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Race Talk Moves for Racial Literacy in the Elementary Classroom
Abstract
The study examines how a white elementary educator used discursive practices I refer to as “race talk moves” to support students’ racial literacy during whole-class read-alouds. This case study found that the teacher used four moves that have been previously documented in literature discussions: listening, participating, synthesizing, and challenging. Significantly, however, the teacher drew upon these moves in ways that were responsive to students’ racialized identities and emergent understandings of race. Moreover, the analysis identified a new, fifth move, what I call “anchoring,” that supported students in moving from surface-level conceptions of race to a deeper understanding of systemic racism. By actively responding to and deepening students’ racial literacy contributions, anchoring moves illuminate how teachers and students can co-construct critical race knowledge. This study diverges from previous research on the drawbacks of white teachers talking about race to demonstrate the moves teachers can make to support students’ racial literacy development.
... Reading and discussing multicultural literature serve as a common means to initiate conversations about race (Boutte & Muller, 2018;Vlach, 2022). Students respond to critical issues around social and racial justice with critical thinking, reflecting on their racial identities and disrupting hegemonic hierarchies Brooks et al, 2018;Daly, 2022;Epstein & Gist, 2015;Kim, 2010;Price-Dennis et al., 2016;Son, 2020). Discussed later, studies have demonstrated that centering race when reading and discussing literature enhances students' positive racial identity development and fosters their understanding of race as a systemic issue. ...
... However, I found no research to date that explores how Chinese American children negotiate their understandings of anti-Asian racism through literacy engagement. Most of the Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit) studies focus on social studies curriculum , teacher education (Chu, 2024;Daly, 2022), parenthood , autoethnographic studies (Reyes, 2023;Teo, 2023), and international students in higher education (Yao & Mwabgi, 2022). Only a few scholars have explored racial literacy education through the AsianCrit lens, including adult identity negotiation through reading (Kim et al., 2023). ...
Racism’s pervasive influence on People of Color (POC) in the United States is further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to heightened racial stigmatization and violence against Asian Americans. This study, informed by AsianCrit and reader response theories, explores how Chinese American students develop activist agency through reading fiction and relevant texts illustrating the racialized experience of Chinese Americans, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through four students’ participation in a community-based book club and engagement in literacy practices for one year, findings reveal students actively unpack the anti-Asian racism through generating counternarratives and ultimately demonstrate activist stance as they make associations with their everyday realities in their family, community, and schools. The study underscores the crucial need to critically examine and raise awareness about prevailing racial narratives, emphasizing the continuous importance of critical racial literacy education both within and outside schools.
... His newfound pride and understanding reflect the transformative potential that learning Black history, in its entirety, can have on Black students' self-efficacy and engagement in history classes (Childs, 2014;Howard, 2004;Jones, 2024a). Additionally, the participants' stories align with scholarly findings that argue exposing students to conversations about race/ism early in their education is vital for the development of their racial literacy (Daly, 2022), or the knowledges and skills needed to understand and confront unjust realities (Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). ...
... e.g.,Edwards & Derman-Sparks, 2020;Daly, 2022;Ryan & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2018; Van Horn, 2015): ...
Book banning and laws against discussing so-called “divisive concepts” in the United States are limiting what is read to children in schools, even in places without specific legislation. Books by Black and LGBTQIA+ authors and/or about Black or LGBTQIA+ characters are specific targets of the book banning and censorship efforts. The research reported in this article used a case study approach to explore two teacher candidates’ responses to inclusive children’s picture books and their discussions of the books with students in their classrooms during their practicum. The results indicated that the teacher candidates strongly believed in the value of sharing inclusive children’s literature and effectively utilized open-ended questions to spark critical thinking. However, they found it challenging to follow their students’ leads and build on comments in ways that could have resulted in deeper thinking and understanding. More practice, feedback and reflective opportunities are needed during teacher preparation in actual classrooms to improve teacher candidates’ abilities to conduct interactive read-alouds about topics that feel risky. The findings also highlight the need for schools and mentor teachers to model discussions about inclusive children’s books.
