Social Justice Education in a Diverse Classroom: Examining High School Discussions about Race,Power, and Privilege

High school students who participate in social justice education have a greater awareness of inequities that impact their school, community, and society, and learn tools for taking action to address these inequities. Also, a classroom that consist of students with a diverse set of identities creates an ideal circumstance in which a teacher can build upon student differences in order to facilitate meaningful discussions about social justice, especially issues of race. Therefore, in this article we use qualitative case study approaches to examine a high school course on social justice education, paying specific attention to the classroom pedagogy and dialogue on issues of race, power, and privilege. The course was purposefully diverse in enrollment, which brought students together who might not have had interactions with each other prior to the class. We employ Hackman's (2005) five components of social justice education (SJE) as a framework for the analysis of the pedagogy and discussions constructed in the classroom, as well as a common language for what constitutes as social justice education in our research inquiry. Students in the course developed a facility for defining and identifying various forms of oppression and injustice. However, we questioned to what extent these very same issues played out in the class dialogue. Due to the level of student diversity, the course was a unique space to learn about racism and intersecting issues of social justice. However, there was still some student resistance to acknowledging certain aspects of racism. In conclusion, we discuss how social justice education is not absolved from, but rife with complex racial politics.     

The Social Funding of Race: The Role of Schooling

Our nation is suffused in questions of race and racism. Despite much scholarly and public discussion we struggle to undo long-held assumptions about race and how it functions. This article looks at race from the perspective of a public commodity that the society “funds” in order to make it seem real and intractable. Throughout the article there are multiple examples of the everyday, commonsense things people in this society do to fund the concept and give it meaning from our children's earliest days. The challenge in a society that so “fully funds” race is it seems near impossible to “defund” the concept in teacher education to allow new teachers to approach the classroom as a space where race is not determinant and highly predictive of student achievement.     

Efficient Social Justice: How Critical Race Theory Research can Inform Social Movement Strategy Development

Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholars in Education, like activists, are intent on dismantling racism in education (and society at large), and often do so by engaging the problem of racial injustice through social science research. CRT research creates a wealth of awareness about how racism functions, and as a result, inspires social agency to create a more just society. This conceptual piece explores how CRT research, when joined with the efforts of activists, is even more potent with capacity to realize social justice. In the paper, the tenets of CRT in Education are outlined, and serve as the foundation of a model that reveal how each tenet can shape research designs, that inform decision making in social movement strategy development. The model is inspired by the author’s personal experiences with combining CRT research with social movement strategy development, and is intended to serve as an impetus for increased dialogue about how CRT social science research, particularly in Education, can support activists’ goals to dismantle racism.     

Whiteness and social studies teacher education: tensions in the pedagogical task

Utilizing a critical whiteness studies framework, the authors analyzed the experiences of a cohort of predominantly White pre-service social studies teachers discussing race and Whiteness in relation to education. The pre-service teachers resisted identifying White privilege as a form of structural racism, instead preferring individualized understandings of racism. The participants also utilized their personal biographies to accept or reject aspects of race privilege. The authors highlighted three tensions for teacher educators to consider when engaging pre-service teachers in discussions about race privilege, including recognizing the unfamiliar nature of structural thinking, appreciating the limitations of personal experience, and acknowledging the challenges of structural considerations within individual classrooms. The authors’ findings – and the tensions they highlight– depart from previous literature on White teachers and race by paying specific attention to pedagogical issues related to developing a critical racial consciousness in White teachers and by attending to the ways in which Whiteness, as a structural force, limits the ability of White teachers to engage in conversations about race. The authors attempt to trouble the assumption that the pedagogical practices in teacher education adequately create an environment in which White teachers can thoroughly engage in the problematics of race, racism, and Whiteness.     

Transgressive and negotiated White racial knowledge

Abstract

This critical case study investigated the experiences of six White preservice teachers as they learned about race and racism during the first semester of an urban-focused teacher preparation program. The author identified two broad themes of transgressive White racial knowledge and negotiated White racial knowledge to capture the participants’ engagement with the topic of race. By detailing the complexities of the racial knowledge of a group of race-conscious White teachers, the project helps to de-homogenize conceptualizations of White teachers’ racial identities. The transgressive knowledge displayed by the participants largely occurred in their intellectual understandings of issues related to urban education. When the participants discussed their antiracist practice and their own complicity in racism, their negotiations with critical understandings of race emerged. These findings suggest that educators working with race-conscious White teachers should emphasize the messiness inherent in enacting an antiracist practice and think differently about the subtle distancing strategies White teachers often deploy to release themselves from complicity in racism.     

