Talk it (Racism) out: race talk and organizational learning
| Pages | 504-518 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0015 |
| Date | 06 August 2018 |
| Published date | 06 August 2018 |
| Author | Decoteau J. Irby,Shannon P. Clark |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education |
Talk it (Racism) out: race talk
and organizational learning
Decoteau J. Irby and Shannon P. Clark
Department of Educational Policy Studies,
University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether race-specific language use can advance
organizational learning about the racialized nature of school problems. The study addressed two questions:
first, is teacher use of racial language associated with how they frame school discipline problems during
conversational exchanges? Second, what do patterns of associations suggest about racial language use as an
asset that may influence an organization’s ability to analyze discipline problems?
Design/methodology/approach –Co-occurrence analysis was used to explore patterns between racial
language use and problem analysis during team conversational exchanges regarding school discipline problems.
Findings –When participants used race-specific and race-proxy language, they identified more problems
and drew on multiple frames to describe school discipline problems.
Research limitations/implications –This paper substantiates that race-specific language is beneficial for
organizational learning.
Practical implications –The findings suggest that leading language communities may be an integral, yet
overlooked lever for organizational learning and improvement. Prioritizing actions that promote race-specific
conversations among school teams can reveal racism/racial conflict and subsequently increase the potential
for change.
Originality/value –This paper combines organizational change and race talk research to highlight the
importance of professional talk routines in organizational learning.
Keywords Organizational learning, Language, Race, Secondary schools
Paper type Research paper
Education researchers use a range of terms and concepts to describe the communication
processes that individuals and groups use to grapple with race, racism and racial identities.
For the purpose of this study, we use “race talk”as a catch-all to describe these phenomena,
which encompasses concepts such as wrestling with race (Buehler, 2013), courageous
conversations (Singleton, 2014), as well as the range of linguistic deployments of color-blind
racism (Picower, 2009). In the past two decades, race talk research has addressed myriad
education-related questions. Evans (2007) examined how leaders talked about
demographically changing schools. DeMatthews et al. (2017) explored the ways that
school leaders evoked racial language to talk about school discipline policies and practices.
Irby (2018) studied the ways that race-specific data served as cues to evoke teacher’s use of
race-visible sensemaking about discipline problems. Teacher education researchers, such as
Mason (2016), Milner and Laughter (2015) and Picower (2009), focused their investigations
toward the race-evasive language practices that teacher candidates in college classrooms
use to maintain white privilege. In school settings, researchers have used observational
approaches to understand the role of racial language in student-teacher dialogue in K-12
school classrooms (Thomas, 2015; Young, 2016) and in school organizations more broadly
(Buehler, 2013; Pollock, 2004). Beyond school settings, Villenas and Angeles (2013) explored
the ways that racial language framed educational issues in the broader sphere of media
related to education and schooling.
This paper considers the practice of using race-specific language as a resource for
advancing organizational learningabout the racialized nature of school problems. To explore
whether race-specific language use is an untapped organizational resource, we conducted a
study that analyzed the association between the presence of race-specific language and
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 56 No. 5, 2018
pp. 504-518
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0015
Received 9 February 2018
Revised 18 June 2018
Accepted 21 June 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
504
JEA
56,5
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