Search results

Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across disciplines. The authors investigate stories in which white English teachers who teach substantial proportions of black students and who self-reported anti-racist goals nevertheless fell short of those goals. The purpose of the study is to understand the tensions between racial liberalism and racial literacy in their pedagogy.

The authors snowball sampled 12 veteran white high school English teachers (3–27 years’ experience) who taught in schools with substantial proportions of black students. The authors used a two-stage interview process to narrow the sample to 7 teachers who confirmed their anti-racist intentions and who wrote narratives of moments when they tried to be anti-racist, but the lesson failed in some way. The authors used a three-stage narrative analysis to analyze how racial liberalism and racial literacy were reflected in the narratives.

The veteran English teachers, despite their anti-racist intentions, told narratives that reflected racial liberalism, portraying racism as an individual and interpersonal phenomenon. Some narratives showed teachers who had taken steps toward racial literacy, but no narratives showed a fully developed sense of racial literacy, portraying the layers of institutional and structural racism in English education.

The sample suggests that veteran white English teachers are subject to similar limited racial literacies as novice teachers. While the authors found glimmers of racial literacy, they still note the work necessary to equip veteran English teachers with the racial literacies necessary for anti-racist instruction. The authors propose directions for teacher education, systemic support and professional development.

This study aims to explore the perceived barriers that a secondary English teacher faced when attempting to discuss racial injustice through young adult literature in Mississippi.

The authors rely on Critical Whiteness Studies and qualitative methods to explore the following research question: What are the barriers that a White ELA teacher perceives when teaching about racial injustice through The Hate U Give?

The authors found that there were several perceived barriers to discussing modern racial injustice in the Mississippi ELA classroom. The participating teacher indicated the following barriers: a lack of racial literacy, fears of discomfort and an urge to avoid politics.

Much has been written about the urgent need for antiracist teaching practices in secondary English classes. This article explores the barriers a white ELA teacher perceived when attempting to discuss modern racial injustice through literature instruction in a white context of the “four pandemics” (Ladson-Billings, 2021).

Using the examples of Grenadian-born Jean Augustine, the first Black Member of Parliament in Canada, and Barbados' Prime Minister Mia Mottley, the piece argues that the ethos of the Emigrant Ambassador—the collective empowerment of Black feminism, liberation, and radicalism—ushered in a new era for change abroad and in Canada, as transnational and international change was driven by Black women from the West Indies.

The author used historical research and social science theoretical frameworks to formulate conclusions, lessons learnt and steps forward for current equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) practitioners.

Black women born in the West Indies in the mid-twentieth century were the catalysts for social justice movements in the 2010 and 2020s. Many methods used for social change in the twentieth century are applicable in the 2020s and beyond.

Research is focused on Canadian and West Indian relations but will have implications for those across the British Commonwealth.

Practitioners and students of EDI will have a new tool on how to approach and confront anti-Black racism, particularly after May 25, 2020.

This article provides opportunities to support the dwindling efforts of anti-racism to support the lives of Black people across the Black Atlantic.

This is an original article built on previous scholarship of the author.

In this chapter, we present critical race theory (CRT) with a focus on Latino critical theory (LatCrit) and its impact on Latinx educators, Latinx youth, and Latinx communities. We focus on identity inclusion and Latinidad as a way to increase critical consciousness of educators and Latinx youth, language rights, and feminist pedagogies of resistance. LatCrit frameworks are used as transformational resistance and afford a productive platform for developing critical understandings of the educational experiences of Latinx youth. We discuss relationships and community through the alignment of LatCrit and critical pedagogy and the application of critical theory and community-responsive pedagogy in increasing equitable outcomes in educational settings that support Latinx youth and families. We provide recommendations to address the challenges Latinx youth face and how Latinx educators can continue to support youth through a LatCrit framework, and a summary of possible solutions to consider. We close with some reflection and dialogue questions.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

TribalCrit permits the recognition of colonization as pervasive in our American society impacting all aspects of our societal structures, including the educational system. Forced boarding schools for Native learners touted the goal of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” as the mission of education in the United States, leaving an indelible strain between Native learners and the US educational system. Research from Native American scholars offers classroom instructional practices and strategies that support inclusive experiences based on truth and acknowledgment of racial and political liminal spaces. Implementing these strategies begins with informed lesson planning to ensure engagement in the instructional core between teacher, student, and content.

This chapter highlights Freire's history and ideologies allow the text to act as in introduction work for those interested in looking at education from a Freireian perspective, and as such it also helps pull together the many aspects of Freire's life and ideas. These points are important because a lot of existing texts and journal articles tend to view Freire from very distinctive perspectives. For example, far and away his most popular text is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but this chapter explores what he wrote about in the 20 other books and dozens of journal articles he wrote. Freire wrote about oppression in education, but also in government, by race and language, and throughout these explorations is a myriad idea about how oppression works, and why the oppressed let themselves be controlled by a minority. Highlighting these facts is a key starting point to the book.

The aim of this paper is to examine the strategic approach of culturally responsive and communicative teaching (CRCT) through a critical assessment of interracial teachers in their daily school interactions.

The empirical data were obtained through interviews among ten interracial teachers. The analysis was made through a thematic approach to obtain substantial data from interviews.

The findings reveal that attempts to gain sufficient comprehension of CRCT are actualized through routine interaction in the multicultural school environment hence resulting in embedding self-awareness of cultural competence in a multicultural classroom, constructing emotional and social development on cultural awareness and internalizing responsive awareness on social engagement in global learning.

The contribution of this research provides an insightful value on expanding key consideration to support the multicultural classroom environment with an active engagement and enhancement of CRCT as fundamental basis of the multicultural classroom.