(2023). Integrating Qualitative Inquiry and Critical Whiteness in Psychology Research Methods Courses. Teaching of Psychology, v50 n2 p112-118 Apr. Introduction: This paper merges two neglected components within the psychological sciences broadly and research methods courses specifically: Critical whiteness and qualitative methodologies. Statement of the Problem: In psychology programs, regardless of discipline, research courses remain one area where issues of race and racism, such as critical whiteness, are deemphasized. Similarly, methods courses rarely integrate qualitative inquiry and critical theory. Literature Review: First, I briefly review the relevant literature on the state of qualitative research in psychology. I then discuss critical whiteness, contextualizing the idea of whiteness, before moving into a review of the current research on whiteness in psychology. Teaching Implications: I present three experiential learning activities that further students' skill development in qualitative methods while learning about three specific aspects of whiteness. Practicing observations, photovoice, and qualitative coding,… [Direct]
(2023). The Discipline Gatekeeper: Assistant Principals' Experiences with Managing School Discipline in Urban Middle Schools. Urban Education, v58 n8 p1543-1571 Oct. School discipline disparities for African American students in urban schools continue to be a topic of contention. While research has rightfully called into question the practices and preparation of teachers and principals, the role that assistant principals serve as disciplinary gatekeepers has gone relatively unnoticed in the literature. The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of five assistant principals at two urban middle schools to ascertain how they addressed issues of race amid applying school discipline interventions for African American students. The findings are analyzed and discussed through a critical race theoretical framework…. [Direct]
(2023). No More Yellow Perils: Antiracism Teaching and Learning. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, v64 n2 p150-168. The ongoing news about anti-Asian hate crimes prompted us to address racism through art education. In this article, we exemplify a model of antiracism art education implemented through three workshops: (1) Imagining Asians, which adopts an anticolonial pedagogy to destabilize the colonial and racist gaze toward Asians; (2) Animating the Chinese Taotie, which applies critical multicultural art education approaches to contextualize Chinese Shang arts and culture (1600-1046 BCE) and issues of social inequalities; (3) Layering Identity, which follows the cultural competence standards to emphasize the complexity of identity work and raise awareness of diverse identity-based narratives and issues. After explaining the conceptual foundation for each workshop, we describe the individual workshop and showcase selected preservice art teachers' artworks reflecting their informed and empowered interpretation of Asian artifacts and intersectional identity. We conclude that the participants gain… [Direct]
(2023). Racism Plays a Disappearing Act: Discourses of Denial in One Anti-Discrimination Campaign in Higher Education. Whiteness and Education, v8 n2 p229-247. This article responds to a university's anti-discrimination campaign, ostensibly launched to combat racism. Taking up poststructural principles and anchored in anti-racism literature, we employ a discourse analysis to examine the truth productions about racism circulated by the campaign, and the subject positions to which they give rise. We analyse the consequences and possibilities for anti-racist action in the light of our argument that the campaign produced the university as an always already anti-racist space, becoming a means to an end to meaningful action. Through themes of belonging, denial, innocence, colour-blindness, and erasure, we demonstrate that the messaging of the campaign aligns with national narratives about Canadian society as free of racial inequity. We bring readers to consider how an anti-discrimination campaign effectively delegitimised the need for anti-racist action, imploring future initiatives to guard against re-inscribing the very forms of inequality they… [Direct]
(2023). Closing STEM Opportunity Gaps through Critical Approaches to Teaching and Learning for Black Youth. Theory Into Practice, v62 n4 p431-447. This article builds upon prior work by suggesting how public, K-12 education systems across the United States can address longstanding opportunity gaps in STEM education. More specifically, we bring together the work of critical perspectives in education, STEM pathway research, as well as best practices from teaching and learning scholarship. We suggest that through critical, interconnected, and aligned approaches to pedagogy, curricula, and instruction, educators can effectively advance the holistic success of Black youth. We begin by summarizing some of the systemic barriers to STEM pathways for Black students. We then highlight how extant studies have pointed to 3 essential teaching and learning strategies that empower Black youth toward academic, social, and civic engagement. We suggest that through: (1) culturally responsive, relevant, and sustaining pedagogies, (2) problem- and project-based, participatory curricula, and (3) a commitment to civic action and civic engagement, we… [Direct]
