(2022). Breaking the Silence Using AsianCrit: Arts-Based Autoethnography of an Asian Immigrant Teacher Educator. Educational Forum, v86 n4 p355-367. This paper uses autoethnographic storytelling to examine the perpetually silenced space I occupy as an Asian immigrant teacher educator in the United States. Guided by four tenets of AsianCrit, I weave together fragments of my lifeworld that both fuel and challenge my position as a teacher educator in the hope of establishing fragile connectivities with other Asian American teachers and expanding the limited presence of Asian American voices in the field of teacher education…. [Direct]
(2022). 'Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't:' Black Parents' Racial Realist School Engagement. Race, Ethnicity and Education, v25 n5 p647-664. Conventional scholarship frames parent involvement in schools as crucial for student success, often depicts Black and Brown parents as under-engaged, and implies their increased engagement would lead to the end of racial disparities in education. This study challenges this traditional discourse and introduces the notion of Racial Realist Parent Engagement. Racial Realist Parent Engagement is a practice and theoretical framing drawn from Derrick Bell's notion of racial realism and a qualitative multicase study of the school engagement experiences of 16 Black parents. These parent participants resisted antiblackness in their children's schools while simultaneously recognizing racism to be a permanent and inevitable aspect of schooling. Racial Realist Parent Engagement shifts parent involvement theory, policy, and practice to a more complex understanding of the purposes and benefits of parent engagement for Black and Brown families — and demands expansive racial justice policy for… [Direct]
(2023). Education Research and Critical Race Praxis: Fieldnotes on "Making It Matter" in New Orleans. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), v36 n1 p42-56. Urban South Grassroots Research Collective for Public Education (USGRC) is a New Orleans-based coalition melding research and grassroots organizing for racial-economic equity. Buras examines her involvement as a scholar activist working in solidarity with community groups to document the effects of the charter school takeover on black public schools and neighborhoods — and push back. Through narrative accounts, Buras illustrates and analyzes USGRC's collective efforts as an instantiation of critical race praxis. Unlike mainstream approaches to scholarship, which treat people and places as data points to be leveraged for academic purposes, USGRC's approach prioritizes the meanings and consequences of research for communities. "Making it matter," Buras argues, requires insurgent scholarship grounded in history, counter-storytelling, place-based knowledge, democratic collaboration, long-term commitment to community, and anti-racist action. Ultimately, she situates USGRC's… [Direct]
(2023). The Clearing: On Black Education Studies and the Problem of "Antiblackness". Harvard Educational Review, v93 n2 p149-172 Sum. In this essay, authors Kihana Miraya Ross and Jarvis R. Givens make their case for a distinct field of education research–Black education studies, which builds on Black studies and education studies. They explore a key analytic in Black education studies, antiblackness, examining its early and more recent uses as an analytic in education research to forward a more holistic understanding of the concept. In doing so, they highlight the relationship between education as a social institution and the sustained manifestation of antiblackness. The authors conclude by considering how and why scholars might employ Black education studies to center Black life and living…. [Direct]
(2023). Family Stories, Counter-Storytelling, and Chronological Overlaying: Exploring Black Historical Consciousness in Elementary Social Studies. Social Studies and the Young Learner, v35 n3 p5-12 Jan-Feb. Social studies in general, and Black history in particular, are marginalized at the elementary level. The ways Black history has been taught are problematic, focusing on either celebrating civil rights heroes or lamenting the oppressive treatment of Black people, thus flattening the rich and varied histories of Black people. An almost singular focus on the civil rights movement excludes other histories, including stories of everyday people–their lives, jobs, means of resistance, collaborations, and accomplishments. Moreover, there is an overwhelming emphasis on oppression and resistance, with less emphasis on culture, beauty, joy, and the full emotionalities of Black people. As a result, children are deprived of learning that captures the full range of humanity within Black histories. In this article, the authors present three alternatives to the traditional instructional approaches to Black history education at the elementary level: family stories/oral histories,… [Direct]
