Whiteness, Pedagogy, and Youth in America

This book employs a narrative approach to recount and interpret the story of an innovative teaching and learning project about whiteness. By offering a first-hand description of a nationally-recognized, high school-based Youth Participatory Action Research project—The Whiteness Project—this book draws out the conflicts and complexities at the core of white students’ racial identities. Critical of the essentializing frameworks traditionally given to address white privilege, this volume advances a distinctive and theoretically robust account of ‘second-wave critical whiteness pedagogy’.

"The pulsing heart of this book is Samuel Jaye Tanner’s storytelling and commentary about a remarkable, year-long project in which white high school students investigated and dramatized how whiteness deformed their own community. Along the way, Tanner criticizes anti-racist pedagogies grounded in a white privilege framework and theorizes white racial identities with sophistication and power. Many different things are needed for the fight against racism in this time of Trump—Tanner’s book is one of them."- Timothy J. Lensmire, Professor, University of Minnesota, USA

Samuel Jaye Tanner is Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, USA.