Purpose
Film has long been an instructional tool in social studies education; however, most research and methods for using film to teach social studies are situated at the secondary level. As such, the purpose of this study was to extend and expand what is known about using film in elementary social studies classrooms. More specifically, this qualitative content analysis study explored how and why elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs) used film clips from Molly of Denali to design critical Indigenous studies lessons. The data offer insight into the possibilities of using film as a strategy to teach anti-oppressive elementary social studies education.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used qualitative content analysis in this study. Data for this study included 17 lesson planning assignments and corresponding written rationales completed by PSTs in an elementary social studies methods course. Data collected as a result of convenience sampling, given both the authors were the instructors of the methods course. To analyze the data, the authors used a multi-step coding process and a combination of inductive and deductive coding.
Findings
Grounded in a framework of anti-oppressive and anti-colonial education, PSTs designed elementary social studies lessons that used film clips from Molly of Denali to increase representation, center a counter-narrative and serve as a motivator. PSTs also infused other sources into their lesson plans, thus extending their lessons beyond the film.
Originality/value
Given the lack of research on how film can be used in elementary social studies classrooms, this study fills a void in the literature. Results of this study suggest that similar to the benefits of using film in secondary classrooms, film can be an engaging and motivating source of information for elementary students. Moreover, when used within a critical pedagogical framework like Sabzalian's (2019) critical orientations of Indigenous studies, film can increase representation and teach anti-oppressive counter-narratives in the elementary classroom.
Purpose
Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across disciplines. The authors investigate stories in which white English teachers who teach substantial proportions of black students and who self-reported anti-racist goals nevertheless fell short of those goals. The purpose of the study is to understand the tensions between racial liberalism and racial literacy in their pedagogy.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors snowball sampled 12 veteran white high school English teachers (3–27 years’ experience) who taught in schools with substantial proportions of black students. The authors used a two-stage interview process to narrow the sample to 7 teachers who confirmed their anti-racist intentions and who wrote narratives of moments when they tried to be anti-racist, but the lesson failed in some way. The authors used a three-stage narrative analysis to analyze how racial liberalism and racial literacy were reflected in the narratives.
Findings
The veteran English teachers, despite their anti-racist intentions, told narratives that reflected racial liberalism, portraying racism as an individual and interpersonal phenomenon. Some narratives showed teachers who had taken steps toward racial literacy, but no narratives showed a fully developed sense of racial literacy, portraying the layers of institutional and structural racism in English education.
Originality/value
The sample suggests that veteran white English teachers are subject to similar limited racial literacies as novice teachers. While the authors found glimmers of racial literacy, they still note the work necessary to equip veteran English teachers with the racial literacies necessary for anti-racist instruction. The authors propose directions for teacher education, systemic support and professional development.
In educational contexts, including early childhood settings, ableism and racism circulate interdependently to define normalcy and deviance. Book reading offers an important platform for dismantling these interlocking ideologies with young children. In this article, we examine dis/ability and race talk in the context of picture-book reading, analyzing the ways four white, nondisabled teacher candidates attempted to discursively resist deficit-based framings of dis/ability and race with small groups of young children in preschool classrooms. Findings revealed how—despite stated intentions to advance educational justice—teacher candidates drew on discourse models that reinforced status quo notions of normativity. We argue that understanding how teacher candidates navigate dis/ability and race talk with young children in the context of literacy instruction can lend insight into the teacher education experiences needed to support these critical conversations.
This article details a self-study dissecting an interracial group of students' theories of Blackness in a postsecondary classroom. I begin by conceptualizing fugitive literacy practices as tools with which to awaken and animate education as the practice of liberation from whiteness and anti-Blackness. I then approach multimodal essay composition as one such practice and illuminate its application in a classroom. I show how this practice affirmed students as empowered producers of knowledge. I contend that pedagogues must pivot away from the disruption of whiteness and anti-Blackness as a defined target, and turn toward the destruction of both as a desirable goal. I conclude by considering further inquiries that this provocation invites vis-à-vis curriculum and pedagogy in English teacher education.
Purpose
This paper aims to examine how a Black male teacher made sense of the ways racism and white supremacy function in schools and constrains his practice by addressing the question: How does a culturally relevant Black male teacher engage a racial perspective in his pedagogy and make sense of the socio-political context of his practice?
