New Book by the Teaching While White Founders

Learning and Teaching While White: Antiracist Strategies for Schools and Communities

By Elizabeth Denevi and Jenna Chandler-Ward

It’s a thrill for us to announced the upcoming publication of Learning and Teaching While White, by Teaching While White founders Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi.

As the authors make clear in their work, white educators have relied too long on people of color to make the needed changes to our racist school system. Racial equity in schools will not come to fruition until white educators recognize their role in supporting racist policies and practices, and then take responsibility for dismantling them.

Learning and Teaching While White is designed with such ends in mind. The book is a well-written and accessible guide to help white educators, leaders, students, and parents develop an explicit, skills-based antiracist practice. Through their own experiences working with school communities, and employing the strategies and tools they have developed over the years, Denevi and Chandler-Ward share the ways in which white educators can gain greater consciousness of their own racial identity; analyze the role of whiteness in their schools and school systems; rethink pedagogical approaches and curricular topics; and address the role of white parents in the pursuit of racial literacy and equity. By engaging in this work, white educators can help lead schools and communities to racial equity and justice.

In the book’s Foreword, Howard Stevenson, the Constance E. Clayton Professor of Urban Education and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative, says Learning and Teaching While White offers clarity about role of educators in driving needed racial change. “The authors advocate for courage,” Stevenson writes. “They want white people to come to a reckoning. This reckoning involves trying to engage, not avoid the obvious tensions, factions, and examples of racial dishonesty, avoidance, denial, and privilege….”

Stevenson adds:

“What I find refreshing in this work is that Chandler-Ward and Denevi provide roadmaps, definitions, self-reflections, and years of classroom and school experiences to help the reader struggle and rise from that struggle. They provide lampposts when the journey toward social justice gets dark through their own stories of racial challenges from Black and Brown students….

“Drs. Chandler-Ward and Denevi provide this honesty, accountability, and hope by defining the confusing terms, conditions, and history of how racism embraces the cloak of Whiteness and shows up in the classroom lessons. They help teachers realize that without attention to antiracism approaches, they will find their current practices far removed from the earlier reasons of social justice that called, dare I say, ‘drove’ them into this much maligned profession. Through the stories, practical guidance, real-life classroom exercises the readers must solve, they offer so many opportunities for teachers to grow and be agentic instead of passive when a social injustice shows up.

“I look forward to the excitement at building a corps of White teachers who are unafraid to speak the truth to power against forces that would rather bury their racial heads into the ground.”

About the book, Eddie Moore, Jr., founder of the long-running White Privilege Conference writes, “What readers find when they open Learning and Teaching While White is a path to becoming a racially aware white educator. This is not just a book; it is a critical, personal exploration of self and system that the authors carefully scaffold to enhance the skill of white educators, both as teachers and as humans.”

Learning and Teaching While White is available for preorder now. On July 26, 2022, it will be for sale wherever you buy books.