A Narrative Inquiry into the Lived Experiences of Racialized Teacher Candidates in an Ontario Teacher Education Program

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation examines the lived experiences of racialized teacher candidates in an Ontario teacher education program, with the aim of understanding how systemic and interpersonal barriers shape their educational trajectories. Ontario offers a distinct context, with a highly centralized, neoliberal education system that makes implementing anti-racist reforms challenging (Shah et al., 2022). Despite efforts to diversify the teaching workforce, racialized educators remain underrepresented, revealing persistent structural and systemic barriers. Guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW), this study foregrounds the strengths, resources, and resilience of racialized teacher candidates rather than framing their experiences in deficit terms. Narrative inquiry serves as the methodological framework, emphasizing the relational, temporal, and contextual dimensions of experience. Across three rounds of interviews with seven participants, 21 transcripts were generated and analyzed using the NVivo software. Data analysis identified resonant threads, which are recurring and meaningful patterns across the narratives, showing how participants navigate personal, social, and institutional challenges while drawing on six types of cultural wealth: aspirational, familial, social, navigational, linguistic, and resistant.

This study contributes to research on teacher diversity by centering the voices of racialized teacher candidates, highlighting both the barriers they face and the strengths they bring to teacher education. The findings offer practical and policy insights, emphasizing the need for teacher education programs to move beyond symbolic diversity initiatives toward systemic, anti-racist reforms that recognize, honour, and build on the knowledge and cultural wealth of racialized teacher candidates.