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative case study draws its data from semi-structured interviews and participant observations and was situated within a transfer high school in the Northeastern region of the USA.
Findings
This study elucidates the ways in which a Black male teacher’s racial literacy enabled him to make sense of the socio-political context of his school, the profession and help his Black male students negotiate how they are racialized in schools and society.
Research limitations/implications
This paper closes with a call for additional research that further examines the relationship racial literacy plays in retaining teachers of color in the profession and for racial literacy to be positioned as a vital component of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge in both teacher education and professional development.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature on critical Black male teachers by forwarding a framework that helps us to understand how they engage in transformative work within assimilationist educational spaces.
This review of research examines classroom conversations about race with a theoretical framing oriented to understanding how such conversations may disrupt social and educational inequalities. The review covers research on how classroom conversations on race contribute to students’ and educators’ understandings of a racialized society, their construction of and reflection on relationships among students, as well as to their learning of academic content knowledge. The review considers research across grades P–12, as well as conversations in teacher education, with a specific focus on the U.S. context. Limiting the review to the U.S. context is done not to obfuscate conceptions of race and inequalities globally, but to elucidate how race becomes manifested in unique ways in the United States—often positioning African Americans and Blackness as the “fundamental other.” The review offers a social, historical, and political discussion that contextualizes how classroom conversations, and their omission, are not conversations only relegated to the classroom, but are part of a larger dialogue within the broader society.
There is considerable confusion in contemporary society when it comes to talking about race. Because of this confusion, race talk in schools can be fraught with difficulty, leading to problematic conversations, disconnections, and ultimately student disengagement. While studies in psychology, sociology, and linguistics have considered the role of race in discourse, there have been fewer of these investigations in English education, especially research on the teaching of literature. This article looks closely at the classroom talk of two veteran English teachers-one an African American man, the other a White woman-in a racially diverse high school, showing how teachers employ different strategies to navigate similarly fraught conversations. Taking an interactional ethnographic approach, I demonstrate ways that conversations about race that emerged from literature units in both classrooms opened up opportunities for some students to participate, while constraining and excluding others. The results of the study revealed that the two teachers navigated these dilemmas through tactical and strategic temporary alignments of actions and discourse, but in both classes, silence and evasion characterized moments of racial tension. As a growing number of researchers and teacher educators provide workshops and materials for teachers interested in classroom discourse studies, supporting new and experienced teachers' investigations in this area may ultimately prove fruitful not only for teaching and learning, but also for race relations. © 2015 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
This study investigates the outcomes of two novice preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) attempts at taking up the roles of critical guides (Damico & Apol, 2008) to mediate discussions about racism inresponse to President Barack Obama’s (2008) campaign speech “A More Perfect Union.” With the objective of teaching for social justice, these PSTs initiated their discussions in two senior English classrooms at the same high school located in a predominantly white, economically low-middle-class Midwest community. Profiles of each intern were developed from data comprised of field notes, meeting notes, interviews, video and audio recordings, journal entries, essays, and other artifacts. Framed by Damico and Apol’s (2008) concept for mediating historical risky texts, and grounded in the principles of critical literacy and antiracist pedagogy, this investigation demonstrates that despite their objective to teach social justice, the PSTs enacted discussions that generated shadow texts (Simon, 2000) and perpetuated stereotypes. It suggests that for these PSTs, there may be a disconnection between the theories they learned in their teacher preparation courses and their practical application of such theories in the field.
