Edinburgh Napier University

  As a team of educators, we wanted to move in a real and meaningful way from ‘not racist’ towards ‘antiracist’. One of us had been tasked with developing our institutional action plan following the publication of the National Anti-racism Framework for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) by the Scottish Council of Deans of Education (SCDE, 2023). We started to write, to create ‘steps’ to be ticked off, but kept coming across the pitfalls that other writers have described of ‘doing’ diversity and inclusion by document; of “doing the document rather than doing the doing” Ahmed (2012). We were concerned to avoid the performative and to write something that led to sustained and sustainable shifts in individual practice and to the student experience.

We started to reimagine our action-plan writing model from one where an individual undertook a paper exercise, to be presented and signed off, a ‘fetish’ (Ahmed, 2012), to something more collective, more organic, and more deeply personal. We each needed to engage with “unlearning” and “unpacking” our “embedded thinking” (Arshad, 2019). And, as a fairly homogenous group, we needed to be mindful too of Arshad’s (2019) warning that it is easy, without the corresponding lived experiences, to fall into the trap of discussing diversity and inclusion issues in an “intellectual sense” only. DiAngelo (2010) describes setting out to help her students to understand multicultural education as “a complex, life-long process rather than as an event”. We wanted to engage with the process then, rather than staging an event. And we wanted to ‘do’ the process together but allow for individual meaning-making.

Here we offer an autoethnographic exploration of our experiences, as a small team who work with pre-service teachers in Scotland, as we tentatively embarked on this journey. Our action plan became reconceptualised from artefact to vehicle: shifted to a messy document - never intended to become tidily complete – but rather something to prompt, provide some structure, track where we’d been and record where we might go next. It was the vehicle to the ‘doing’. We will describe the activity, the conversations, an indication of our shared and individual learnings, and tentative thoughts about the micro- and macro-impacts on our individual and collective practices as teacher educators.