This article focuses on Mr. Kurt, a white, first-year English teacher in an all-white context who has chosen to teach his students about whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege, and the many ways institutionalized racism is enacted in daily life. I center this article on classroom scenarios that highlight the challenges embedded in dealing…

Pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy are important, especially in the wake of racial violence when mainstream media work to stigmatize, characterize, and marginalize Black youth by projecting them as "dangerous Others." In this article, we offer an overview of how mainstream media reinscribe and reinforce white supremacy,…

In the wake of racial violence, teacher educators, literacy scholars, and classroom teachers are looking for ways to teach about in/equities and in/justice. In this article, I position #SayHerName as an entry point for educators and scholars to think about how English education and English language arts classrooms can become spaces to address…

Despite the largely degrading media representations of Blackness, historically, Black girls and women have been strong activists, disrupting narratives the media conveys about Black girl- and womanhood. Centering Black girls' lived experience through critical media literacy can give them the opportunity to develop the language to identify,…

This critical ethnographic study explores how two teacher candidates in English education used specific and varied literacy practices to enact their social justice priorities at a troubled high school in a high-need district. Data include interviews before and after the student teaching experience; observations of teaching, blogs, journals, and…

Delane Bender-Slack takes on the important subject of teaching for social justice. Her article's strength is in its uncompromising look at complex, often misinterpreted teaching challenges. This article focuses on actual teachers working for social justice in their classrooms. Working from a strong theoretical framework, she pushes us in new…