Whiteness and national identity: teacher discourses in Australian primary schools

Abstract

The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that fostered different levels of critique among students, teachers often communicated Australian national identity as commensurate to white racial and Anglo-Australian cultural identity. We identified three main approaches teachers used to talk about national identity and cultural diversity: cultural essentialism, race elision and a quasi-critical approach...