A lesson in teaching English while White

Abstract

This article offers a close analysis of a 90‐minute teaching sequence in an English as a foreign language classroom of an adult basic education program for refugee‐background learners in a Finnish community college. The White European‐heritage teacher, the author of the article, researcher on‐site, and substitute teacher at that point, taught a lesson with a focus on ownership of English to a group of about 15 adult learners of color from mostly Middle Eastern and African backgrounds. She used peer‐supported discourse analysis of the lesson transcript to better understand the processes of Whiteness that interfered with students’ learning and engagement during the lesson. This revealed that the researcher‐teacher’s discourses and practices erased racial differences between her and the learners, perpetuated Eurocentric ideologies of argumentation, and positioned her as “white listening subject” (Flores & Rosa, 2015a) vis‐à‐vis the students. A theoretical lens of critical Whiteness pedagogy (e.g., Matias & Mackey, 2016) helps understand these findings within larger racist and Eurocentric structures of educational systems and socialization. Each finding feeds into recommendations for teachers and teacher educators, particularly those who received their education in predominantly White institutions but work in racially and culturally diverse contexts.