Naitnaphit Limlamai
Naitnaphit Limlamai is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she studies how secondary English preservice teachers take up their English education training. She specifically focuses on preservice teachers’ ideas and practice of teaching that is oriented to diversity, inclusion, justice, and equity. She explores how to support teacher educators in envisioning and building new English classrooms that reject the status quo in order to help students build literacy and critical thinking skills to be thoughtful and contributing members of our democracy. She uses the knowledge she gains from her research, which includes studying her own teaching, to teach current and future teachers. In 2019 she was named the Diversity, Inclusion, Justice, and Equity Chair of the Michigan Council of Teachers of English.
Before returning to graduate school she taught high school English for 13 years in public and private schools in Florida, Georgia, and New York. At the University of Michigan, Naitnaphit is a teacher educator in the School of Education and a Graduate Student Instructional Consultant at the Center for Research in Teaching and Learning. She has also taught first-year writing in the English Department and has served as a Graduate Student Research Assistant in the Sweetland Center for Writing.
WORKSHOP
We Can’t Hide from the Whiteness that Shows Up in Our Classrooms—So What We Gonna Do About It?
Our social identities, including and especially our racial identities, affect how we move through the world, and how others see us. This is especially true in classroom spaces as teachers and students together encounter curricula, pedagogical practices, and assessments that are founded and grounded on principles of whiteness and white supremacy. Despite our best efforts to diversify what we do in the classroom, without an honest self-reflection on how our racial identities affect our work in the classroom with students, we are likely perpetuating curricular violence, harm, and trauma. In this session, we will consider how our social identities, particularly race, affect our work in the classroom, and how we can push back against our educative socialization.