This dissertation investigates how the intersections of race, class, and gender operate in the everyday teaching and professional norms of middle-class White women teachers—particularly in schools such as the one in this study, where a majority of middle-class, White women teachers serve predominantly low-income, racially and ethnically diverse students of color. Presented as a set of three independent, but closely related, analyses that all draw from a common data source, these articles comprise an intersectional analysis of teaching and teacher professionalization as complex, polyvalent, and often contradictory.

The first two articles are empirical analyses of the ways in which middle-class White women teachers construct a middle-class, White-centered classroom climate and professional culture, despite the diversity of the student body. I describe how middle-class White womanhood is enacted through discourse in teachers' professional collaboration and in individual classroom teaching, with special attention to the participation and social locations of middle-class, White women teachers. The third article in this volume is a conceptual exploration that responds to the critiques and findings of the previous two articles, drawing from the classroom narratives of a well known middle-class, Jewish, White woman teacher, Vivian Paley, whose stories offer one perspective on how it could look and feel to teach and reflect in anti-racist ways that challenge norms of classroom climate and of social distance between students and teachers.

Understanding how schools and classrooms become middle-class and White-centered places that situate students of color and other marginalized youth outside the realm of inclusion and opportunity in school requires a close look at everyday classroom teaching and teacher professionalization. Ultimately, middle-class White women teachers' classroom interactions and professional culture relate to the creation of classroom and school environments which affect learning opportunities for children. Noticing and examining the micro-construction of middle-class White supremacy in school norms and classroom climate is the first step of interrupting the conditions and actions that keep it dominant.