Play of the unconscious in pre-service teachers’ self-reflection around race and racism

Reading psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious desire for wholeness in the light of the notion of white racial supremacy, this study explores a constituted difficulty that self-reflection around the issues of race and racism confronts by exploring three white male pre-service teachers’ emotional experiences inscribed in their responses to the process of engaging in self-reflection. The pervasiveness of strong emotional reactions to the process of engaging in self-reflection spoke volumes not only about how uncomfortable the participants felt in the face of ambivalence, incommensurability and vulnerability but also about their active resistance against their emotional states to defend their unconscious desire for wholeness that is intensified by the forces of white racial supremacy. This study also seeks to elaborate problems inherent in teachers’ self-reflection and why and how unknown and unconscious emotional world filters and at times hinders the participants’ willingness to inquire into their own relationship to race and racism. In the final section, the author discusses how the findings may be used to imagine how teachers’ unknown and unconscious emotional world can become subjective curriculum which in turn becomes a foundation for students’ learning or lack thereof and also informs the field of teacher education engaging in critical self-reflection.     

No Child Left Behind and the Denigration of Race

Race is the social expression of power and privilege, and new racial configurations take shape in conjuction with alterations in the political economy of American society. This article examines the relationship of educational policy to the emergence of a new conception of racism that has appeared in the post-civil rights era: colorblind racism. Colorblind policies are championed as fair and just, congruent with the egalitarian aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In rendering invisible the salience of race, the goal of colorblindness is to make advantage appear as a logical consequence of the natural order of things. The non-recognition of race as a form of political power tacitly enables the colorblind ideal to steer education policy toward the reinforcement of the dominant culture as the norm and the maintenance of hegemonic social arrangements. The insinuation of colorblindness into the culture of educational policymaking, and of No Child Left Behind in particular, suggests that substantive educational restructuring may not be part of the nation's racial agenda.     

Inhabiting the ‘tragic gap’: pre-service teachers practicing racial literacy

Set in the context of a teacher education program, this study examined how three White pre-service teachers participate in book club discussions of children’s literature. We asked: When White pre-service teachers are in a context that enables talk about race, racism and anti-racism, what do they talk about? What conceptual and discursive tools do they use? We were guided by these questions, along with theoretical perspectives of racial literacy, multicultural discourses and a form of critical discourse analysis referred to as ‘positive discourse analysis’ or ‘reconstructive discourse analysis’. Our analysis illustrates that the participants held two questions, what constitutes racism and what makes a person a White ally, without firm resolution in the form and function of their talk. Their discourses illustrate that racial literacy involves what teachers say and also a willingness to stand in the space of indeterminacy, which may create space for new social positions. We argue for a continued theorization of critical discourse analysis alongside of racial literacy and multicultural discourses.     

Introductory Overview to the Special Issue Critical Race Theory and Education: Recent Developments in the Field

What can critical race theory, a movement that has its roots in legal scholarship, contribute to research in education? Plenty, as it turns out. Much of the national dialogue on race relations takes place in the context of education--in continuing desegregation and affirmative action battles, in debates about bilingual education programs, and in the controversy surrounding race and ethnicity studies departments at colleges and universities. More centrally, the use of critical race theory offers a way to understand how ostensibly race-neutral structures in education--knowledge, truth, merit, objectivity, and "good education"--are in fact ways of forming and policing the racial boundaries of white supremacy and racism (Roithmayr, 1999, p. 4).     

The Relevance of Critical Race Theory to Educational Theory and Practice

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has its origins in legal analysis but increasingly has been used by educational researchers to analyse the continued salience of institutional racism in educational settings. After providing a brief overview of the history of CRT and the educational issues addressed by critical race theorists, I review two books that explicitly engage critical race theory (CRT). Delgado and Stefancic's (2001) primer on the CRT literature provides an important backdrop for situating Guinier and Torres' (2002) ambitious argument for building grassroots social movements around the concept of political race.     

Taking the risk to engage in race talk: professional development in elementary schools

Developing public education where every child has the right to learn requires that teachers pay attention to and engage in race talk – open discussion about race, social construction of race, and racism. While it is clear that children engage and reflect critically about these aspects of race even at a young age, teachers rarely engage in race talk with them. In this study, an African-American preservice teacher and a White teacher educator explore how African-American, Polynesian, and White in-service teachers, participating in Courageous Conversations professional development, address or avoid race talk in their elementary schools through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and what risks they take when they do. Findings, through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, demonstrate that (1) racism was observed and/or experienced by all teachers in elementary schools; (2) lived racial experiences impacted teachers’ approach to conversations about race; (3) creating an open space was crucial for race conversations; (4) Courageous Conversations provided a ‘new language’ to talk about race; and (5) administrative support facilitated more attention to race. Findings indicate the road to greater equity in schools requires more professional development about race talk in elementary schools.     

