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This article shares how providing teacher candidates with experiences in a predominantly black elementary school for their clinical experiences highlighted a need to recognize, acknowledge and address anti-blackness in teacher candidates’ clinical courses. As well as, a need to emphasize the brilliance and assets of black students. Additionally, this article shares ways in which those involved in the work of school-university or professional development school (PDS) partnerships can incorporate practices that address anti-blackness in clinical practice.

Conceptual paper sharing experiences addressing anti-blackness in school-university partnerships.

National Association of Professional Development Schools (NAPDS) recently revised their Nine Essentials to include this revised version of Essential 1: A comprehensive mission which calls for the advancement of equity, antiracism and social justice within and among schools, colleges/universities and their respective community and professional partners. The work that the author presents in this article around preparing teacher candidates to address anti-blackness fits into the call of Essential 1 because when anti-blackness is addressed equity, antiracism and social justice can be part of the educational experiences of black children. This article shares how providing teacher candidates experiences in a predominantly black elementary school for their clinical experiences highlighted a need to recognize, acknowledge and address anti-blackness in teacher candidates’ clinical practice. As well as, a need to emphasize the brilliance and assets of black students. Additionally, this article shares ways in which those involved in the work of school-university or PDS partnerships can incorporate practices that address anti-blackness in clinical courses.

The author believes that this manuscript is appropriate for publication because it addresses a necessary shift that must happen in clinical practice by recognizing, acknowledging and addressing anti-blackness, as well as making sure teacher candidates are prepared to teach black students. This manuscript has not been published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The author has no conflicts of interest to disclose.

This paper discusses the author's perceptions of anti-blackness, her research on “surface-level” diversity and her recommendations for faculty, administrators and allies.

The paper is a personal account, drawn from the author's background and experiences teaching and studying diversity. It discusses research on American Blacks' unique experiences with police violence and discrimination in employment, housing, customer service, healthcare and education consistent with anti-blackness.

Anti-blackness pervades Blacks' everyday experiences, including in academic institutions.

This paper is a viewpoint paper. Researchers should study anti-blackness, looking specifically at Blacks' organizational and societal experiences.

The author provides suggestions for faculty regarding sharing their research findings, teaching about anti-blackness in diversity, human resources, organizational behavior, management and other courses along with mentoring doctoral students. Recommendations for administration to help ensure that Black faculty are hired, valued and supported are also provided.

Efforts to identify, acknowledge and dismantle anti-blackness are critical to Blacks and are important to improving diversity, inclusion and equity in society.

This paper provides the author's perspective on anti-blackness, using her personal perceptions and experiences, coupled with research evidence. The author provides suggestions for faculty and administrators based on decades of research and experience in the field and being Black in an anti-black society.

This study aims to examine how critical love theory is operationalized in K-12 classrooms to support Black children. The authors use BlackCrit and a conceptual framework of critical love to describe the strategies educators used as pro-Black pedagogies of resistance.

The authors conducted a thematic analysis to identify how critical love praxis is used by K-12 educators as a tool to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism as defined by the framings of BlackCrit theory. The authors produced a literature synthesis of qualitative research that responds to this study’s research questions: How are critical love theories operationalized? What educator practices do researchers identify as material manifestations of critical love?; and How and to what extent do critical love praxis address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistorical approaches to social transformation as defined by BlackCrit theory?

Critical love theories manifest as critical love praxis. Educators used critical love praxis to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism by cultivating and supporting the co-creation of homeplace for Black students in K-12 education. Homeplace is cultivated through critical love praxis as classroom-focused, person-focused and politically focused approaches.

This study’s findings extend current theoretical research on critical love by describing its material form in K-12 education and by identifying how a critical love praxis can work to directly challenge anti-Blackness. The authors find implications for their work in teacher education and teachers’ in-service professional development.

This study aims to present radical abolition studies, which encourages us to (re)member that the abolition of institutions and systems is incomplete without the abolition of their attendant epistemes of domination. The authors draw on the etymology of the word radical to encourage abolitionist praxis to grab systemic harm at its epistemological roots. Within radical abolition studies, this study presents Black abolition theory, which aims to make explicit a theorization of Blackness and works to abolish the episteme of anti-Blackness.

This paper offers Black abolition theory within radical abolition studies to reground abolition in its Black theoretical roots and to interrogate the concept of anti-Blackness and other epistemes of domination in abolitionist study and practice. Using a close reading of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, and subsequent books and articles in abolition studies and educational studies that reference it, the authors highlight Du Bois’ original conceptualization of abolitionism as an ultimate refutation of a racial-social order and anti-Blackness. The authors then put Michael Dumas and kihana ross’ theory of BlackCrit into conversation with abolitionist and educational theory to push forward Black abolition theory.

Radical abolition studies and its attendant strand of Black abolition theory presented in this paper encourages scholars and practitioners to go beyond the dismantling of current instantiations of systemic harm for Black and other minoritized people – such as the school as it currently operates – and encourages the questioning and dismantling of the epistemes of domination sitting at the foundation of these systems of harm.

Black abolition theory contextualizes abolition in education by rooting abolitionist educational praxis in Black lineages. More generally, radical abolition studies encourages further research, study and collaboration in partnership with others who have historically participated in the fight against being labeled as subhuman to upend all epistemes of domination.

Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in US schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and physical traumas. Despite relentless attacks of anti-Blackness, Black youth fight valiantly through a range of creative outlets, including multimodal compositions, that enable them to move beyond negative stereotypes, maintain their creativity, and manifest the present and future lives they desire and so deeply deserve.

