“I Thought I Had Left That ‘Where Are You From?’ Stuff Behind”: Racialized Participation and Strategic Navigation in Teacher Education

Abstract

This article investigates how female students with ethnic minority backgrounds experience and navigate the social relations and interactions that emerge in their encounters with Danish classmates in a teacher education program in Denmark. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the article analyzes qualitative interview data from sixteen students who, despite their diverse cultural and social backgrounds, share common experiences of being othered, singled out, and made visible within the social dynamics of the study environment. The analysis reveals that these students’ interactions with Danish peers are shaped by a series of ambivalent experiences. In some contexts, they are met with professional and social recognition; in others, they encounter stereotypical expectations, academic marginalization, and ethnic othering—experiences that mirror broader societal patterns beyond the teacher education setting. To navigate these contradictions, the students develop various strategic, relationally embedded ways of positioning themselves within the everyday life of the program. This process is conceptualized through the notion of racialized situational competence, an analytical tool that captures these navigational practices not merely as reactive coping mechanisms but as expressions of reflective and tactical agency. It highlights how students actively manage participation and recognition within a normatively structured and asymmetrical social space.