Building Racial Competency In White Educators Through The Transformative Act Of Writing

This book argues that the transformative act of writing can be used to strengthen the racial competency of White educators in profound ways, leading them to a more comprehensive consciousness regarding the way their racial identity impacts them personally and professionally. Through detailing the experiences of two White educators who engaged in a practice of deeply reflective personal narrative writing about their racial identity, this book presents written data from the participants and discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the participants’ written work. It also provides a strong, evidence-informed case for using reflective writing as a tool for strengthening the racial competency of White educators in order to positively impact their students, their classrooms, and their greater school communities. Lastly, the book offers writing exercises that can be applied to contexts within and outside the field of education so that readers can start the important work of further developing their racial competency. It will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, faculty, and scholars with interest in whiteness studies and advancing antiracist pedagogies, as well as literacy education and diversity and equity in education.

Learn how to disrupt the reproduction of white supremacy in curriculum and instruction. This volume directly confronts persistent iterations of whiteness in English education through advancing antiracist dispositions and practices. Readers will find a variety of practical implementations of teaching and learning in English Language Arts, English literacy, and English as a Second Language. Chapter authors are educators who describe various teaching projects located in K–12 and teacher education contexts. Each chapter includes a dialogic reaction by an acclaimed and experienced scholar to further extend thought around complex themes. Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education encourages a more pedagogical view of how to engage teacher and student thought, feeling, and action in ways that combat white supremacy in English education across schools and society. Book Features: Illustrates how and why whiteness enables racism and argues that racism harms both students of color and white students.Describes teaching projects from K–12 and teacher education classrooms that include dialogical exchanges with racially and intellectually diverse scholars.Addresses a range of topics, including using children’s books and young adult literature, teaching emergent multilingual students, developing curriculum, and preparing teachers.Provokes readers to imagine nuanced teaching and learning that invites students into antiracist values and dispositions that resist white supremacy. Contributors: Cecilia J. Aragón, Pauli Badenhorst, Carlin Borsheim-Black, Cynthia Brock, Laurie Dymes, Chelsea Escalante, Jill Ewing Flynn, Adison Godfrey, Justin Grinage, Heidi J. Jones, Kelsey R. Jones-Greer, Timothy J. Lensmire , Erin T. Miller, Abigail Rombalski, Spencer Salas, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides, Anna Schick, Jenna Min Shim, Jeanine Staples, Erin B. Stutelberg, Samuel Jaye Tanner, Elise Toedt, Paul F. Walsh

In this compelling anthology, a diverse group of experienced teacher educators and practicing teachers tackle the impact of race and culture on teaching and learning. Sharing their personal experiences, research, and reflections, they focus on the connections among teacher quality, teacher preparation, and the achievement gap for African Americans and other children of color. They address ways that teachers can assess and enhance their own racial and cultural competence and in so doing better educate their students, especially in inner-city schools. Providing an inspiring and practical tool for engaging in successful, meaningful education with K–12 students of color, this stellar group of contributors offers: Concrete ideas and advice on what educators can do to support teachers to become more racially and culturally competent. Multiple perspectives providing a variety of new insights on current research and practice. Honest and thought-provoking personal narratives on race and schooling.

Critical Pedagogy, Race, and Media investigates how popular media offers the potential to radicalise what and how we teach for inclusivity. Bringing together established scholars in the areas of race and pedagogy, this collection offers a unique approach to critical pedagogy by analysing current and historical iterations of race onscreen. The book forms theoretical and methodological bridges between the disciplinary fields of pedagogy, equality studies, and screen studies to explore how we might engage in and critique screen culture for teaching about race. It employs Critical Race Theory and paradigmatic frameworks to address some of the social crises in Higher Education classrooms, forging new understandings of how notions of race are buttressed by popular media. The chapters draw on popular media as a tool to explore the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of racial injustice and are grouped by Black studies, migration studies, Indigenous studies, Latinx studies, and Asian studies. Each chapter addresses diversity and the necessity for teaching to include visual media which is reflective of a myriad of students’ experiences. Offering opportunities for using popular media to teach for inclusion in Higher Education, this critical and timely book will be highly relevant for academics, scholars, and students across interdisciplinary fields such as pedagogy, human geography, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and equality studies.