This study aims to answer the question “How do Black students' multimodal renderings demonstrate creativity and love in ways that disrupt anti-Blackness?” The authors critically examine four multimodal compositions created by Black elementary and middle school students to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures. The authors take up Black Livingness as a theoretical framework and use visual methodologies to analyze themes of Black life, love and hope in the young people’s multimodal renderings.

The findings suggest that Black youth creatively compose multimodal renderings that are humanizing, allowing their thoughts, feelings and experiences to guide their critiques of the present world and envision new personal and societal futures. The authors conclude with a theorization of a Black Livingness Pedagogy that centers care for Black youth.

Recognizing that “the creation and use of images [is] a practice of decolonizing methodology” (Brown, 2013, loc. 2323), the authors examine Black student-created multimodal compositional practices to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures.

This paper argues that to preserve black lives, teacher educators and teacher candidates need to develop a decolonial lens. A decolonial lens can provide clarity in understanding how the centering of Western epistemic perspectives perpetuate hierarchies and processes of racialization and invisibilized structures of domination that (re)produce differential learning experiences and outcomes for black students. This study aims to build on prior research to help teacher candidates more effectively recognize and challenge racism and anti-blackness in their schools and teaching practices.

In this paper, the author discusses how racism and anti-blackness are perpetuated in schooling and why teacher educators must address them in our work with teacher candidates. Drawing upon existing literature on teacher education, my experiences as a teacher educator and social justice scholar, and insights from the decolonial scholarship, the discusses the importance of a decolonial lens for disrupting racism and anti-blackness, and I offer examples of how teacher educators and teacher candidates can engage in this work.

Multicultural education has done little to change the conditions of black students in schools. While most teacher education programs have made efforts to become more oriented toward social justice, there is a wide gap between program goals and teachers who can work effectively with the diversity of students that they serve.

This paper outlines an approach that teacher educators can use to further develop an antiracist decolonial teaching and research agenda and support teacher candidates regardless of their racial/ethnic group.

A decolonial analysis can help teachers develop a better understanding of the structural and school inequalities that create disparate outcomes for black students and how to intervene. This is urgently necessary, as schooling remains a site of non-belonging and marginalization for black children and youth.

This paper offers a new race-conscious approach to disrupt systemic racism and anti-blackness in education.

Given the historical legacy of policing Black bodies, this research focuses on the structures of anti-Blackness within school policing and the strategies students of Color activists use as they work to defund or abolish police departments in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

Specifically, this article looks to Twitter as a counter-storytelling space for students of Color activists to organize and build movements to end anti-Black school policing. Through the frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and Black critical theory (BlackCrit), this research applies inductive coding to analyze 42 Twitter posts from three students of Color-led organizations based in Los Angeles.

This document analysis presents four themes, which describe four dominant strategies students of Color activists use in their campaigns to defund or abolish school police in the LAUSD: (1) centering Blackness and Black student experiences, (2) making demands for the elimination of funding and support for school police, (3) calling for a shift in funding to support Black students and (4) employing multiple tactics concurrently.

These findings demonstrate the importance of developing and centering a critical understanding of anti-Blackness to achieve racial and educational justice within social movements.

Moreover, the demands of students of Color activists reflect visions of public schools free from anti-Black school policing.

In Virginia, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder accused the state’s library agency of racism for “its slow pace in processing and publicly presenting records from his tenure as the nation’s first elected Black governor” (Associated Press, 2020). The State Librarian responded that this was just a lapse in protocols and framed it as a budget issue and staff turnover. However, “Library of Virginia has been processing papers from his gubernatorial successors before finishing work on his” (Associated Press, 2020). Recently, the Alabama State Department of Archives and History acknowledged their participation in systemic racism, epistemicide, and their history of privileging White voices over those of Alabama African-Americans.

Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing (Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, & Bertolini, 2020). Conceptualization and analytic application of epistemicide has an established tradition in a number of social science fields, but information scientists have only recently acknowledged epistemicide (Oliphant, 2021; Patin et al., 2020; Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, Bertolini, & Grimm, 2021). Building from our recent identification of the existence of epistemicide within the IS field (Patin et al., 2020), this work challenges the information field to become an epistemologically just space working to correct the systemic silencing of certain ways of knowing.

This chapter examines the four types of epistemic injustices—testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular—occurring within libraries and archives and argues for a path forward to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. It looks to digital humanities and to reevaluations of professional standards and LIS education to stop epistemicide and its harms. This chapter demonstrates how to affirm the power and experience of Black lives and highlight their experiences through the careful acquisition, collection, documentation, and publishing of relevant historical materials. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. There has to be a reckoning before the paradigm can truly shift; if there is no acknowledgment of injustice, there is no room for justice.

This paper aims to center the experiences of three cohorts (n = 40) of Black high school students who participated in a critical race technology course that exposed anti-blackness as the organizing logic and default setting of digital and artificially intelligent technology. This paper centers the voices, experiences and technological innovations of the students, and in doing so, introduces a new type of digital literacy: critical race algorithmic literacy.

Data for this study include student interviews (called “talk backs”), journal reflections and final technology presentations.

Broadly, the data suggests that critical race algorithmic literacies prepare Black students to critically read the algorithmic word (e.g. data, code, machine learning models, etc.) so that they can not only resist and survive, but also rebuild and reimagine the algorithmic world.

While critical race media literacy draws upon critical race theory in education – a theorization of race, and a critique of white supremacy and multiculturalism in schools – critical race algorithmic literacy is rooted in critical race technology theory, which is a theorization of blackness as a technology and a critique of algorithmic anti-blackness as the organizing logic of schools and AI systems.