Research studies suggest that professional development would better prepare the 84% White teaching force to serve diverse classrooms. Schools have begun providing professional development with desired outcomes of better serving their diverse student body. This research study focused on educators who received summer camp-style immersive…

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…

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…

This study sought to investigate the efficacy of a professional development designed to equip teachers with antiracist practices and support them in developing an abolitionist mindset. The study was designed for white teachers. Participants of the study engaged in a 6-week course grounded in a constructivist learning theory, TLT, and centered…

This multicase study examined the socialization experiences of four preservice high school English teachers from four different Midwestern teacher education programs to understand how their acculturative and professional socialization experiences influenced their social justice beliefs. This study also examined how participants' most salient…

This qualitative research study examined the experiences of two Black female teachers and six White female teachers who participated in five Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) workshops that incorporated Open Studio Process (OSP) using Expressive Therapy Continuum (ETC). It is informed by research on defensiveness and resistance that often…

This dissertation study explores how white, award-winning history teachers narrate the role of race, racism, whiteness, and antiracism in their identity formation, in their understandings of society, and in their teaching of history. Drawing from a nationwide sample and utilizing surveys and semi-structured interviews, this project explores…

White people have a responsibility due to their complicity in White Supremacy, to practice antiracism in solidarity for racial justice with Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) people and communities. Antiracist education, which fosters this sort of work, necessitates learning about racism and Whiteness to comprehend the violence of White…

European American teachers' race-consciousness influences whether their pedagogical and content choices are non-racist and color-evasive or social justice-oriented and anti-racist. This narrative inquiry qualitative research analyzed the race-consciousness of European American teachers who self-identify as social justice educators. As the…

Social justice education is critical work that should be integrated into the teaching and learning in schools. Because this learning is not an isolated event, nor does it solely exist within the classroom walls, family engagement structures are of importance. Both social justice education and effective family engagement involve inclusive…

Traditional science instruction typically follows an initiation- response-evaluation format and privileges curriculum reflective of Western, male, white, middle-class values, and knowledge which sometimes tends to exclude Black and Latinx students. This qualitative instrumental case study explored how a White male seventh-grade science teacher in…

The process of racial identity development (RID) is widely agreed to be the process by which an individual comes to understand the role race plays in their sense of self, how it influences their ability to acquire information and reach goals, how it affects their interpersonal interactions with others, and the manner in which it assigns group…

The teaching force in the United States is largely White, female, and unprepared to acknowledge the significance of being White and work effectively with a racially diverse student population. To better serve students of color, teachers must be able to understand their own racial identity to be able to respectfully acknowledge the racial and…

Discipline is defined as the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. In public schools across the United States, disparate discipline outcomes continue to plague most educational settings, and methods of effectively addressing this concern remain elusive. White teachers comprise…