Unforgivable Blackness: Visual Rhetoric,Reader Response,and Critical Racial Literacy

Perceptions of black representations in literature and other visual mediums as positive or negative continuously cause consternation and debate (Fleetwood, 2011). Because African American children are literacy participants and consumers, they are not immune from experiencing this tension. This essay considers the effects and affective threads of racism and racialization connected to visuality (Foster, 1988), and how educators might support and nurture children’s roles as aesthetic critics and critical readers of books featuring racial imagery and representations. The young African American readers in this study resist a picturebook using colorist logic and macro-level social indexing of phenotypic traits. The author argues that negative social messages about blackness within the larger ethos of society, as well as the absence of diverse representations in children’s literature, contribute to such interpretations. She suggests explicitly teaching African American children about counter-visuality and the ways in which “art works” to shape and transform understandings about complex experiences like racism.     

Silenced Memories: An Examination of the Sociocultural Knowledge on Race and Racial Violence in Official School Curriculum

Drawing from the theoretical lenses of cultural memory and critical race theory, we examined how elementary level and middle school level social studies textbooks represent the history of racial violence directed toward African Americans and resistance to this violence in the U.S. Using a literary analysis method, we found that textbooks often presented vivid accounts; however, these narratives often presented these acts as detached from the larger structural and institutional ties that supported and subsequently benefited from these actions. We contend that this limited representation of racial violence has an adverse effect on the larger sociocultural memory and sociocultural knowledge available to students, thus limiting the extent to which students can fully understand the legacy of racism and racial inequity in the U.S.     

“Racism just isn't an issue anymore”: Preservice teachers' resistances to the intersections of sexuality and race

Through year-long focus group interviews with members of a secondary English Education cohort this paper considers both 1) participants' understandings of sexuality and race and 2) how participants' understandings of sexuality and race shaped their interactions with one another. Themes established through data analysis suggested that 1) participants maintained positioned racism as an historical issue that contrasted with the contemporaneity of LGBTQ issues; 2) participants resisted intersecting race and sexuality; 3) participants silenced Andy, the only queer student of color, when she argued for the intersectionality of race and sexuality.     

SECURING TEACHERS FOR SLUM SCHOOLS

This study examines the beliefs of nine white English-only speaking preservice teachers who tutored English language learners of Mexican origin as part of a university field service requirement. Over the course of a semester, participants were interviewed at length about their own reasons for becoming teachers, their beliefs about the children, and the ways in which race influenced their lives. Participants also were observed tutoring, and their learning journals were analyzed. Through various means of data collection, it became apparent that the good intentions of the participants were consistently undermined by the whiteness and the racism that influenced their beliefs about and behaviors with the children. The researcher consequently decided to intervene in the study, sharing data with participants and encouraging them to see the ways that whiteness and racism influenced their tutoring experience. Critical Race Theory and Critical White Studies together make up the theoretical framework that situates this study.     

“But I’m oppressed too”: white male college students framing racial emotions as facts and recreating racism

Most analyses of racism focus on what people think about issues of race and how this relates to racial stratification. This research applies Feagin’s white racial frame to analyze how White male college students at two universities feel about racism. Students at the academically non-selective and less diverse university tended to be apathetic while those attending the academically selective and more racially diverse campus tended to be angry. This study highlights the interconnectedness of affective and cognitive responses to race: two areas integral to both the maintenance and dismantling of systemic racism. It also highlights how men frequently frame emotions as facts, which can also support racial stratification.     

Consequences of learning about historical racism among European American and African American children

Knowledge about racism is a critical component of educational curricula and contemporary race relations. To examine children's responses to learning about racism, European American (Study 1; N= 48) and African American (Study 2; N= 69) elementary-aged children (ages 6-11) received history lessons that included information about racism experienced by African Americans (racism condition), or otherwise identical lessons that omitted this information (control condition). Children's racial attitudes and cognitive and affective responses to the lessons were assessed. Among European American children, racism condition participants showed less biased attitudes toward African Americans than control condition participants. Among African American children, attitudes did not vary by condition. Children in the two conditions showed several different cognitive and affective responses to the lessons.     

Race,ethnicity and education under New Labour

From 1997 the New Labour government was eager to affirm a commitment to social justice and racial equality, and initially there were moves to address some long‐standing educational grievances. But a continuation of Conservative market policies of choice and diversity in schooling and a targeting of ‘failing’ schools exacerbated school segregation and racial inequalities. Policies intended to improve the achievement of minority groups have had some success, but the higher achievements of Indian and Chinese groups have led to facile comparisons which further pathologise young people of African‐Caribbean and Pakistani origin. Failure to develop a curriculum for a multiethnic society has contributed to an increase in xenophobia and racism, and there were no educational policies to deal with increased hostility towards young Muslims. Home Office policies targeting refugees and asylum seekers have encouraged racial hostility towards their children despite amended race relations legislation.