(2008). Cultivating a Critical Race Consciousness for African American School Success. Educational Foundations, v22 n1-2 p11-28 Win-Spr. In the field of education, much of the research on Black student achievement focuses on cultural and/or structural explanations for the academic outcomes of these adolescents. A vast amount of the research on Black student achievement perpetuates a continuous discussion of Black underachievement. Race continues to remain central across discussions that include psychological, anthropological, and sociological analyses. While this research highlights individual, environmental, institutional, and societal factors that affect Black students' schooling experiences, there is a lack of in-depth examination of how these factors interact with students' individual identities to shape their attitudes and beliefs about schooling and subsequent school behaviors. This article does not focus on the schooling experiences of urban, Black high school students; rather, it illuminates students' attitudes about race and racism, achievement, and the utility of schooling for upward mobility. In the… [PDF] [Direct]
(2024). Empowering Disabled Voices: A Practical Guide for Methodological Shifts in Biology Education Research. CBE – Life Sciences Education, v23 n3 Research Methods 1. Biology education research provides important guidance for educators aiming to ensure access for disabled students. However, there is still work to be done in developing similar guidelines for research settings. By using critical frameworks that amplify the voices of people facing multiple forms of marginalization, there is potential to transform current biology education research practices. Many biology education researchers are still in the early stages of understanding critical disability frameworks, such as Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit), which consists of seven tenets designed to explore the intersecting experiences of ableism and racism. Our Research Methods Essay uses DisCrit as a model framework and pulls from other related critical disability frameworks to empower disabled voices in biology education research. Drawing from existing scholarship, we discuss how biology education researchers can design, conduct, and share research findings. Additionally, we… [Direct]
(2024). Excavating Hegemonic Rules of Engagement for Women and Queer Students of Color in Academic Spaces. Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, v46 n4 p597-621. In this study, the author examines how persistent exclusionary epistemic norms and practices become internalized as barriers for women and queer students of color to pursuing liberatory learning in justice-oriented academic spaces at traditionally white institutions. Using an epistemic oppression framework rooted in critical race and intersectional feminist perspectives, the author analyzes critical episodes when women and queer students of color felt constrained in their desired participation in an educational foundations learning community to reveal hegemonic rules of academic engagement that operated to stifle their participation. The author argues that these rules, informed by dominant epistemologies and epistemic harms, limit WQSoC license to ask questions, claim their experiential knowledge, and assert critiques from their positionalities toward critical educational praxis. This research has implications for theorizing conditions that explicitly attune to and counter these… [Direct]
(2024). From Strain to Strength: The Stressful Realities and Coping Mechanisms of Black Student Affairs Professionals in Predominantly White Institutions. ProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, University of Georgia. Black student affairs professionals are not the primary group of focus in most empirical studies. Much of the literature about Black people at PWIs in higher education focuses on student and faculty experiences (Wolfe & Dilworth, 2015). The purpose of this narrative qualitative study was to explore experiences and strategies Black student affairs professionals use to cope, work through, and overcome various forms of racism and discrimination at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Through a transformative paradigm, this study utilized BlackCrit (Dumas & Ross, 2016) as a guide to the emancipation of non-dominant groups to uncover stories using sociocultural lenses, as well as The Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), as frameworks to understand how participants expressed navigating through anti-Black environments. Twelve individuals participated in a 60-minute semi-structured interview. The analysis indicated that there are significant… [Direct]
(2022). The Authenticity Trap: A Critical Race Interrogation. About Campus, v27 n4 p13-17 Sep-Oct. The author recounts how they could not "be myself" or be authentic in the same way that White peers could without being stereotyped as anything other than a typical college student. The article endeavors to interrogate the loose, subjective definition of authenticity in higher education as a potentially precarious practice for BIPOC who lack a layer of insulation from a judgment that White colleagues benefit from. It discussed the need to reclaim authenticity beyond the socially constructed and oppressive traditions and create spaces in which BIPOC can experience authentic liberation on their own terms…. [Direct]
