Adolescents' codevelopment of critical consciousness and social dominance in ethnic studies courses.

There is debate around offering ethnic studies to high school students. Ethnic studies connects learning to students' lives and analyzes the workings of racism to construct avenues toward equity. As the debate unfolds, it is critical to examine ethnic studies' implications for youth development and the mechanisms that link it to student outcomes. One of ethnic studies' long-stated goals is fostering students' critical consciousness. Critical consciousness refers to critical reasoning around inequality (critical reflection), motivation to challenge inequality (critical motivation), and action taken to disrupt inequality (critical action). Little research has examined youth critical consciousness development within ethnic studies-a consciousness-raising system. Consequently, this longitudinal mixed-methods study examines students' critical consciousness development in ethnic studies and sheds light on the contextual characteristics (i.e., critical school socialization) that foster critical consciousness. Analyses of 459 ninth-grade students' (52% girls, 4% nonbinary; 1% Asian, 1% Black, 4% multiracial, 64% Latinx, 7% Native American, 15% described their own race, 7% skipped the question; Mage = 13.92) survey data, and focus group data with 19 students, revealed that ethnic studies-enrolled students grew more in their critical reflection than nonenrolled students. However, the quantitative data demonstrated decreasing critical motivation among all students, whereas the qualitative data suggested emergent critical motivation among ethnic studies-enrolled students. Furthermore, critical school socialization and teacher pedagogy were key to ethnic studies consciousness-raising. Altogether, this study highlights that ethnic studies fosters youth critical consciousness-a worthwhile outcome that should be considered in policy debates about ethnic studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

ABSTRACTWe know little about the challenges districts and teachers face when establishing Ethnic Studies courses. In one school district, variation in teachers’ Ethnic Studies knowledge impeded the production of curricula and its implementation. This study examines how Ethnic Studies teachers responded to the problems of differential knowledge and orientation on race, power, and teacher positionality in the context of high school classrooms. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I argue that a praxis-oriented approach to teacher professional development can play a central role in preparing Ethnic Studies teachers. Through political education and critical race dialogue, teachers developed their critical consciousness, which then led to a collective identity and shared views on major elements of Ethnic Studies’ curricular perspectives and approach. This study holds significant implications for teacher education and professional development as schools, districts, and states create policies to contribute to an equitable and inclusive public education through Ethnic Studies curricula.

This chapter presents school-based action civics interventions as a setting for critical consciousness (CC) development. Action civics programs guide students to take collective action to address locally relevant civic issues within a context that promotes reflection and skills development. We highlight one action civics program, Generation Citizen (GC), and overlay programmatic components with the core elements of CC to elucidate how action civics may support CC development and where the constraints may be. The features of GC that we propose align with CC development are: placing action at the center of the program; fostering critical social analysis and reflection; valuing children's right to participation; and focusing on skill-building. Images of youth-generated action civics presentation posters are used to illustrate aspects of CC. Finally, this chapter offers next steps to bridge across CC and action civics theory, research, and practice.

This article provides a personal reflection on the development of the author's critical consciousness and is meant to trigger debate on the relevance critical consciousness has for adult educators. Freire's stages of consciousness are used to provide a framework for understanding its development. Links between critical consciousness and consciousness raising are examined, and the issue of resistance is explored; these connections are used to discuss praxis involving both thought and action. Examples of the author's actions are used to illustrate how the development of critical consciousness has changed her personal, academic, and professional life. These demonstrate that critical consciousness does not evolve on its own, but rather requires supports that are external to oneself. Résumé Cet article constitue une réflexion personnelle sur le développement de la conscience critique de son auteure et vise à amorcer le débat sur la pertinence de cette conscience pour les éducateurs d'adultes. Les étapes de la conscientisation de Freire fournissent un cadre pour comprendre ce développement. L'on y examine les liens entre la conscience critique et la conscientisation ainsi que la question de la résistance. Ces liens sont utilisés pour analyser la praxis qui implique la pensée et l'action. Des exemples parmi les actions de l'auteur sont utilisés afin d'illustrer comment le développement de la conscience critique a changé sa vie personnelle, académique et professionnelle. Cet exercice montre que la conscience critique n'évolue pas toute seule mats requiert un soutien de soi-même comme de l'extérieur.