(2023). Newspaper Constructions of the COVID-19 Learning Loss. Critical Education, v14 n4 p42-74. Learning loss due to the pandemic has become a significant global concern. The purpose of this paper is to understand the newspaper coverage of the COVID-19 learning loss. Critical discourse analysis is utilized to analyze (N = 38) newspaper articles. Results include: constructions of youth identities, racialized constructions of youth identities, factualized portrayals of learning loss, and the neoliberal narrative. The pandemic crisis narrative was used to promulgate fear and reinforce the deficit-based portrayals of youth learning. Generalized learning deficiencies and disproportionate impact led to racialized portrayals of loss, stigmatizing youth through decontextualized and ahistorical representations. Factualized portrayals of learning loss took shape through linguistical structure, word choices, data-based emphasis, and an expert narrative. Discourse depicted as fact undergirded the neoliberal narrative and justified the need for increased testing and reform in schools…. [PDF]
(2023). D√≠a de los Muertos: Recognizing Heterogeneity in Latinx Cultural Knowledge. NABE Journal of Research and Practice, v13 n3-4 p68-83. The article examines how a Mexican second grade dual language teacher guided his Latinx bilingual students in exploring D√≠a de los Muertos, a cultural practice. Through the D√≠a de los Muertos project, parents responded in a variety of ways. Some parents learned about D√≠a de los Muertos for the first time, other parents remembered participating in the commemorative practices in their country of origin, while a couple of parents were completely in opposition to the thematic project. A key finding of the qualitative study is that teachers need to recognize and be aware of the heterogeneity of Latinx parents' responses to D√≠a de los Muertos as a cultural practice. Learning parents' perceptions of D√≠a de los Muertos early on can inform the pedagogical practices of implementing the thematic unit…. [Direct]
(2024). Inspiring Critical Consciousness: A Case for a Decolonized Journalism Study Abroad Curriculum. Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, v79 n2 p147-168. This study explores how a study-abroad program that combines journalism best practices in diversity, equity, and inclusion with decolonized curricular materials can foster critical consciousness in journalism education. Against the backdrop of a multiethnic world, growing diversity in student demographics, and a recognition of the lack of diversity in newsrooms and news content, journalism education can explore innovative and radical options to equip future journalists. Data analysis of five cohorts of a journalism study abroad in South Africa finds that using such options translates into journalists-in-training producing news content that reflects a critical consciousness about equity, justice, and colonialism…. [Direct]
(2024). When Anti-CRT Becomes Anti-Care: Navigating Curricular Controversies Amid Voucher-Induced Changes to a Private Religious School Landscape. Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, v27 n3 p55-69. As access to private religious education expands through vouchers, public discourse has positioned these schools as politically neutral spaces. Teachers who seek to ethically care for students are thus placed in a predicament. In this article, we present the fictive case study of a middle school teacher in a suburban Catholic school that has accepted vouchers and consequently undergone significant demographic and political shifts. When the teacher makes a curricular decision that responds in caring and critical ways to their students, they face a wave of parental opinions that call their instruction and ethical aims into question…. [Direct]
(2022). A Case Study of Trust and the Relationships between White Teachers and Their Black Students. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Oakland University. The purpose of this study was to examine whether White teachers' trust in their Black students would stimulate positive teacher-student relationships. One question guided my research: How do White teachers build trust with their Black students? This study used interviews of 5 White middle school teachers and 3 Black middle school students for the data set. Semi-structured interviews and a focus group were conducted to fully understand the lived experience of teachers and students within a middle school setting. All of the teacher participants worked in middle schools where they taught core content classes. Each teacher and student interviewed had at least 1 year experience teaching or attending middle school. Each interview and focus group was recorded via ZOOM and transcribed as soon as possible for accuracy and review. Important statements were extracted from the interview and focus group transcripts resulting in three major themes. Theme one, students and teachers' definition of… [Direct]
