I have spent a significant amount of time reflecting on my racial identity and the many stereotypes or attitudes that may

come along with it. Surprisingly, this is not something I had previously given much thought to, solely because I had never been asked to consider my racial identity so closely before. From early memories of my racial identity, I recognize that my own schooling environment was very similar to that of Foresthills Elementary in Sunny Valley, as described in Race in the Schoolyard (Lewis, 2011). I attended a monoracial school in a suburb of Long Island, New York. There, everyone looked just like me; this included students, teachers, and faculty members. My classmates and I all talked the same, dressed the same, shared the same experiences, and had the same opportunities; we were all children from white, middle class families. Growing up in a nonintegrated suburb, I never learned to become fluent in or comfortable with talking about issues surrounding race and racism in our society because I was never asked to. My education was consequently extremely colorblind and limited in the scope of democratic knowledge I learned. My teachers made no effort to expose my peers and I to an integrated multicultural curriculum. Instead, I was presented with traditional and shallow opportunities to learn about diversity in the history of my country, through outlets such as Columbus discovering America, Black History Month, and the Equal Rights Movement; no information that I learned was about the present. My teachers did nothing to immerse students in a diversified curriculum, and no one seemed to mind. Now, as an adult, student teacher, and student of educational discourse analysis, I am becoming overwhelmingly aware of the immense issue that monoracial schools are creating for our society by not integrating diversity into every facet of the curriculum. As a future teacher, by not speaking about race in schools, I would consciously be choosing to ignore distinctions of race, overlooking stereotypes, and consequently countering the progress of society moving forward. I would also subconsciously be sending children the message that the history of students of one particular race is more important than the history of students of another race. Therefore, while I am proud of who I am and where I come from, I recognize that I should utilize my position as a white female in order to affect necessary change in the minds of young learners. I can only achieve this goal by refusing to remain silent about race in my classroom.

I am one of three white teachers in my classroom; as I explore and form my own racial identity I am filled with questions about how my race affects my students feelings and experience within the learning space. They are classified as White, Black, Hispanic, Latino, and Asian Pacific. How do my students see me? What do I think when I see them? As a future teacher, I cannot help but to fear that, knowing where I come from and knowing that it may be a different place from where my students come from, there will be a disconnect. At the same time, I question that if I were to teach in a monoracial school, of any particular race, how I would incorporate multicultural education into the curriculum in a tangible and democratic way. Moving away from the traditional multicultural education I received, it is my goal as a future teacher to figure out a way to teach cross-racially in either a monoracial or an interracial classroom for the benefit of all students. I hope to have a class that not only expects a diversified curriculum but also appreciates learning about the unfamiliar, and that this learning will ultimately inspire understanding and a more united society.