Race and Ability in Teachers' Collective Framing of Learning and Learners in an Arts Integration Context

In U.S. society, the concept of race has been co-constructed with the concept of ability (Connor & Ferri, 2013) and used, at every level of education, to frame different racialized groups of children as differently abled. Inequitable curricular opportunities have subsequently been afforded to these different groups, thus maintaining the racialized power structure of U.S. society. This curricular disparity occurs across broad processes of policy-making and national educational discourse as well as minute processes of person-to-person interaction. Each of these processes and the decisions made within them are threaded with ideological underpinnings that discursively connect the processes across multifaceted levels of interaction. This qualitative study engaged frame analysis methods along with Philip’s (2011) ideology in pieces methods to examine racial-ability ideologies in educators’ collaborative curricular decision-making in an arts integration context in which the researcher was a participant-observer. Findings from observations of teacher teams in collaborative planning workshops and interviews with teachers revealed framing processes in which participants positioned themselves closer to and further from racial-ability ideologies common in society – ideologies related to color-evasiveness, race-consciousness, teacher autonomy, and musical talent and exclusivity. As participants deliberated over curriculum, pieces of these societal racial-ability ideologies worked their way into discourse and impacted the curricular possibilities that teachers were able to develop for their racialized students. These findings point to the need for teacher education and professional development programs to incorporate opportunities for educators to work toward developing awareness of the racial-ability ideologies that influence their curricular decision-making.