This book employs a narrative approach to recount and interpret the story of an innovative teaching and learning project about whiteness. By offering a first-hand description of a nationally-recognized, high school-based Youth Participatory Action Research project—The Whiteness Project—this book draws out the conflicts and complexities at the core of white students’ racial identities. Critical of the essentializing frameworks traditionally given to address white privilege, this volume advances a distinctive and theoretically robust account of ‘second-wave critical whiteness pedagogy’.
A New York Times Best Seller "Essential reading for all adults who work with black and brown young people...Filled with exceptional intellectual sophistication and necessary wisdom for the future of education."—Imani Perry, National Book Award Winner author of South To America An award-winning educator offers a much-needed antidote to traditional top-down pedagogy and promises to radically reframe the landscape of urban education for the better Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color, Dr. Christopher Emdin has merged his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America. He takes to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student’s culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning. Putting forth his theory of Reality Pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike—both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally. Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the “Seven Cs” of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education.
What does it mean to be white in today's society? Is whiteness an ethnicity? White Reign tackles questions like these by examining whiteness as a cultural concept that our society has created and exposing the systems that teach us how we think about race, including schools, media, and even cyberspace. These essays examine the construction of white identity and the possibility of reshaping whiteness in a progressive, nonracist manner, presenting a culture of whiteness that can be employed by educators, parents, and citizens concerned with racial justice.
Pushing the boundaries of Asian American educational discourse, this book explores the way a group of first- and second-generation Hmong students created their identities as new Americans in response to their school experiences.
Antiracist work in education has proceeded as if the only social relation at issue is the one between white people and people of color. But what if our antiracist efforts are being undermined by unexamined difficulties and struggles among white people? Whiteness at the Table examines whiteness in the lived experiences of young children, family members, students, teachers, and school administrators. It focuses on racism and antiracism within the context of relationships. Its authors argue that we cannot read or understand whiteness as a phenomenon without attending to the everyday complexities and conflicts of white people’s lives. This edited volume is entitled Whiteness at the Table, then, for at least three reasons. First, the title evokes the origins of this book in the ongoing storytelling and theorizing of the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective—a small collective of antiracist educators, scholars, and activists who have been gathering at its founders’ dining room table for almost a decade. Second, the book’s authors are theorizing whiteness not just in terms of structural aspects of white power, but in terms of how whiteness is reproduced and challenged in the day-to-day interactions and relationships of white people. In this sense, whiteness is always already at the table, and this book seeks to illuminate how and why this is so. Finally, one of the primary aims of Whiteness at the Table is to persuade white people of their moral and political responsibility to bring whiteness—as an explicit topic, as perhaps the most important problem to be solved at this historical moment—to the table. This responsibility to theorize and combat whiteness cannot and should not fall only to people of color.
What does it mean to be young, American, and white at the dawn of the twenty-first century? By exploring this question and revealing the everyday social processes by which high schoolers define white identities, Pamela Perry offers much-needed insights into the social construction of race and whiteness among youth. Through ethnographic research and in-depth interviews of students in two demographically distinct U.S. high schools—one suburban and predominantly white; the other urban, multiracial, and minority white—Perry shares students’ candor about race and self-identification. By examining the meanings students attached (or didn’t attach) to their social lives and everyday cultural practices, including their taste in music and clothes, she shows that the ways white students defined white identity were not only markedly different between the two schools but were considerably diverse and ambiguous within them as well. Challenging reductionist notions of whiteness and white racism, this study suggests how we might go “beyond whiteness” to new directions in antiracist activism and school reform. Shades of White is emblematic of an emerging second wave of whiteness studies that focuses on the racial identity of whites. It will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, as well as to those involved with high school education and antiracist activities.
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
We began the call for this book by asking authors to ideate on activism -to take up and seek to extend- the interbraided values from the Curriculum and Pedagogy group’s espoused mission and vision, collocating activist ideologies, theoretical traditions, and practical orientations as a means of creatively, reflectively, and productively responding to the increasingly dire social moment. This moment is framed by a landscape denigrated beyond even Pinar’s (2004) original declaration of the present-as-nightmare. The current, catastrophic political climate provides challenges and (albeit scant) opportunities for curriculum scholars and workers as we reflect on past and future directions of our field, and grapple with our locations and roles as educators, researchers, practitioners, and beings in the world. These troubled times force us to think critically about our scholarship and pedagogy, our influence on educational practices in multiple registers, and the surrounding communities we claim to serve. This is where the call began: from a desire to think through modern conceptions regarding what counts as activism in the fields of education, curriculum, and pedagogy, and to consider how activist voices and enactments might emerge differently through curriculum and pedagogy writ large. A guiding source of inspiration for this book, weaving among the emerging themes between the collected manuscripts, reflections, and poems, was a passage in Sara Ahmed’s (2013) book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. In this passage, Ahmed works through the complicated relationship between the testimonies of pain that injustice causes, the recognition of this pain, and the potential of these wounds to move us into a different relationship with healing (p. 200). The chapters, reflections, and poems within this volume, thus, effect a collective ideation on how specific cultural politics and deleterious ideological formations – racism, colonialism, homophobia, ableism, to name only a few – persist and mobilize. The authors seek to expose and name some of these injustices, asking readers not only see and hear these experiences, but to inhabit our complicities in their promulgation. It is important to acknowledge that these named social troubles do not exist in isolation, and will enmesh, weave, wind, and entangle with one another. The section headings parallel Ahmed’s (2013) own ideations: testimony, recognition, and wounds, not as a formula to follow as an activist call, or as a model for a means to a more just end, but as a way to engage in these issues as a trope of activist confrontation of readers who are, as many of our authors suggest, complicit in maintaining many of these social troubles. The chapters do not need to be read in any particular order, though the ordering of the chapters moves from the naming of social troubles, to showing how teaching, research, and theory ask us to take a more active role in recognizing and acknowledging the prevalence of these issues, and then theorizing ways to engage the wounds.
An examination of how curriculum choices can perpetuate White supremacy, and radical strategies for how schools and teacher education programs can disrupt and transform racism in education When racist curriculum “goes viral” on social media, it is typically dismissed as an isolated incident from a “bad” teacher. Educator Bree Picower, however, holds that racist curriculum isn’t an anomaly. It’s a systemic problem that reflects how Whiteness is embedded and reproduced in education. In Reading, Writing, and Racism, Picower argues that White teachers must reframe their understanding about race in order to advance racial justice and that this must begin in teacher education programs. Drawing on her experience teaching and developing a program that prepares teachers to focus on social justice and antiracism, Picower demonstrates how teachers’ ideology of race, consciously or unconsciously, shapes how they teach race in the classroom. She also examines current examples of racist curricula that have gone viral to demonstrate how Whiteness is entrenched in schools and how this reinforces racial hierarchies in the younger generation. With a focus on institutional strategies, Picower shows how racial justice can be built into programs across the teacher education pipeline—from admission to induction. By examining the who, what, why, and how of racial justice teacher education, she provides radical possibilities for transforming how teachers think about, and teach about, race in their classrooms.
