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How can the author, as social studies methods instructors, assist future elementary teachers develop the knowledge and skills to engage young students in critical examinations of race and racism, and feel empowered to take action against racial oppression? The purpose of this paper is to share one of many possible ways of “doing race” in elementary social studies teacher education.

First, the author proposes the topic of school segregation as a relevant and engaging inroad for elementary students to learn about race and racism. Then, the author outlines and problematizes a dominant approach to teaching about school segregation in elementary classrooms and suggests an alternative approach informed by critical race theories. Next, the author provides counterstories to dispel the dominant narrative of school segregation from an Asian critical race theory perspective. This is followed by an explanation of the lesson the author teaches in the author’s elementary social studies methods course that utilizes these perspectives and counterstories.

By using Asian-American counterstories of school segregation, the lesson seeks to assist preservice elementary teachers in disrupting the dominant teaching practices and discourses around school segregation and helps preservice teachers develop the critical understandings and competencies needed to successfully teach about race and racism in elementary classrooms.

The author concludes by discussing the possibilities and implications of the lesson.

The authors suggest strategies for addressing and combating these attempts at racelighting.

The authors of this article– five anti-racist educators working in various educational settings in SLC– employ the Critical Race Theory counter-story methodology (Delgado and Stefancic, 1993) to confront resistance to educational equity in Utah. They do so by first providing a historical context of race and education in Utah before presenting four short counterstories addressing the racelighting efforts of students, fellow educators and administrators when confronted with the complexities of racial injustice.

These counterstories are particularly important in light of the recent increase in color-evasive and whitewashed messaging used to attack CRT and to deny the existence of racism in the SLC school system in K-post-secondary education, and in the U.S. as a whole.

These stories are set in a unique environment, yet they hold national relevance. The racial and religious demographics in Utah shed light on the foundational ethos of the country – white, Christian supremacy. They reveal what is at stake in defending it and some of the key mechanisms of that defense.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to effectively end race-conscious admissions practices across the nation, this paper highlights the law’s commitment to whiteness and antiblackness, invites us to mourn and to connect to possibility.

Drawing from the theoretical contributions of Cheryl Harris, Jarvis Givens and Chezare Warren, as well as the wisdom of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion, this paper utilizes CRT composite counterstory methodology to illuminate the antiblack reality of facially “race-neutral” admissions.

By manifesting the impossible situation that SFFA and the Supreme Court’s majority seek to normalize, the composite counterstory illuminates how Justice Jackson’s hypothetical enacts a fugitive pedagogy within a dominant legal system committed to whiteness as property; invites us to mourn, to connect to possibility and to remain committed to freedom as an intergenerational project that is inherently humanizing.

In a sobering moment where we face the end of race-conscious admissions, this paper uniquely grapples with the contradictions of affirmative action as minimally effective while also radically disruptive.

In this paper the co-authors, educators and organizers working together in a liberatory curriculum development organization (People's Education Movement Chicago), put forth a conceptualization of Critical Race Praxis (CRP) in education as it applies to K-12 curriculum and education writ large. They take Yamamoto's (1997) premise seriously in that they need to spend less time with abstract theorizing and more time in communities experiencing injustice.

The co-authors utilize critical race counterstory methodologies to analyze and (re)tell their experiences building and supporting justice-centered curriculum bound in CRP. In doing so, they share narratives that illuminate their individual and collective experiences navigating the gratuitous violence of white supremacy and other forms of structural oppression, and their work to center justice in and out of K-12 schools.

The findings provide examples of organizational praxes within the tenets of CRP (Conceptual, Material, Performative and Reflexive). For People’s Education Movement Chicago the conceptual conditions of their praxes begin with an intersectional analysis of schooling, education, and life. Within the CRP tenant of the material, the co-authors share experiences that detail their continuous political education and offer seven emergent ways of being and building to bound the material change they seek to create through their work. Next, the co-authors share their insights on the performative tenet, with a focus on curriculum, which creates learning experiences that support people to remember social movements and develop within them the curiosity and agency to act on their findings in ways that center justice and transformation. Finally, the findings related to reflexivity focus on the authors’ internal practices as a collective. The authors place process over product which, as they articulate, is a must if they are to produce a vital harvest for communities they work with and for.