Cultivating interaction among English Language Learners (ELLs) and their non-ELL peers remains a desirable, yet often elusive, goal. While existing literature documents the challenges of ELL/non-ELL interaction and proposes strategies for overcoming them, there is little research examining concrete episodes of interaction from both the ELL and non-ELL perspectives. In response, I explore how a group of refugee and immigrant high school students (ELLs and non-ELLs) negotiated their interaction while collaboratively creating a digital video. In particular, I consider the role of the “language barrier” and how the participants interacted through and despite language. In the tradition of humanities-oriented educational research, I draw on Levinasian philosophy to reflect on the relational and ethical aspects of ELL/non-ELL interaction. Findings suggest that while language played a key role, communication obstacles tended to defy simple and strategic anticipation and resolution. Negotiation of meaning was often a creative, situated, and multidirectional process. Most importantly, interaction seemed to be ultimately about people in relationship—uncertain and at times uncomfortable, but also full of promise and opportunities for ethical response. I propose opening spaces as a new approach to ELL/non-ELL interaction that foregrounds human and ethical dimensions. Such reframing dislodges the issue from common assumptions which may unwittingly reduce ELLs to a “language problem,” and it honors the potential of participants creatively working out the interaction for themselves. By pursuing insights from both ELLs and non-ELLs, this study offers an important perspective rarely explored in the literature.
Critical race theory has recently been blamed for causing harmful outcomes. Conservative activists are believed to be distorting this theory in order to ban it. The campaign to ban critical race theory has affected many schools across the United States. In some cases, school personnel have resigned because of the way some groups have responded to the debate over banning this theory. New laws that restrict teachers from teaching content that may make students uncomfortable have been passed. Banning critical race theory from K-12 schools is a controversial topic because public school personnel usually do not teach it. The controversy involves the programs that may have to be dropped if this theory is banned. This paper focuses on the origins of critical race theory, the misconceptions about this theory, the campaign to ban it, and the negative outcomes resulting from the movement to ban it. It also includes a description of how some groups are resisting this movement.
This study explores the use of critical conversations in a field-based practicum setting to develop dispositions toward, and understandings of, equitable teaching practices. To date, few studies have examined how mentors and mentees use shared reflection to examine issues of equity alongside learning how to teach. Using self-study methods and discourse analysis, I describe how two mentors and one preservice teacher engaged in five critical conversations across one school year. Critical conversations centered around how to design curriculum and use inclusive teaching practices to serve culturally, linguistically, and racially minoritized students in one fifth grade classroom. Findings indicate the participants used ten discursive strategies to initiate and sustain critical conversations, and issues of race surfaced new tensions that challenged the group’s collaboration. Given the turn toward practice-based teacher education, this study offers insights into the ways mentors and mentees can use critical conversations to mediate field experiences and suggests the need for repurposing existing resources to prepare culturally relevant, antiracist, and equity-focused educators.
Using a framework of critical race theory (CRT), this chapter emphasizes that racial microaggressions in K‐12 schools are mechanisms of institutionalized racism. It explores the dynamic relationship between macro‐ and microracism and offers strategies for researchers and practitioners of K‐12 schools to better reflect upon and transform the way Students of Color experience their education. A step in addressing racial microaggressions on an individualized level is articulating that racism to the perpetrator as naming racism can—at times—facilitate a climate of reflection. Despite the intent of the perpetrator, a seeming compliment or joke can have detrimental impact on People of Color if it embodies racialized stereotypes. Eliminating the existence of racial microaggressions in K‐12 education requires strong racial literacies and positive racial climates where equity, community cultural wealth, and racial justice are constantly reflected in the everyday structures, practices, and interactions of schools.
Many students of color who are also identified as “struggling” readers are likely to have negative experiences in school. In this article, I discuss the findings of a case study examining how reader identities emerged in and through language for such students. The discourse data analyzed here concern an interactional pattern in which the focal students and their teacher collaborated in disrupting identities of deficiency, and instead constructed literate identities within whole-group discussions of text. These findings highlight moments of agency from students marginalized in schools and point toward ways that teachers and students can collaboratively create space for students’ literate voices to be heard.
The rapidly changing landscape of twenty-first century education has sparked intense conversations around the need for a more racially and ethnically diverse PK-12 teacher population. Drawing from critical race theory and racial formation, in this paper, I describe findings from a qualitative case study that examined how a group of black millennial preservice teachers understand race and racism. Findings from the study illuminate that race and racism continue to hold relevance for the participants, even as they recognized generational difference in how these issues operate in past and present social relations. Additionally, as the participants express both sophisticated and simplistic understandings about racism, social media and university spaces allow students to expand their knowledge about race and racism.
