Although a vast majority of teachers in Sweden strive for equal conditions for their students and want to counteract racism (Nilsson Mohammadi, 2021), there are many studies showing that racism occurs among teachers in Swedish schools, both in the form of racist acts towards individual students and as institutional and structural racism (Behtoui et al., 2019). The presence of racism in schools is a problem that is highly relevant in other countries as well (Araújo, 2016; Crutchfield et al., 2020; Kennelly & Mouroutsou, 2020).

   Superficial understandings of diversity risk confirming differences due power hierarchies of recognition that tend to split and categorize human characteristics and behaviors, attributing class, race, gender, and sexuality to them (Layton, 2008). Confirming these differences, or normative splits and categorizations, would reinforce social injustices and hinder inclusive education and equal opportunities for students from marginalized groups. Hence, there is a need for active investigations of categorizations linked to social power hierarchies and heightened awareness of normative processes that shape our understandings of ourselves and others.

   The aim om this paper is to discuss, with a wider research network with similar research focus, the methodological nature of and the analytic procedures for investigations of teachers’ categorizations linked to social power hierarchies. I would like to discuss action research stance in the planned partnership between me, a former school psychologist and doctoral student, and secondary school teachers for exploring ways of bridging the gap between teachers ambitions to counter racism and the parts of their practice that facilitates the reproduction of racial power hierarchies. By combining postcolonial and psychoanalytic perspectives on subjectivity we will collaborate and actively investigate categorizations and explore deracialization practices. With deracialization practices I mean actions that counteract effects of racism (not to be confused with processes where someone starts to pass as “white”).

   Teachers to a high degree avoid touching on controversial topics and often act with silence on racist comments in the classroom. Their intention is neutrality but their actions have a normalizing effect on racism (Rosvall & Öhrn, 2014). The avoidance could also be described as a cases of strategic color blindness (Apfelbaum et al., 2008) or “white” teachers’ inability to recognize and deconstruct racist acts (Sue, 2013).

   Racism as a phenomenon is often reduced to only the open racist expressions of certain individuals and many students' experiences of racism therefore fall outside the scope (León Rosales & Jonsson, 2019). Simultaneously with this narrow definition, expressions of racism have since the 1960s, increasingly shifted from open forms to more subtle and hidden, in Sweden (Akrami et al., 2000) as well as elsewhere (McConahay et al., 1981; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995). If left without further investigations these more subtle and hidden forms of racism will continue to create inequality and hinder diversity to thrive (Bell, 2002; Benson & Fiarman, 2019).

   Issues regarding inclusion, diversity and racialization are complex and multifaceted. Teachers often must balance between different competing principles in their practice. Lee Shulman (1986) suggests the term strategic knowledge, which arises solving situations when two principles are in contradiction to each other. The solutions involve showing judgement and require both theoretical and practical knowledge (Shulman, 1986). An actions research stance regarding schoolteachers’ understandings of, their attempts at changing their practice against racism and following reflections on these attempts will target both their theoretical and practical knowledge. This should therefor contribute to the advancement of teachers’ strategic knowledge and their deracialization practices. 

Secondary school teachers who want to try to understand and change their practice against racism will be included in the study. Together with me and a couple of teacher collogues at the same school, the teachers will work with texts and concepts such as racism, racialization, othering, normative Swedishness and subjectivity. Based on the work with these texts, the teachers get the opportunity to reflect on and plan for how they want to test and put their understandings of the theoretical concepts into practice. When the plans have been carried out, the teachers can bring their experiences of the practice and the attempts at change back to our meetings, where I act as a supervisor. Teachers thus get to make an oscillation between experiences and reflections on these individual and collective experiences. The teachers involved may have different familiarity with theories about and work against racism. A criterion for teachers to be included in the study is that they themselves want to deepen their understanding and change their practice against racism. Regardless of teachers’ prior familiarity whit anti-racism, the collaboration between us and the oscillation between theory and practice will be in focus. I will work with the teachers' self-reports in dialogue. The aim is to provide space and opportunity for teachers to reflect on their own practice, the categorizations and splits they make (that previously may have been unconscious) and how they would like to change their practice. This would shed light on teachers’ reflections regarding different aspects of their work against racism. The research collaboration, where I meet with the teacher as described above, will take place during one school year starting in autumn 2023. A final part will be the teachers’ active reflections on the methods used and the conditions of our collaboration. A follow-up interview will take place after one semester to examine teachers experiences after some time. In order to capture teachers’ reflections transcriptions of the audio recorded meetings will be thematically analyzed.

Issues regarding inclusion, diversity and racialization are complex, depending on teachers’ judgment in everyday life in school. Superficial understandings of diversity risk confirming differences due to societal power hierarchies and thereby perpetuate and reinforce social injustices. Teachers who want to advance their understanding and their practice linked to work against racism will be given the opportunity to work with texts and concepts, concerning racism and subjectivity, and to make an oscillation between experiences and reflections on these experiences. The suggested research approach could influence researchers internationally. Teachers involved are expected to advance their knowledge of postcolonial perspectives linked to racism, racialization, othering, normative Swedishness and in relation to the Swedish school system. They are expected to advance their knowledge of subjectivity and become more aware of normative processes within their understandings. Combining this new knowledge with the opportunity for testing the new understanding in practice, and then reflect on their experiences, will likely contribute to articulation of teachers’ strategic knowledge. Teachers’ strategic knowledge regarding racialization will presumedly be visible in teachers’ gaining new vocabulary to describe and understand their practice. Teachers will detect and handle more cases of racist acts in school. They will have explicit deliberations on how to deal with racist incidents and they will probably perceive themselves more capable to handle such incidents. The articulation of strategic knowledge most likely also contains teachers actively planning preventive work against racism, not awaiting incidents. The actions teachers take to counteract racism, based on the strategic knowledge described above, can be conceptualized as deracializing practice. A practice that aims at liberation from the splits and categorizations of human characteristics that are based on power hierarchies that establish norms of recognition. The results are expected to be relevant for researchers and teachers in Sweden as well as in other countries.

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