(1996). The Future of Academic Freedom. These nine essays address controversial issues of academic freedom and values at the university level. The book, which was derived from two years of debate and lectures presented to national meetings of the American Association of University Professors, is organized in three sections which address such issues as: the purpose of academic freedom, the problem of hate speech, and the ethics of inquiry. The nine essays are: (1) "The Limits of Academic Freedom" (Louis Menand); (2) "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?" (Richard Rorty); (3) "Justifying the Rights of Academic Freedom in the Era of 'Power/Knowledge'" (Thomas L. Haskell); (4) "Academic Freedom and Law: Liberalism, Speech Codes, and Related Problems" (Cass R. Sunstein); (5) "Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech" (Harry Louis Gates Jr.); (6) "Academic Freedom as an Ethical Practice" (Joan W. Scott); (7) "We Need a New Interpretation of…
(2018). Hauntings and Entanglements of Race: Re-Reading the Journals of an Early American Missionary Woman in Hawai'i. Whiteness and Education, v3 n1 p90-102. As a way to develop a more somatic response to race and the legacy of injury and violence towards the first peoples of the Hawaiian nation, this paper's aim is to draw a connection between the early writings of American women to Hawai'i and my own positionality as a feminist scholar in present day Hawai'i. Using a feminist, postcolonial lens, I provide a content analysis of Lucia Holman's diary, which chronicles her journey to Hawai'i in 1820, as one of seven missionary women from the American Missionary Board. Third, I make a case for how archival texts as a lived process of research can move towards a deeper social understanding of race relations within the complexities and colonial injuries of the historical present. Finally, I propose that archival texts can be used in developing a critical anti-racist pedagogy in working with teachers and educators in Hawai'i. The larger question of this project asks if it is possible to produce anti-colonial or anti-oppressive responses from… [Direct]
(2023). Is the Employment of School Resource Officers in High Schools Associated with Black Girls' Discipline Outcomes?. Race, Ethnicity and Education, v26 n3 p398-418. In recent years, the media has highlighted the disrespectful and sometimes violent manner in which SROs respond to Black girls' behaviors. Few studies question how SROs in schools might influence traditional school discipline outcomes such as suspensions for a double minoritized group (race and gender) such as Black girls. Leaning on the Black feminist framework of Intersectionality and QuantCrit and using the most recent data from the Office of Civil Rights (2017-2018) the present study examined if there was an association between a SRO's employment in a school and Black girls' risk of receiving an in-school or out-of-school suspension. The findings indicate that for Black girls, their exposure to an SRO was greatest at urban schools and schools with a racially/ethnically diverse student demographic, and the presence of an SRO was associated with an increase in out-of-school and in-school suspensions for Black girls…. [Direct]
(2023). Addressing Race in English Language Teaching. AILA Review, v36 n1 p64-90. The aim of this paper is to analyze a set of didactic materials developed to teach English as an Additional Language at a Brazilian public school in Rio de Janeiro. Such materials were designed to invite 7th grade students with diverse social, racial, and economic backgrounds to learn about the world and the English language from viewpoints that delineate a decolonial stance (Mignolo, 2010; Kumaravadivelu, 2016; Jansen, 2017). Grounded on the notions of Critical Race Literacy (Ferreira, 2014) and Critical Language Awareness (Alim, 2005), this paper looks into didactic activities built upon emancipatory (Freire, 1996) and transgressive (Pennycook, 2006; hooks, 2013) approaches to Applied Linguistics and Language Education, understanding English Language classrooms as privileged arenas for the construction of ideas on race. The methodological approach is based on the premises of a Dialogical Discourse Analysis (Brait, 2006/2018) to identify centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin,… [Direct]
(2023). Eroding Community Cultural Wealth: How Schooling Devalues Latina/o/x Students' Identity, Pride, and Language. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, v17 n1 p1-31. Educational narratives written by several cohorts of Latina/o/x students in a college-level ethnic studies course, first-year retention program showed how the current hegemonic educational paradigm–with its attendant neo-liberal, colonial, white supremacist and Eurocentric logics– abates the accumulation and employment of community cultural wealth. Specifically, these systemic obstacles impact linguistic, navigational, and resistant capital as Latina/o/x students recount how learning English, feeling othered by classmates and teachers, and internalizing assimilationist and deficit-based ideologies to avoid harassment or mistreatment factored into their educational experiences. Situating community cultural wealth amid the Americanization, deculturalization, or assimilationist projects that have shaped the schooling conditions for students of color better accounts how educational practices, curriculum and spaces can destabilize the range of community cultural wealth competences Yosso… [Direct]