(2018). Black Leaders Matter: Agency, Progression and the Sustainability of BME School Leadership in England. Journal for Multicultural Education, v12 n2 p183-196. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate factors that contribute to black male school leaders' career progression and sustenance within the teaching profession. This, because the progression of black and minority ethnic (BME) teachers in Britain has been the subject of much debate. Fewer BME teachers are in leadership roles in education, and there are only 230 BME headteachers of approximately 24,000 primary and secondary headteachers. Design/methodology/approach: The headteachers' professional lives are explored through the lenses of critical race theory and interpretivism. In doing so, it illuminates the journey towards and the realities of a group whose views are currently unrepresented in research on school leadership or that of the experiences of male BME teachers in England. Findings: This study finds that whereas personal agency and determination are largely responsible for keeping these black headteachers in post, "White sanction" (Miller, 2016) has played… [Direct]
(2013). Confessions of a Border-Crossing Brotha-Scholar. International Perspectives on Higher Education Research In this chapter, Douglas draws on his experiences in various educative spaces to share how he utilizes his positionality as a border-crossing brotha-scholar to teach about social justice and racism in university classrooms. In sharing how he employs his unique identity to help students negotiate various ideological borders in his courses, Douglas also models how socially just pedagogical practices can emerge out of who we are. [For the complete volume, "Social Justice Issues and Racism in the College Classroom: Perspectives from Different Voices. International Perspectives on Higher Education Research. Volume 8," see ED591557.]… [Direct]
(2017). Justice-Centered Science Pedagogy: A Catalyst for Academic Achievement and Social Transformation. Science Education, v101 n6 p1034-1060 Nov. Longstanding inequities in science education across the lines of race and class remain the most intractable problem in the field. Justice-centered science pedagogy is introduced as a theoretical framework built on the traditions of critical pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy to address these inequities as components of larger oppressive systems. This study examines how a justice-centered advanced chemistry class in an urban neighborhood high school supported students to succeed academically while taking up urgent issues of social and environmental justice identified by their communities. The findings include evidence that curriculum organized around an issue of environmental racism supported academic achievement that exceeded the expectations of a typical high school chemistry course. The findings also document how the curriculum provided opportunities for students to move beyond academic achievement to position themselves as transformative intellectuals. As transformative… [Direct]
(2015). Evaluate, Analyze, Describe (EAD): Confronting Underlying Issues of Racism and Other Prejudices for Effective Intercultural Communication. IAFOR Journal of Education, v3 n2 p82-93 Sum. Racism and other prejudices have hindered efforts to diversify and further many fields, including education, psychology, politics, law, and healthcare (Race for Opportunity, 2010). Although there are many ways to combat these prejudices, intercultural communication continues to be a vital component in assisting individuals and groups with valuing the past, understanding the present, and preparing for the future of communication in a global society (Sadri and Flammia, 2011, p. 19). This paper provides a brief overview of pertinent research and major theories related to communicating with people of different cultural backgrounds, as well as useful techniques and strategies to use when teaching in international or multinational classrooms, and working or consulting in international or multinational companies, organizations, and educational institutions. It also includes data collected via surveys and interviews that helps to shed light on underlying issues of racism and discontent in… [PDF]
(2022). A Tale of Two Pandemics: Black Family Engagement at the Intersection of Distance Learning and Black Lives Matter. ProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. The recent global pandemic triggered by the spread of COVID-19 left the majority of school systems across the United States moving quickly toward remote learning and hybrid models of education. As school buildings closed, many K-12 school systems adopted a form of whole-school distance learning, leaving students to learn from home and families to support these swift changes. A report released by "Urban District #1" in the Los Angeles area highlighted that Black students remained less active online than their White peers during the early stages of the pandemic. Black students and their families also navigated the country's "racial reckoning" due to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed Black men and women at the hands of the police. This qualitative study was guided by three goals: (1) to understand how Black students and their families experienced distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) to examine how schools attempted to engage… [Direct]
