Shaking Off Shakespeare: A White Teacher, Urban Students, and the Mediating Powers of a Canonical Counter-Curriculum

While a wealth of scholarship has investigated White teachers’ abilities to realize the aims of culturally responsive teaching in urban secondary English classrooms, studies that query the canonically-specific challenges teachers face when attempting to actualize equity-driven instruction are less frequently forwarded. To that end, this ethnographic case study tells the story of Sam Winters, a White teacher of British literature, who negotiated multiple forms of Whiteness—both his own and his required curriculum’s—to effect participatory realities for his urban students. Data, which were collected over five months, were treated with layers of deductive and inductive codes. Findings reveal obstructions to culturally responsive canonical instruction, such as sociocultural tensions between privileged and marginalized persons and texts, including canonically-specific incongruences between the curriculum and Sam’s students; fear of punitive fallout and time likewise constrained his efforts. Yet, buttressed by his dialogic classroom community, Sam delivered a canonical counter-curriculum that cultivated students’ sociopolitical consciousness and provided them with multimodal opportunities to restory themselves into and against required British literature texts. Implications, including the transformative powers of implementing canonical counter-curricula, and the value of leveraging teachers’ multi-dimensional sociocultural identities as cultural assets that position them to effect culturally responsive instruction, are discussed.