In this critical historical analysis, "Higher Education for American Democracy" is considered a historical artifact, and its veneration as a landmark quest for equal opportunity in higher education is challenged. I argue that this report and the institutional expansion that resulted positioned the federal government to have a direct role…

A pioneer for women's rights and a prominent pop culture icon in a striking white collar, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is best known for her work on the bench; her fiery dissents and scathing arguments are legendary. Ginsburg's legal work in the 1970s marked a major advancement for women's rights, driven by the novel legal strategy she developed to…

Young Children of Color in the United States experience the effects of racism on a daily basis. There have been calls for anti-bias and anti-racist education across the field of education, yet most recommendations are based on older students or studies in laboratory settings. Additionally, state and local governments have enacted legislation…

This article offers articulation theory as a tool for listening and thinking about the culture in and around writing centers. After defining a method of articulation analysis that considers articulation, disarticulation, and rearticulation, as well as alignments, contradictions, and tensions within a context, the article performs an articulation…

HBO's "Lovecraft Country" is a model resource for developing speculative civic literacies, which are forms of meaning making aimed at helping students conceive of a more equitable democratic society. Speculative civic literacies and "Lovecraft Country" both center the tension between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism in the…

Deliberation and inquiry can go hand-in-hand. Inquiry-based learning calls on teachers to facilitate student-led discovery, something that can only happen when students ask questions and weigh possible answers before settling on a plausible and evidentiary answer. Teaching through inquiry is about setting students up to wrestle with the issue at…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities are institutions that contribute to the higher education of people of African descent. The archives of enslaved and freed people describe their systematic approach to education, highlighting the ways that Black communities in America engaged in teaching and learning. Despite enslavement and forced…

This article explores the extent to which official social studies curriculum documents acknowledge difficult questions raised by the persistence of poverty in the United States. As it turns out, just as some parts of social studies curricula tell distorted stories about U.S. history, other parts tell misleading stories about the nation's present…

This paper documents a half-semester service-learning teaching activity for engaging students to think critically about intercultural communication theory. In collaboration with a community partner, students in my intercultural communication class researched the influence of the Great Migration on U.S. society, producing five books summarizing…

Students, especially young children, recognize differences. This guided inquiry positions elementary students to consider the (dis)abilities they see and do not see. This article couples trade books emphasizing diverse perspectives--general, American, people of color, international contexts, fiction, and disparate (dis)abilities--with evocative…

Despite decades of research to the contrary, public discourse continues to insist on the direct power of curriculum to shape student learning, rather than acknowledge the complex and situated ways that teachers and curricular materials interact to shape enacted instruction. In this paper, we use a model of curriculum enactment to illustrate the…

The field of education in America--oft-viewed as a catalyst for change and self-improvement--has a racist history, which is often undiscussed by teachers and likely unknown to students. This article guides high school students to explore how educational texts, tasks, and policies have been products and producers of racist ideas in the past and…

This article examines the presentation of caste systems of stratification in U.S. introductory sociology textbooks. First, the "caste versus class" debate from the 1930s and 1940s is summarized and its competing perspectives are evaluated. Second, after an in-depth analysis of introductory sociology textbooks presenting material on the…

This article offers a case study on the history of the tattoo in the United States and the rise of American imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. It models how high school history teachers can use the tattoo to teach about the rise of American imperialism. It also illustrates the author's primary argument: American imperialism fueled…

Based on the author's teaching experience, this book examines why and how many progressive White people are stuck when it comes to race. By locating contemporary Whiteness in its historical context, this book rethinks some of the foundational aspects of White attitudes and approaches to antiracism, including empathy, resistance, and privilege.…