Examining How White Teachers’ Interracial Contact Experiences Shape Their Self-Efficacy and School Choices

Racial inequalities in education may be exacerbated by teachers’ lack of confidence about working with students from racial and ethnic backgrounds different to their own. Although intergroup contact experiences typically enhance people’s self-efficacy about navigating cross-group interactions, very little work has explored such trends among teachers. Across two cross-sectional studies and one preregistered repeated measures experiment (N = 1,608), we reveal that (a) White teachers’ interracial contact experiences predicted a stronger sense of self-efficacy about cross-race engagement; (b) White teachers generally showed a preference for working in a majority-White school compared to a majority-Black school, but this bias was attenuated by teachers’ interracial contact experiences; and (c) the link between cross-race friendships and desire to work in the majority-Black school was mediated by a greater sense of self-efficacy.