Researcher positionality

Dangers can emerge for researchers “when they do not pay careful attention to their own and others’ racialized and cultural systems of coming to know, knowing, and experiencing the world” (Milner 2007, p388). As a means to guard against these dangers, I consider the personal experiences and epistemological positions that may influence my research. I am a White U.S. American female and I was a classroom teacher for fourteen years before turning to education research. As a White person, I have the privileges associated with being part of the dominant culture in U.S. society: the cultural practices I follow and the values I hold are shared with the majority of U.S. Americans and they are reflected in social institutions such as public schools and other civic organizations (Delpit, 2006). I am rarely questioned about my actions and intentions because most other Americans implicitly understand the cultural bases behind what I do.

Although I am a member of the dominant cultural group in the U.S., I also have had some experiences with respect to culture and race in educational settings that give me a unique stance as a White American and a researcher. Two experiences stand out as shaping my research stance and agenda. First, I spent a year and a half working as a teacher at a home for orphaned children in rural Honduras directly after college. This was my first experience being outside of the dominant culture and I learned how to adapt my behavior to respond to this cultural context. Many of these adaptations related to the more defined gender roles I encountered as compared to

the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region from which I came. This experience opened my eyes to the fact that differences in cultural practices and values exist and can significantly influence how people interact with one another. As a member of the dominant cultural group in the U.S., these differences had been largely invisible to me, even though I grew up with both White and African American neighbors.

The second experience that shaped my stance and agenda as a researcher was my first U.S. teaching position. I worked at a public high school in Washington, DC where the majority of the staff and students were African American. Although working in Honduras helped me to understand that differences in cultural practices and values exist, working in DC opened my eyes to the fact that these differences didn’t only exist between people from different countries, they also existed within my own country, within my own neighborhood, and indeed within the school building in which I taught. Until this point I had no idea that culturally diverse Americans may engage in cultural practices or hold values different than the ones I held as a White American. Thankfully, I had a wonderful mentor teacher who was an African American woman. By noting how she interacted with both staff and students, I learned about how adapt my behavior and interactions to respond to the African American environment in which I worked. For example, I learned to put much more emphasis on cultivating good relationships than I was used to doing in predominantly White environments. My experiences in Honduras and in DC have guided me to study and bring to light the idea that differences in cultural practices and values are real, they significantly impact what teachers do in classrooms, and they are largely invisible to many White Americans.

Of the twenty-two participants in this research project, there are seventeen White females, four White males, and one African American male. Most of the White participants

probably share some of my experiences as a White American: one of relative privilege within our country as we are members of the dominant cultural group. These PSTs grew up in a society where their cultural practices and values were usually not questioned because they were shared by other white Americans and were reflected in U.S. social institutions such as schools and government organizations. For many of these participants, traveling to Mexico represented the first time they were outside of the dominant culture. It may have been the first time that their actions and values were not implicitly understood by most people with whom they interacted. And although as an African American, Cameron was already outside of the dominant cultural group in the U.S., this was also his first time outside of U.S. borders, and exposed him to different cultural practices and values than he was familiar with as well.

Being part of a dominant cultural group makes it dangerously easy for me to interact with others without critically thinking about my interactions as particular cultural practices and reflecting specific values. In my research, I have to be careful not to make presumptions about the sense others make of their experiences. This idea alone draws me to qualitative research, as this type of research seeks to understand the sense people make of their own experiences in the context in which they occur (Hatch, 2002). As many of the participants in this research study are White American females like myself, I am further compelled to closely follow qualitative methods for this research project. These methods bring to light the sense others make of their experiences, and steer me away from the dangerous presumption that all White American females share my views and ideas regarding culture and race. I actually think pursuing my research questions would be easier to do with more male participants or more culturally diverse participants, as I would not be so tempted to fall into the trap of blindly presuming that the participants share my viewpoints because we have the same cultural background or gender.