The authors conclude the article with the following offerings useful to P-20 educators, researchers, school administrators and community members advancing more just educational futures: a commitment to the on the groundwork, situating social justice as an experiential phenomenon, the utilization of interdisciplinary approaches, collaborative work and capacity building, and a commitment to self and collective care.

As P-20 teachers, community workers, organizers, caregivers and education scholars of color building together in a K-12 curriculum development organization, the authors suggest that now is the moment to pivot away from the rhetoric of “we don't do CRT” and into work that constructs paths toward praxes bound in the tenets of CRP.

By engaging in critical literacy, participants theorized Blackness and antiblackness. The purpose of this study was to have participants theorize Blackness and antiblackness through their engagements with critical literacy.

The authors used a youth-centered and informed Black critical-race grounded methodology.

Participants’ unique and varied revelations of Blackness as Vitality, Blackness as Cognizance and Blackness as Expansive Community, served to withstand, confront and transcend encounters with antiblackness in English curricula.

This paper provides a model for how to engage Black youth as a means to disrupt anti-Black English education spaces.

This study provides a foundation for future research efforts of Black English outer spaces as they relate to English education. Findings in this study may also inform existing English educator practices.

This study theorized both the role and the flexible nature of Black English outer spaces. It defined the multi-ethnic nature of Blackness. It proposed that affirmations of Blackness sharpened participants’ critical literacies in Black English outer spaces as a transformative intervention to anti-Black English education spaces.

The purpose of this study was to challenge the “single story” narrative the authors utilize counterstorytelling as an analytic tool to reveal the paradox of exploring human rights with incarcerated BIPOC teens whose rights within the justice system are frequently ignored. Shared through their writing, drawing and discussions, the authors demonstrate how they wrote themselves into narratives that often sought to exclude them.

This paper centers on the interpretations of Universal Human Rights by Black adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system in the Southeastern region of the United States. Critical ethnography was selected as we see literacy as a socially situated and collaborative practice. Additionally, the authors draw from recent work on the humanization of qualitative methods, especially when engaging with historically oppressed populations. Data were analyzed using a bricolage approach and the framework of counterstorytelling to weave together the teens' narratives and experiences.

In using the analytic tool of counterstories, the authors look at ways in which the stories of colonially underserved BIPOC youth might act as a form of resistance. Similarly to the ways that those historically enslaved in the United States used narratives, folklore, “black-preacher tales” and fostered storytelling skills to resist the dominant narrative and redirects the storylines from damage to desire-centered. Central then to our findings is the notion of how to engage in the work of dismantling the inequitable system that even well-intentioned educators contribute to due to systemic racism.

The research presented here is significant as it attempts to add to the growing body of research on creating spaces of resistance and justice for incarcerated youth. The authors seek to disrupt the “single story” often attributed to adolescents in the juvenile justice system by providing spaces for them to provide a counternarrative – one that is informed by and seeks to inform human rights education.

As researchers, the authors struggle with aspects related to authenticity, identity and agency for these participants. By situating them as “co-researchers” and by inviting them to decide where the research goes next, the authors capitalize on the expertise, ingenuity and experiences' of participants as colleagues in order to locate the pockets of hope that reside in research that attempts to be liberatory and impact the children on the juvenile justice system.

This study emphasizes the importance of engaging in research that privileges the voices of the participants in research that shifts from damage to desire-centered. The authors consider what it may look like to re-situate qualitative research in service to those we study, to read not only their words but the worlds that inform them, to move toward liberatory research practice.

This study provides an example of how the use of counterstorytelling may offer a more complex and nuanced way for incarcerated youth to resist the stereotypes and single-story narratives often assigned to their experiences.

Legislators continue to label Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other race-based concepts as divisive. Nevertheless, CRT, at its core, is committed to radical transformation and addressing issues of race and racism to understand how People of Color are oppressed. Through rhetoric and legislative bans, this current anti-CRT movement uses race-neutral policies and practices to limit and eliminate CRT scholars, especially faculty members, from teaching and researching critical pedagogies and other race-based topics.