(2022). Rac(e)ing to Punishment? Applying Theory to Racial Disparities in Disciplinary Outcomes. Race, Ethnicity and Education, v25 n4 p564-584. In recent decades, racial disparities in K-12 disciplinary outcomes in the United States have garnered considerable attention. Empirical studies have established that schools' discipline policies and practices play an important role; however, the lack of an integrated theoretical framework inhibits the discourse on bias and discrimination as a contributing factor. This study aims to close the gap between theory and empirical evidence by examining the contributors to the racial disparities in disciplinary outcomes through theoretical lenses. Our findings indicate that school discipline approaches that predominantly focus on policing minor and subjective behavior may facilitate racial bias in enforcement. Our results suggest that the racial discipline gap may be the product of the: (a) heightened focus on risk management, (b) cultural and demographic mismatch between the teaching workforce and students, and (c) transmission of dominant values through school discipline policies and… [Direct]
(2022). Impacting Resilience of Black Students through Critically Conscious Institutional Leadership and Policy. Journal of Education, v202 n4 p576-584 Oct. The author develops a conceptual framework that defines characteristics of critically conscious institutions and proposes their effectiveness in the promotion and strengthening of resilience in black students. Black students' development within an anti-black society is framed as a sustained and continuous adversity, and this article expands the critical consciousness conversation by shifting the focus from changes in student characteristics to institutional change, mirroring the shift in resilience literature from a critique of individuals' characteristics to a critique of the interactions between individuals and the proximal and distal environments with which they engage…. [Direct]
(2022). Who Is the One Being Disrespectful? Understanding and Deconstructing the Criminalization of Elementary School Boys of Color. Urban Education, v57 n9 p1592-1620 Nov. This research aims to contribute to understanding what criminalization for boys of color looks like in urban elementary school settings and to offering insights into what we must do to disrupt criminalization in urban schools. Using multiple sources of data from four elementary schools across a 2-year period, we found that boys of color in the study were subjected to criminalization as part of their daily educational experiences. Their bodies and behaviors were hyper-policed, disparately punished, and routinely labeled with criminalizing terms. Furthermore, we found masternarratives framing boys of color as disrespectful and habitually truant to be ambiguous and empirically false…. [Direct]
(2022). "I Think I've Always Thought I Have to Prove Myself": Interpretations, Perceptions, and Teacher Sensemaking at a Distance. ProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, San Jose State University. This grounded theory, constant comparative method study provides a Critical Race Institutional Logics Perspective account of Latina teacher sensemaking of distance learning. Distance learning–while not a particularly new school initiative, school reform effort, or organizational change–brought forth an organizational change that unmasked racist systems and deficit policy models perpetuating persistent, pervasive, disproportionate, low academic achievement for Latinx students. This study looked at how Latina teachers made sense of and enacted distance learning from their own personal values, beliefs, perceptions, and or impressions. Particularly, this study analyzed the role of race and its effects in shaping Latina teacher practice through these perceptions. This study argues that the incongruence between policy and lived experience is not strictly an organizational question, but an epistemological question that is best addressed through a critical analysis of Latina teacher… [Direct]
(2023). Critical Race Structuralism: The Role of Science Education in Teaching Social Justice Issues in Urban Education and Pre-Service Teacher Education Programs. Urban Education, v58 n9 p2209-2238 Nov. Using critical race structuralism (CRS), a new contribution, as well as primary and secondary data, this article explores the role of science in teaching social justice issues in urban education. In the United States, a teaching workforce, which is predominately White, middle class, and female, intersects with an increasingly diverse student population, creating a need for culturally responsive teaching practices, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) classes. An investigation of existing literature reveals the need for greater emphasis on environmental racism and social justice as they pertain to students living in low-income and urban communities. Our findings reveal that CRS can be utilized in a collective effort to transform teacher education programs and teacher pedagogy, to effectively address environmental racism and other social justice issues in urban schools and communities…. [Direct]