We have a serious disconnect in the field of teacher education.  Whereas 80% of the teaching workforce is female, Caucasian, middle class, and of Christian belief (Hoy, Davis & Pape, 2006) the majority of the student enrolled in public schools do not reflect these characteristics.  I resemble the growing population of white, female teachers that are working in our public schools to effectively serve historically underserved, marginalized populations.  In our recent classroom management text, my co-authors and I wrote:

        “For most of our lives, we took for granted the larger discourses that framed our interactions with students who came from different backgrounds than our own: Discourses of meritocracy, deficit thinking, colorblindness, and choice.  A discourse is an implicit way of thinking about the world that we often take for granted as ‘true.’  We collect discourses from our everyday interactions with our world because they manifest in our political, legal, and economic structures.  When we are unaware of them, we allow them to guide our behavior and they work to maintain the status quo; a status quo where minority, low-income, and non-native speaking children underperform their middle class, White peers.” (Davis, Summers, & Miller, 2012)

While I am a fierce advocate for public school teachers, I believe more research and more professional development needs to be channeled into understanding our failures to connect with the students for whom we have systematic differences in our experiences and habitus and developing pedagogies to promote classroom relationships and equity.  To be clear, the data indicate the students we commonly fail tend to be male, non-White, non-Christian, non-native English speaking, lower-income and/or non-heterosexual students.  Already in North Carolina schools, and in many schools throughout the Southern U.S., these students represent the numeric majority.  Moreover, “the South is the only region in the nation to ever have both a majority of low income students and a majority of students of color enrolled in public schools”  (SEF, 2010). Training in the Southeastern U.S., at the University of Georgia, and working in Southeastern U.S. and having mentors (Paul A. Schutz & Sonja Lanehart) who were willing to ‘call out’ the beliefs and practices I took for granted was integral the development of my identity as an ally and to allow me to disentangle the ways in which race, language, sexuality and income each make unique contributions to children’s experience in public school.

Drawing from these early experiences, I would argue, my primary commitment to diversity is expressed in my research agenda which is focused on deconstructing the relationship-gap between white teachers and their historically underserved, marginalized  students.  Over the last five years, I have developed several programs designed to explore the ways in which dysconscious racism (King, 1991) may operate to undermine relationship quality in even the most committed, master teachers (Davis, Watson, & Neuman, 2013; Davis & Decuir, in progress).

I put my theories to the ‘test’ in my own tutoring / mentoring of African American boys (both at my daughter’s school and at at my community partner organizations over the last five years).   And these personal interactions are leading me in the direction of understanding teacher’s conceptions and communications of power (social, economic, instructional), authority (see Wubbles et al., 2006), and equity in the classroom (Davis, Gabelman, & Wingfield, 2011).

Finally, I enact my commitment to diversity daily in my instructional design (which integrates critical theoretical perspective and seeks to highlight the contributions of scholars of color); my service on college (SAY advisory board) and National Committees (AERA Affirmative Action Committee, Div. 15 Early Career Faculty Committee), and through advocacy for my colleagues of color in the College.