Through semi-structured interviews using Critical Race Methodology (CRM), the authors sought to understand how 40 faculty members challenged the dominant narratives presented by administrators through their responses to CRT bans. Additionally, this work aimed to examine how administrators’ responses complicate how faculty make sense of CRT bans.

Findings describe three major themes: (1) how administrators failed to respond to CRT bans, which to faculty indicated their desire to present a neutral stance as the middle ground between faculty and legislators; (2) the type of rhetoric administrators engaged in exemplified authoritarian approaches that upheld status quo narratives about diversity, exposing their inability to stand against oppressive dominant narratives; and (3) institutional leaders’ refusal to address the true threats that faculty members faced reinforced the racialized harm that individuals engaging in CRT work must navigate individually.

This study is one of the few that provide empirical data on this current anti-CRT movement, including problematizing the CRT bans, and how it affects campus constituents such as faculty members.

While Black teachers have engaged in racial justice-oriented teaching for centuries and the body of research on racial justice-oriented teachers is growing, very little is known about how teachers come to this work. The purpose of this paper is to focus on where and how Black teachers who teach with racial justice aims learned to engage in this work.

This is a narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) study that was designed and analyzed using a critical race theory lens.

Participants learned to engage in racial justice-oriented teaching from their lived experience, particularly from their K-12 teachers who showed why this kind of teaching was necessary. Additionally, participants were highly skeptical of whether or not teacher education programs could prepare White preservice teachers to engage in this kind of teaching.

There is very little research focusing on how Black teachers come to engage in racial justice-oriented teaching, and even less that provides insight into how Black teachers perceive teacher education programs at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). This study sheds light on when, where and how Black teachers learn to teach with racial justice aims, and it also illuminates the experiences of Black teachers in PWI teacher education programs.

Researchers and teachers have noted the power of students reading text sets or multiple texts on the same topic, and numerous articles have been published with examples of and frameworks for text set construction. This study aims to traces the theoretical assumptions of these frameworks and explores their distinct implications and tensions for understanding disciplinary literacy in English language arts (ELA).

The author draws on three frameworks, using a focal article for each: cognitive (Lupo et al., 2018), critical (Lechtenberg, 2018) and disciplinary (Levine et al., 2018), and connect those articles to other research studies in that tradition. Separately, the author describes each of the three text set frameworks’ design principles. Then, across frameworks, the author analyze the disciplinary assumptions around each framework’s centering texts, epistemological goals and trajectories.

The centering text, goals and trajectories of each framework reflect its underlying epistemological lens. All frameworks include a text that serves as its epistemological center and the cognitive and disciplinary frameworks, both rely on progressions of complexity (knowledge/linguistic and literary, respectively). The author traces additional alignments and tensions between the frameworks and offer suggestions for possible hybridities in reading modality and reading volume.

Many articles have been written about models of text set construction, but few have compared the assumptions behind those models. Examining these assumptions may help English teachers and curriculum designers select texts and build curriculum that leverages the strengths of each model and informs researchers’ understanding of disciplinary literacy in ELA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine libraries’ responsibility to engage with and support communities of color as they challenge systemic racism, engage in the political process, and exercise their right to free speech. Many libraries have ignored the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, citing the need to maintain neutrality. Despite extensive scholarship questioning the validity of this concept, the framing of library neutrality as nonpartisanship continues. This paper examines librarianship’s engagement with, and disengagement from black communities through the lens of the BLM movement. It also explores the implications of education, engagement, and activism for people of color and libraries today.

The authors have engaged the topic from a critical race perspective as a practice in exercising voice – telling stories, presenting counterstories, and practicing advocacy (Ladson-Billings, 1998).

The assertion that libraries have been socially and politically neutral organizations is ahistorical. When libraries decide not to address issues relevant to people of color, they are not embodying neutrality; they are actively electing not to support the information and service needs of a service population. In order for libraries to live up to their core values, they must engage actively with communities, especially when those communities are in crisis.

As a service field, librarianship has an ethos, values, and history that parallel those of many other service fields. This paper has implications for developing understanding of questions about equitable service provision.