(2013). Activist Educational Research. Qualitative Inquiry, v19 n8 p552-565 Oct. In the field of education, critical theorists, critical pedagogues, and critical race theorists call for academics to engage in activist academic work to promote the social transformation of the material conditions created by racism and other forms of oppression. This article is a response to this call for academics, particularly those in the field of education, to confront inequities resulting from intersecting oppressions such as heterosexism, racism, and sexism as well as to take action to create a more socially just world. Using two years of fieldnotes and interactive interviews, we present a critical co-constructed autoethnography that reviews literature on activist research, offers a critical analysis of our own efforts at activist research and provides a framework for reflecting on the impact of different types of activist research, particularly in the field of education…. [Direct]
(2015). Memoir Pedagogy: Gender Narratives of Violence and Survival. Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, v27 n2 p31-45 Mar. Through our reading of the memoirs of women political prisoners in Morocco, Iraq, and Iran, this article explores the transnational feminist praxis of building solidarity. We cross-read these memoirs in the context of Aboriginal women's encounter with state violence in Canada. This cross-reading and contemplation are intended to trouble the liberal notions of multiculturalism, settlement, and integration and to connect transitions in the lives of women who deal with war, militarism, racism, violence, and poverty. Therefore, the question we address is how to read the memoirs in the context of history and find the missing links between, for instance, colonization and migration, militarization and liberal democracy, racism and multiculturalism? How can we read them in the context of Canadian history and contemporary geopolitical positioning? In this article, we discuss the memoir genre in relation to public pedagogies, describe the memoirs on which we focus, discuss their main themes… [Direct]
(2020). Stealing an Education: On the Precariousness of Justice. Teachers College Record, v122 n2. Background/Context: This article examines a 2011 court case in which an Ohio state court convicted and jailed a poor, single, Black mother of two school-aged children for "stealing an education." Using a false address, the mother, Kelley Williams-Bolar, enrolled her daughters in a public school district that was more privileged and amply resourced than their home district in order to provide her children a "better education." The court's ruling and public opinion on this case (as illustrated through media) serve as the context of this article's analysis. Purpose: Employing Judith Butler's concept of precarity, Jacques Derrida's theory of justice to come, and Hannah Arendt's and Walter Benjamin's ideas about state violence, the article offers a conceptual framework of the precariousness of justice to analyze the implications of this case. Through the precariousness of justice framework, the article examines the ways that racial and class societal inequities… [Direct]
(2019). Incorporating Two-Generation Approaches in Community Change: Lessons from the Family-Centered Community Change. Research Report. Urban Institute The Annie E. Casey Foundation launched Family-Centered Community Change (FCCC) in 2012 to support three local partnerships seeking to help parents and children in high-poverty neighborhoods succeed together. These partnerships, located in Buffalo, New York; Columbus, Ohio; and San Antonio, Texas, are each developing a more integrated set of services, including housing assistance, high-quality education, and job training. Since 2013, the Urban Institute has been evaluating each initiative's design, implementation, and outcomes for families. The theory behind the demonstration is that "two-generation approaches," or coordinating high-quality programs and services for children and parents, can help break intergenerational poverty and move families with low incomes toward greater economic independence. This paper is one of a series of reports based on what we have learned from five years of observations from our research. The three FCCC initiatives provide services including… [PDF]
(2024). From Classroom to Community: Cultivating Critical Consciousness in K-12 Ethnic Studies for Civic and Community Engagement. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, The Claremont Graduate University. The institutionalization of K-12 Ethnic Studies in California Public Schools is the culmination of decades of grassroots community organizing to address inequities between students of color and their advantaged peers. Empirical evidence suggests that K-12 Ethnic Studies courses have positive academic and social outcomes for historically marginalized students, yet limited research documents the pedagogical practices that occur in these courses to develop students' critical consciousness and academic achievement tied to civic and community engagement. Mainstream curricula continue to perpetuate race-neutral pedagogy that does not acknowledge the racialized experiences of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, making it necessary to offer curricula that supports students critical understanding of racism and intersectional forms of oppression. Using statistical analysis (e.g., stepwise regressions) and in-depth semi-structured interviews, this mixed methods… [Direct]
