Tropp’s paper states, “As we examine potential barriers to teachers’ engagement in race talk with students, we must also learn how to support teachers effectively when they are called upon to facilitate these discussions.” Tropp emphasizes that future training efforts need to consider how both implicit racial biases and conscious concerns about being seen as racist may curb teachers’ willingness to engage students in meaningful and productive conversations around race. “It’s understandable that we would have concerns about how what we say might be perceived or received by others.” “This is not just something unique to teachers, but something that we all experience in our society, where people are very quick to judge what we say,” Tropp says. Recent teacher training and professional development programs have typically focused on educating teachers about implicit racial biases-that is, unconscious racial biases they may have and about which they may have limited awareness-without sufficiently addressing teachers’ conscious concerns about how they may be seen, or how their comments may be interpreted, Tropp explains. These psychological barriers are still evident, even after Tropp took into account numerous other variables such as teachers’ years of experience, their demographic characteristics, characteristics of the schools in which they teach and their own prior exposure to diversity training. Analyzing data from two large surveys, each including responses from more than 1,000 K-12 teachers, Tropp found that teachers’ implicit racial biases and their explicit fears of being perceived as racist both independently contributed to lower intentions to talk about race with their students.
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