Using Traffic Stops to Engage Preservice Teachers in Thinking About Systemic Racism

Racism impacts the lives of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) in a myriad of ways. It is important that future teachers go beyond individual acts of racism to understand how racism operates as a system. To this end, we designed and implemented a statistical investigation with 13 preservice teachers using real traffic stop data from a local city. We were interested in how preservice teachers explained the role of racism in the policing of traffic stops. Drawing on a framing of systemic racism as an intertwining of individual, cultural, and institutional factors, we found that most of the preservice teachers made connections between the results of their statistical investigations and broader institutional factors that affect policing. Statistical investigations using large datasets that highlight disparities based on race provide affordances for preservice teachers to start thinking about systemic racism. Further, the investigations can normalize challenging conversations around race and racism in mathematics and statistics content courses.