(2020). "Yes, and … ": Continuing the Scholarly Conversation about Teacher Labor in PK-12 Education. Wicked Problems Forum: Teacher Labor in PK-12 Education. Communication Education, v69 n1 p130-134. After nearly 40 years of policy changes since "A Nation at Risk," often without or over the voices of teachers, it seemed that society was on the way to embracing the idea that teachers were interchangeable, over compensated, and largely unnecessary to the process of education. Supreme Court decisions, such as Janus vs. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), have dealt a terrible blow to teacher unions ability to advocate effectively for their students, communities, and profession. However, teachers have started to push back, and have enjoyed success through recent labor movement activism (e.g., Red for Ed) in states such as Illinois, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Colorado. Although teacher advocacy has not been successful everywhere from a policy standpoint, it has started to create a conversation about teacher labor different from the emphasis on skills, accountability, and testing that has been so harmful to teachers and students. For… [Direct]
(2022). Counternarratives as DisCrit Praxis: Disrupting Classroom Master Narratives through Imagined Composite Stories. Teachers College Record, v124 n7 p150-173 Jul. Background/Context: In disability critical race theory (DisCrit) Classroom Ecology, Annamma and Morrison (2018a) offered invaluable direction for teachers by proposing constructs that address racism and ableism within the foundational components of the classroom–curriculum, pedagogy, resistance, and solidarity. These liberatory lenses offered a critical framework to conceptualize and achieve DisCrit-aligned teaching and learning. However, as of yet, critically conscious classroom teachers who seek to make DisCrit live in spaces that serve multiply-marginalized students have no map to operationalize theory into practice. To support the enactment of DisCrit Classroom Ecology, scholarship must authentically partner with classroom teachers who are working with and who have influence over the educational trajectories of multiply-marginalized students. Objective: This article builds on lived practice and imagines liberatory praxis through the use of counternarratives as a methodological… [Direct]
(2014). Examining Whiteness in a Children's Centre. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, v15 n1 p69-80. This article utilises critical whiteness theory to explore the ethnic discourses observed in a children's centre in South London. Whilst critical whiteness has been used as a framework to understand race, racism and multiculturalism in a number of settings, including education, there are few studies that have sought to understand ethnicity in early year's contexts in this way. A key focus of the research was to develop child focused methods that captured the perspectives of three- to five-year-olds on ethnicity through photo-elicitation and walking tours. The article explores the multiple ways that whiteness was performed, constructed and deconstructed by the parents, young children and staff in the centre. The article concludes that further explorations of whiteness in early childhood settings are needed in order to develop strategies that will help to produce a version of whiteness that can play a role in the struggle against racism and offer more multicultural early years and… [Direct]
(2019). Navigating Institutional Racism through Rutgers' School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF) Program. ProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, School of Graduate Studies. This study examined a U.S. based university's peer group for low income students to identify the ways in which the group successfully retains African American, male students despite the low national retention rate of Black male students in higher education. The peer group was assessed through qualitative analysis to understand the ways in which the organization is able to facilitate students' academic and social integration into the university despite their experiences with institutional racism and microaggressions. Using Vincent Tinto's Theory (1975) and Critical Race Theory, this research finds that African American men are better able to retain within the university when the peer group's staff proactively addresses the challenges that the students bring with them into their university experience; facilitates the students' bond with racially similar, male students within the group; and adopts a "like family" approach towards academically and socially supporting students…. [Direct]
(2017). Racial Identity Development of Transracial Adoptees during College: A Narrative Inquiry. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D./HE Dissertation, Azusa Pacific University. This narrative inquiry study focused on the research question: "How do lived experiences during college contribute to racial identity formation of Black or biracial students who were adopted domestically by White parents?" The purpose of the study was to better understand the racial identity development of transracial adoptees (TRA) during the college years. Data consisted of over 35 hours of interviews conducted with five TRA college juniors and seniors using a series of three interview protocols. The first interview focused on childhood and hometown experiences, the second on life experiences during the college years, and the third interview focused on the meaning participants made from the first two sets of questions. Three principle themes emerged from the data, as well as a variety of sub-themes. The first theme was labeled "Difference," with sub-themes of "Fitting in," "Navigating Black Societal Norms," and "Common Experiences."… [Direct]