Christina Berchini is a teacher educator and a member of the NCTE Standing Committee Against Censorship who writes often on the topic of whiteness and privilege and teaching. This year Christina was recognized for this work with the NCTE 2017 National Intellectual Freedom Award Honorable Mention. Find her on Twitter @Christina_Berch .

The award selection committee noted,

Given our current sociopolitical climate, the need for conversations on race and racism is a necessity. Christina tackles these issues head on. As the teaching force remains largely White and students become increasingly multicolored, it is important to understand how schools operate, especially when they do so to advantage and disadvantage various stakeholders while proclaiming that they celebrate diversity. Christina’s scholarship on ways in which White teachers’ identities are structured by the contexts and discourses of their schools is not only timely, it is imperative. Her work is important because it reveals how institutions reify specific racialized social norms. It raises public awareness of how school organization is anything but benign, instead shaping educational practice to impose one set of cultural values and practices on multicultural students and teachers. Her scholarship on how race and racism plays out in schools has often been met with visceral hostility – verbal personal attacks as well as those that call for her being removed from her teaching position. But these challenges do not stop her from continuing to write about this topic. Christina’s pledge to continuing this conversation in the face of hostile challenges is clear evidence of her commitment to intellectual freedom.

While Christina was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the NCTE Annual Convention, Distinguished Service Award winner Peter Smagorinsky elegantly presented her words of thanks,