Critical Race Talk in Teacher Education through Movie Analysis: From 'Stand and Deliver' to 'Freedom Writers'

In an attempt to enact equitable practices in U.S. public schools, many critical multicultural and anti-racist theorists, researchers, and practitioners strongly suggest that teacher educators move beyond diversity approaches to multicultural education in their teacher preparation programs to address the more uncomfortable issues of power and equity--namely, racism. Teacher educators commonly find that race talk, especially with their White students, leads to a host of dysfunctional classroom dynamics that may actually perpetuate the racial logic teacher educators, and even teacher education students, would hope to disrupt. This article seeks to provide a rationale for some of the dysfunctional aspects of race talk in teacher education programs and offers an alternative framework for engaging students in critical race talk. As a way to demonstrate how teacher education students in a graduate multicultural course critically examined race through a discursive framework of racism, this article includes excerpts from students' papers wherein they apply critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine how discursive racism is produced through films, including "Stand and Deliver" and "Freedom Writers."