Today's elementary teacher candidates (TCs) are entering a world of public education decimated by decades of neoliberal education reforms (Kumashiro, 2010; Lipman, 2012) exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Giroux, 2021) and the current white-supremacist, heteropatriarchal backlash (Pendharkar, 2022). For justice-oriented TCs, finding agency in…

Though Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training (DEI) has proliferated, facilitators still seek effective tools to support the growth of anti-racist consciousness in participants. An avenue with great promise around these needs is how shared reflexive vulnerability can promote the growth of this consciousness. Using the tools of microethnographic…

In this article, I explore several complicating factors that impact (White) music teachers as they work towards decolonizing their teaching practices. Created by the discursive structures of settler colonialism, these factors include the discourse of an additive multiculturalism, both in society and in the field of music education, the tendency to…

In the midst of dual pandemics, the racial justice uprising and Coronavirus pandemic, I, a Black associate professor of education, took on the challenge of having my White colleague as an apprentice for racial justice work. While co-teaching a critical diversity course, I decided to strategically engage our College of Education in a robust…

This mixed methods study examined how a National Professional Development Grant project's first cohort (2018-2020) in the Midwest impacted mostly White and monolingual inservice teachers who work with emergent bilingual learners (EBLs). Two research questions (RQs) guided this study: RQ1: What were the inservice teachers English language…

Amidst institutional reckonings with anti-blackness, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) are thought to be an intervention. But, how do Black students perceive being served at Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs)? Analyzing focus groups (n= 33), we find Black students perceived anti-blackness at an HSI from: overrepresentation of white personnel…

Academicians, administrators, and policymakers in New Orleans have pointed toward a disproportionate academic and life-cycle outcome where Black American males are particularly disadvantaged as compared to White students. An often-cited cause of these disproportionate outcomes for Black male students is inequality and mistreatment in schools.…

Racism is enmeshed within the fabric of U.S. public education, making it critical to identify and dismantle. One way to do this is to provide professional development (PD) to teachers targeting antiracism to build awareness, decenter whiteness, and advance racial equity in schools. This systematic review is a synthesis of antiracism PD studies,…

This study utilizes life history methodology to understand how White teachers develop racial awareness while also exploring how the education profession acts as an inflection point for racialized understandings of the world. Furthermore, as the educators in this study grew in their racial awareness, there was a rise in conflicting and ambivalent…

Social media is becoming a professional resource in education as teachers aspire to integrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) into their curriculums and teaching practices (Carpenter, 2019; Hardy, 2014; Oddone, 2019). Previous research records 82% of educators use Instagram; this number implies influencers' ideas are reaching a significant…

Achieving equitable educational outcomes for Black and Brown students was at the core of this research. Scholarly work on the persistence of disparate educational outcomes among Black and Brown students rarely contended with a stunning demographic. While U.S. public school students are increasingly diverse, the teaching force in grades K-5 is…

Increased public scrutiny and outcry over police shootings of unarmed Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to name just two, forced a greater awareness of societal demonizing and criminalizing of Black and Brown people due to racial stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination. This examination of American…

Purpose: This paper aims to highlight a reconstructive lens on one white teacher's critical approach to teaching literacy. This work equally highlights the importance of anti-racist approach to critical pedagogies centered on a humanizing ethic of cariño. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on portraiture and qualitative methods, this paper uses…

Writer's workshop is a popular curriculum opportunity in most US schools. This case study of two Black boys engaging in a Kindergarten writer's workshop richly contextualizes their writing identities and practices. A critical childhood studies framework was used to show how Black boys and their White teachers improvised writing-related…

First-year composition (FYC) has historically functioned as a space for furthering the linguistic assimilation of students into "appropriate" forms of communication in academic spaces. While often going unstated in course/writing program goals, Standardized American English (SAE) has typically been the language variety elevated in FYC…