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In this important new book by Kenneth Fasching-Varner, we not only hear the voices and stories of teachers that ring with familiarity, investment, and conflict -we also gain compelling insight into the troubling discourses of race and Whiteness that have long framed teaching and teachers. Read and discuss this book today. -- Kevin Kumashiro, University of Illinois, Chicago; author of Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture Working through Whiteness: Examining White Racial Identity and Profession with Pre-Service Teachers by Kenneth Fasching-Varner is an honest, unflinching study of the racial narratives of white pre-service teachers. Dr. Fasching-Varner builds on critical race scholarship, laying bare and employing concepts such as counter-storytelling, whiteness as property, expansive and restricted anti-discrimination, white identity development, and more, to reveal the ways that color-blindness and dysconscious racism (naivety about racism's predominance in our world) thwarts teachers' abilities to become culturally relevant and to break the system of beliefs and teaching practices that perpetuate the educational debt, the so-called racial achievement gap. Using theories of white racial identity and the auto-ethnography of his own life trajectory as a white male, Fasching-Varner examines the processes and workings of white identity of his study's participants and finds that an expanded model is needed to account for the nature of white individuals and whites as a connected group in the system of privileged whiteness. In his recommendations for teacher education programs, teacher educators and pre-service teachers, we find that change is possible, through contextualized, intentional, selective approaches that complement the reality of our particular classroom settings, where teachers teach in a meaningful and culturally relevant manner. Read this book, be inspired and informed. -- Elaine Richardson, Ohio State University Working through Whiteness: Examining White Racial Identity and Profession with Pre-service Teachers reverses the gaze in discussions about raciality and racism in education by focusing on brokers of power and privilege instead of the victimized, as is often the case. The gaze is penetrating, compelling, sometimes disturbing, but always necessary in the struggle to achieve equity and justice in educational opportunities and outcomes for diverse underserved students. Compliments are due to the author for being courageous enough to reveal inconvenient and often unspeakable truths about Whiteness for and among the majority who teach-White teachers. In the process Fasching-Varner demonstrates the power of narratives as content and method for better preparing White teachers to understand their own raciality and its effects on how they relate to diverse students. This is a must read for White prospective and practicing teachers, as well as teacher educators. -- Geneva Gay, University of Washington Kenneth Fasching-Varner has done an immeasurable service with this volume. Academic yet accessible, Working Through Whiteness masterfully explores the way in which whites entering the teaching profession either have or (more problematically) have not critically explored their racial identities, and the consequences of their uninterrogated white lenses on the children of color who comprise a growing share of the students in their classrooms. All pre-service teachers should read it, as should anyone who cares about the creation of educational equity in the United States. -- Tim Wise, author of White Like Me and Between Barack and a Hard Place