This timely volume presents powerful stories told by Black families and students who have successfully negotiated a racially fraught, affluent, and diverse suburban school district in America, to illustrate how they have strategically contested sanctioned racist practices and forged a path for students to achieve a high-quality education. Drawing on rich qualitative data collected through interviews and interactions with parents and kin, students, community activists, and educators, Family Engagement in Black Students’ Academic Success chronicles how pride in Black American family history and values, students’ personal capabilities, and their often collective, proactive challenges to systemic and personal racism shape students’ academic engagement. Familial and collective cultural wealth of the Black community emerges as a central driver in students’ successful achievement. Finally, the text puts forward key recommendations to demonstrate how incorporating the knowledge and voices of Black families in school decision making, remaining critically conscious of race and racial history in everyday actions and longer term policy, and pursuing collective strategies for social justice in education, will help eliminate current opportunity gaps, and will counteract the master narrative of underachievement ever-present in America. This volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and academics with an interest in matters of social justice, equity, and equality of opportunity in education for Black Americans. In addition, the text offers key insights for school authorities in building effective working relationships with Black American families to support the high achievement of Black students in K-12 education.

Higher education has recently been recognized as a key driver for societal growth in the Global South and capacity building of African universities is now widely included in donor policies. The question is; how do capacity building projects affect African universities, researchers and students? Universities and their scientific knowledges are often seen to have universal qualities; therefore, capacity building may appear straight forward. Higher Education and Capacity Building in Africa contests such universalistic notions. Inspired by ideas about the ‘geography of scientific knowledge’ it explores what role specific places and relationships have in knowledge production, and analyses how cultural experiences are included and excluded in teaching and research. Thus, the different chapters show how what constitutes legitimate scientific knowledge is negotiated and contested. In doing so, the chapters draw on discussions about the hegemony of Western thought in education and knowledge production. The authors’ own experiences with higher education capacity building and knowledge production are discussed and used to contribute to the reflexive turn and rise of auto-ethnography. This book is a valuable resource for researchers and postgraduate students in education, development studies, African studies and human geography, as well as anthropology and history.

What will it take to create equitable educational opportunities for all students? According to veteran educator Vernita Mayfield, teachers and school leaders need to learn how to recognize culturally embedded narratives about racial hierarchy and dismantle the systems of privilege and the institutions that perpetuate them with knowledge, action, and advocacy. Cultural Competence Now provides a structure to begin meaningful conversations about race, culture, bias, privilege, and power within the time constraints of an ordinary school. The 56 exercises include activities, discussions, and readings in which to engage during each of the four quarters of the school year. School leaders will discover how to facilitate learning through the four steps—awaken and assess; apply and act; analyze and align; advocate and lead—as you and your colleagues * Increase your awareness of privilege and bias. * Adapt your professional practices to meet the needs of all students. * Examine policies and practices that inhibit opportunities for marginalized populations. * Align resources to eradicate inequity in your school. Mayfield offers advice on establishing a safe environment for professional conversations, setting goals for cultural competency, overcoming resistance, reviewing school data and the school's vision and mission through the lens of race and culture, and strategically managing what can be a transformative yet uncomfortable change process. Cultural Competence Now responds to the urgent need to build the cultural competency of educators—for the sake of children and in the interest of supporting and retaining all educators.

In the colorblind era of Post-Civil Rights America, race is often wrongly thought to be irrelevant or, at best, a problem of racist individuals rather than a systemic condition to be confronted. Race, Whiteness, and Education interrupts this dangerous assumption by reaffirming a critical appreciation of the central role that race and racism still play in schools and society. Author Zeus Leonardo’s conceptual engagement of race and whiteness asks questions about its origins, its maintenance, and envisages its future. This book does not simply rehearse exhausted ideas on the relationship among race, class, and education, but instead offers new ways of understanding how multiple social relations interact with one another and of their impact in thinking about a more genuine sense of multiculturalism. By asking fundamental questions about whiteness in schools and society, Race, Whiteness, and Education goes to the heart of race relations and the common sense understandings that sustain it, thus painting a clearer picture of the changing face of racism.