Evaluating Antiracist Dispositions: Choosing, Analyzing, and Using Dispositional Assessment Tools in Antiracist Ways

Introduction

Teacher dispositions have been defined in a variety of ways. Yet, one similarity across definitions is that dispositions are the expression of behaviors and actions over time (Nweke, et al., 2019; Warren, 2018). More recently, teacher preparation programs have begun to develop and use assessment tools that aim to measure dispositions. Yet, assessing teacher dispositions varies throughout teacher education programs, and there has been much debate surrounding their role (Borko et al., 2007). In part, the growing focus on the assessments of in-service teachers and pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) dispositions reflects the larger push for a standardization of teaching practices in teacher education and uniformity in teacher quality (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). External accreditation bodies such as the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) frequently require teacher preparation programs to utilize dispositional tools with high validity and reliability in order to gain and maintain accreditation.

With calls from educational scholars to more adequately prepare educators to be able to teach through an anti-racist lens (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Love, 2019), teacher disposition assessment tools in the past decade have increasingly focused on PSTs’ knowledge of K-12 students’ racial, cultural, and linguistic identities, albeit often with a standard of expectations that educators recognize and “accept” diversity rather than advocate for justice in educational spaces. As teacher educators who acknowledge our responsibilities to prepare PSTs in antiracist teaching, learning, and ways of being, we assert the urgency of holding PSTs accountable for the empowerment of their future Black, Indigenous, students of color. Historically, these efforts in and of themselves have always been highly connected to the political moment. Political movements such as pushes for multicultural education and colorblindness and more current banning of conversations about race in classrooms have impacted how teacher education has prepared teachers for racially, culturally, linguistically diverse classrooms.

We also recognize that efforts to standardize and develop uniformity in teaching disposition assessments can uphold whiteness ideology regarding teaching and learning (Weilbacher, 2012). Even when such tools are created to hold educators accountable for being prepared to teach in racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse schools, they often reinforce norms of “professionalism” and racial, cultural, and linguistic orientations that are rooted in whiteness ideology (Souto-Manning, 2019) and pay little attention to PSTs’ beliefs both inside and outside the classroom. In this chapter, we offer considerations for critically using disposition assessment tools, offering insights into the tensions teacher educators and other users of disposition assessments must recognize.