Amid a pandemic, protests (on masking and mattering), and presidential campaigns in 2020, adults and young folx alike were wading through an exhaustive socio-political milieu, that called for speculation. In this study, students had the opportunity to practice their writing and analytical skills while developing their racial literacy -- the…

Current 11th grade U.S. History textbooks are Eurocentric and tell a biased portrayal of the country's history. This study analyzed the four most frequently used history textbooks in the most 25 populated school districts across the State of California using a mixed-method design, to show the degree to which they are Eurocentric. The four…

Folklife, a type of inquiry that focuses on "ways of life" as its central lens, is constantly changing. Rather than focus on cultural loss or salvaging, folklife inquiry is more powerful when it is positioned to offer insights about human experience through the sharing of personal lived histories in safe and supportive environments. At…

While researching racially segregated education, the author came across speeches delivered in the 1940s by two educational leaders--one a black man and the other a Native American man. G. B. Buster, a longtime African American teacher, implored his African American listeners to work with white Americans on enforcing equal rights for all. A few…

This study examined the learning trajectory of five US humanities teachers when navigating learning to teach the difficult history of school desegregation within a context of a six-month inquiry-based professional development. The research questions were: What do teachers frame as problems when teaching difficult histories? How do they…

A central understanding of narrative scholarship is that stories are ever in process, taking shape in each recounting according to the needs, purposes, and understandings of the teller. Sometimes participants share accounts that are incomplete or inaccurate, shrink from voicing their feelings, or silence their accounting altogether. In this study,…

The United States has a lengthy history of welcoming immigrants from throughout the world and ultimately naturalizing and conferring citizenship to them. Yet, a number of indigenous and people of color never consented to citizenship and many still do not wish to have it. This article explores the role of citizenship as a tool to not only…

Mexican American Studies (MAS) courses have been criticized for many years. Legislation in Arizona and Texas have attempted to ban the content. This article pushes back on this attempt of oppression and offers MAS teachers a framework to apply when teaching the content. Using a timeline to depict the years of attempts for Mexican American Studies…

This article explores relationships of youth power in a set of threads leading to the potential of today's youth activism to combat the climate crisis. Following an introduction featuring Sweden's Greta Thunberg, the threads are these: First from an American context is history of youth development, with one emphasis on the construction of…

The C3 Framework prompts middle school and high school students to assess the ways people have worked to promote the common good. The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework. It also summons students to take informed action. One way that Wendy Harris, a high school social studies teacher at a Deaf school in Saint Paul, MN, advance this goal…

This report evaluates the quality of the K-12 civics and U.S. History standards adopted by the fifty states and the District of Columbia as of May 1, 2021, based on their content, rigor, clarity, and organization. Reviews were conducted by a bipartisan team of veteran educators and subject-matter experts with deep knowledge of civics and U.S.…

There is currently a national debate surrounding what can and cannot be taught in K-12 public schools. In this Equity Dispatch we remember that centering equity and being able to recognize, name, and address the history of systemic racism and oppression in the United States is inclusive, not divisive.

The authors analyzed three Advanced Placement U.S. History textbooks' narratives of U.S. 20th century social democratic policies (e.g. New Deal, G.I. Bill, pro-suburbanization policies) using Lipsitz's "possessive investment in whiteness" as a theoretical framework. The authors found texts portrayed the exclusion of Black populations…

Background: The recruitment of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) has been an ongoing effort for specialized libraries and library programs, especially as they try to fill technical roles while combatting internalized biases and candidates' potential self-deselection by not applying or otherwise removing themselves from the recruitment…

In spring 2021, we taught a course called Honors White Supremacy and Privilege to university honors students at our higher education institution in Florida. Aimed at helping students process intellectually the Black Lives Matter events of the preceding year, the course took place just as a reaction was gathering momentum against anti-racist…