Such regulations limited the possibilities for adequately addressing curricular gaps by simply adding a diversity course, the most common approach taken in teacher education (Kraehe, 2010). To adequately address the sociocultural gaps in art teacher preparation, the foundational assumptions about what constitutes essential knowledge for art teachers would likely need to be rethought and programmatic structures reorganized in their entirety. Participants who identified as racial and/or sexual minorities were particularly inquisitive about and responsive to my positionality. These participants also seemed to be more willing to disclose their experiences as members of marginalized groups once I shared my stories with them. Quote sources are identified at the first occurrence from each interview, as well as when the interview source changes. Sue (2010) describes the cumulative effects of racial microaggression on people of color, which include emotional distress, an invalidating climate for learning, stereotype threat (see Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002), and a strain on physical health (see Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999) and productivity (see Salvatore & Shelton, 2007). These costs extend to other marginalized groups as well. Studies in Art Education / Volume 56, No. 3 213