Although race remains a controversial, yet pervasive, issue in society and education, practicing teachers may still grapple with whether race should be a central feature of curriculum and related instructional practices, and/or how race should be interrogated in the classroom. In this article, I discuss results from teacher survey data about their views on the relevance of race talk in their classroom; their feelings and beliefs about their preparedness to develop discursive raced opportunities; and whether they believe parents, guardians, and administrators would support such discourse inside of the classroom. Implications for literacy teacher education and teacher development are discussed.
This article examines classroom practices that draw upon students' understandings of race and equity as they engage in critical literature inquiry to explore issues of power in our society. Our research team, comprising a fifth-grade classroom teacher, a doctoral candidate, and a university professor, analyzed students' written and digital projects to better understand what new skills, strategies, and meaning-making opportunities emerge when race is centralized in the curriculum. We documented the various ways students were able to voice their thoughts through multimodal learning in an elementary language arts classroom. © 2016 University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education.
This case study focuses on the relationship between critical language awareness and racial literacy. We explore how one White preservice teacher explored race and racism and engaged her young student, who identified as Black, in a discussion of “whiteness” and “blackness” in a literacy practicum. We focus on three literacy events (a journal entry about white privilege, a literacy lesson with her student, and a debriefing session with her colleagues) to answer our research questions: How does a literacy teacher bring a developing awareness of racism and white privilege to her literacy practices while learning to teach in a practicum? What tools and contexts support her work to analyze, critique and reconstruct her understandings? How might we understand the affordances and constraints of literacy practices? The findings of the study suggest the ways in which CLA works as a tool in breaking a silence about race, providing a diverse set of tools to do so. The case study we present has implications for researchers studying racial literacy through critical approaches to discourse as well as teacher educators and teachers developing practices of racial literacy.
On its fiftieth anniversary, Brown v. Board of Education no longer enjoys the unbridled admiration it once earned from academic commentators. Early on, the conventional wisdom was that the courageous social engineers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDEF), whose inventive lawyering brought the case to fruition, had caused a social revolution. Legal academics and lawyers still widely acclaim the Brown decision as one of the most important Supreme Court cases in the twentieth century, if not since the founding of our constitutional republic. Brown's exalted status in the constitutional canon is unimpeachable, yet over time its legacy has become complicated and ambiguous. The fact is that fifty years later, many of the social, political, and economic problems that the legally trained social engineers thought the Court had addressed through Brown are still deeply embedded in our society. Blacks lag behind whites in multiple measures of educational achievement, and within the black community, boys are falling further behind than girls. In addition, the will to support public education from kindergarten through twelfth grade appears to be eroding despite growing awareness of education's importance in a knowledge-based society. In the Boston metropolitan area in 2003, poor people of color were at least three times more likely than poor whites to live in severely distressed, racially stratified urban neighborhoods. Whereas poor, working-class, and middle-income whites often lived together in economically stable suburban communities, black families with incomes above 20,000 to live in neighborhoods with high rates of crime and concentrations of poverty. Even in the so-called liberal North, race still segregates more than class.
This article examines how secondary English teachers in two racially diverse schools – one in Massachusetts, USA, the other in Ontario, Canada – described their knowledge of and practices for teaching about race and racism. The extent and quality of teachers’ racial literacy knowledge and practice were considered in light of the literature on racial literacy, racial literacy instruction, and anti‐racist education. Three approaches to racial literacy instruction were identified: apprehensive and authorized; incidental and ill‐informed; and sustained and strategic. The paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of teachers’ knowledge and skills in order to suggest content and structures for professional development in support of racial literacy instruction.
ABSTRACTS
There is a pervasive silence in literacy research around matters of race, especially with both young people and white people. In this article we illustrate that young white children can and do talk about race, racism, and antiracism within the context of the literacy curriculum. Using a reconstructed framework for analyzing “white talk,” one that relies on literature in whiteness studies and critical race theory and draws on critical discourse analytic frameworks, we illustrate what talk around race sounds like for white second‐grade students and their teachers. This research makes several contributions to the literature. We provide a detailed method for coding interactional data using critical discourse analysis and a lens from critical race theory and whiteness studies. We also illustrate the instability of racial‐identity formation and the implications for teachers and students when race is addressed in primary classrooms. Ultimately, we argue that racial‐literacy development, like other literate process in the classroom, must be guided.
