(En)Countering the ‘White’ Gaze: Native-Speakerist Rhetorics and the Raciolinguistics of Hegemony

What is it about?

The present autoethnographic account challenges the ‘myth’ that we live in a ‘post-racial’ multicultural Canadian society; it provides an insider’s perspective on the researcher’s embodied experience of being socialised into the role of a non-native English-speaking teacher while striving for integration into K-12 public education in British Columbia, Canada. Taking a critical race theoretical perspective, informed by an intersectional discourse analysis of the (re)construction of professional identity as linked to the hierarchisation of power relations within academic spaces, this chapter investigates how the dominant Eurocentric academic discourses and practices tend to impose their ideological frameworks and rationalities on non-native educators by promoting a neo-racist narrative which serves to delegitimise the multilingual/ multicultural capitals and the pedagogical skills internationally educated teachers bring to the Canadian teaching profession.

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Why is it important?

The present study has also made the case that teacher education programs should refrain from training student teachers solely for jobs through the reproduction of a meritocratic system of competitive, disempowered, ethnocentric and deskilled educational technicians and clerks (Giroux, 2016). Prospective teachers should be encouraged to develop their own teaching approaches around themes that align with students’ own lived experiences and that serve to counter all forms of discriminatory and exclusionary views and practices in educational spaces.

Perspectives