Existe un silencio persistente en la investigación en alfabetización en cuanto a las cuestiones de raza, especialmente con jóvenes y con blancos. En este artículo mostramos que los niños blancos hablan de raza, racismo y anti‐racismo en el contexto del currículo de alfabetización. Mediante un marco reconstruido para analizar el “habla de los blancos” basado en la literatura sobre los estudios de la “blancura”, la teoría crítica de la raza y el análisis crítico del discurso, ilustramos cómo se percibe el hablar sobre la raza entre estudiantes blancos de segundo grado y sus docentes. Esta investigación hace varias contribuciones a la literatura. Proporcionamos un método detallado para codificar los datos de la interacción usando el análisis crítico del discurso y una perspectiva de la teoría crítica de la raza y los estudios de la “blancura”. También ilustramos la inestabilidad de la formación de la identidad racial y las implicancias para docentes y estudiantes cuando se toca el tema de la raza en la escuela primaria. Por último argumentamos que el desarrollo racial de la alfabetización, como otros procesos educativos en el aula, debe ser guiado.
Es besteht ein hartnäckiges Schweigen in der Schreib‐ und Leseforschung über Rassenangelegenheiten, besonders sowohl bei jungen Leuten als auch unter Weißen. In diesem Artikel zeichnen wir auf, dass junge weiße Kinder über Rasse, Rassismus und Anti‐Rassismus innerhalb des Schreib‐ und Leselehrplankontextes sprechen können und auch sprechen. Durch Anwendung eines rekonstruierten Rahmenwerkes zum Analysieren von „weißem Gerede”, welches aufs Schreiben und Lesen von Studien darüber weiß zu sein und auf einer kritischen Rassentheorie beruht und sich auf den kritischen Diskurs analytischer Rahmenbedingungen beruft, illustrieren wir wie Gespräche um Rassenzugehörigkeit unter weißen Schülern der zweiten Klasse und ihren Lehrern klingen. Diese Untersuchung besteht aus verschiedenen Beiträgen zur Literatur. Wir vermitteln eine detaillierte Methode zum Kodieren von wechselwirksamen Daten unter Nutzung der kritischen Diskursanalyse und einem Bereich kritischer Rassentheorie und der Studien des Weißseins. Ebenfalls illustrieren wir die Instabilität in der rassenzugehörigen Identitätsformation und die Auswirkungen für Lehrer und Schüler, sobald die Rasse in Klassenräumen der Unterstufen angesprochen wird. Schließlich argumentieren wir, dass rassisch bedingte Schreib‐ und Leseentwicklung, wie andere Bildungsprozesse, im Klassenraum anleitend gesteuert werden müssen.
Il y a un silence pesant dans la recherche en lecture‐écriture au sujet des questions de race, notamment quand il s'agit de jeunes et de blancs. Dans cet article nous montrons que de jeunes enfants blancs peuvent parler et parlent effectivement de race, de racisme, et d'anti‐racisme dans le contexte du programme de lecture‐écriture. En utilisant une structure reconstruite pour analyser le « parler blanc », en relation avec la littérature des études blanches et la théorie critique de la race et qui s'inspire des structures analytiques du discours critique, nous montrons à quoi ressemble ce que disent de la race des enfants blancs de seconde année et leurs maîtres. Cette recherche fournit plusieurs contributions à la littérature. Nous apportons une méthode détaillée de codage de données interactives utilisant une analyse critique du discours et une loupe provenant de la théorie critique de la race et des études blanches. Nous montrons également l'instabilité de la formation de l'identité raciale et l'implication des maîtres et des élèves quand il est question de race à l'école primaire. Enfin, nous soutenons que le développement de la lectureé‐criture raciale, comme tout autre processus de lecture‐écriture à l'école, doit être dirigé.
Map: Where anti-critical race theory efforts have reached
- K Alfonseca
The case for capitalizing the “B” in Black
- K A Appiah
July 2). I’m a Black scholar who studies race. Here’s why I capitalize ‘White
- E L Ewing
August 17). I’m a Black feminist. I think call-out culture is toxic
- L Ross