This study aims to characterise and understand the manifestation of critical mathematics consciousness (CMC) in the modelling process and the relationships that are established between mathematical modelling as a teaching methodology and the development of critical consciousness. Based on a contextualised topic of interest, the students produced mathematical models, and an improved analytical framework based on education for critical mathematical consciousness was used to analyse the interpretations and validations produced. In addition, a questionnaire was applied to ascertain consciousness at an individual level. The results show that the application of the analytical framework generated insights into the development of critical mathematics consciousness. Furthermore, it was noted that the use of questions seems to help in the development of mathematical modelling by deepening discussions and benefiting the development of CMC. This suggestion contributes to the evolution of CMC, through the reflection on social issues in the production of a model. It appears that mathematical modelling is favourable to the manifestation of CMC.

This article re-stories the navigation of one White female student, Abby, enrolled in a 12thgrade ethnic studies course titled Native American literature. Abby reveals tensions, disruptions, and self-discoveries within a course that recentered Indigenous histories and literacies while, concurrently, decentered dominant knowledge systems. Her story addresses this article’s central question: How does Whiteness operate in an ethnic studies course? Eleven vignettes trace Abby’s critical consciousness development within and beyond this course. Relying on Paris and Alim’s (2014, 2017) culturally sustaining pedagogy and McCarty and Lee’s (2014) culturally revitalizing pedagogy, I offer culturally disruptive pedagogy to argue that as educators, researchers, and community members seek ways to sustain and revitalize cultural practices, we must also consider the ways hegemonic norms—as perpetuated by ideologies of whiteness—require a needed disruption.

Ethnic Studies education is a promising intervention for promoting anti-racism and decolonization and fostering important developmental outcomes. However, little research documents Ethnic Studies course-taking among Asian Americans, who are particularly understudied despite their advocacy for Ethnic Studies and the implications of Asian American racialization for diversity-related educational policy. In this systematic review, we utilize the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory and Asian Critical Race Theory to examine developmental outcomes among Asian Americans enrolled in Ethnic Studies courses. Across 23 records, Asian Americans (ages 7–39) reported six categories of outcomes associated with Ethnic Studies course-taking: ethnic-racial identity, critical consciousness, community and peer relations, family, psychological well-being and emotional experiences, and academic and professional development. Continued research on Ethnic Studies course-taking is needed to understand how education supports outcomes conducive to anti-racism, decolonization, and social transformation.

While schools can perpetuate societal inequities, they can also provide opportunities for students' critical consciousness (CC) development. To gain a comprehensive understanding of CC development in schools and address the potential conflation of individual student perceptions of school climates with their CC, we examined associations between students' and teachers' perceptions of racialized school climates—specifically assimilationism, color-evasion, multiculturalism, and CC —and students' CC of racialized inequities, including critical reflection, motivation, and interpersonal and structural action. Our sample comprised 832 students (M = 15.05 years, SD = 0.75, 44.5% female, 4.2% non-binary) and 198 teachers in 23 secondary schools in Thuringia, Germany, with data collected in 2022. Multilevel path analyses and school-level bivariate correlations revealed that student and teacher reports of CC climate were related to more, and teacher-reported assimilationism to less critical reflection. Effects for color-evasive and multiculturalist climates on various CC facets were mixed, including positive and negative effects across student and teacher reports. To cultivate youth CC as resource and tool for driving transformative change, measures fostering a CC climate should be taken, including social-justice oriented training programs for educators.

Increased interest in anti-racist education has motivated the rapidly growing but politically contentious adoption of ethnic studies (ES) courses in US public schools. A long-standing rationale for ES courses is that their emphasis on culturally relevant and critically engaged content (e.g., social justice, anti-racism, stereotypes, contemporary social movements) has potent effects on student engagement and outcomes. However, the quantitative evidence supporting this claim is limited. In this preregistered regression-discontinuity study, we examine the longer-run impact of a grade 9 ES course offered in the San Francisco Unified School District. Our key confirmatory finding is that assignment to this course significantly increased the probability of high school graduation among students near the grade 8 2.0 grade point average (GPA) threshold used for assigning students to the course. Our exploratory analyses also indicate that assignment increased measures of engagement throughout high school (e.g., attendance) as well as the probability of postsecondary matriculation.

This study tested a theory-based model linking the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on health domains (i.e. work, home life, social life, emotional health, physical distancing) with critical consciousness (CC) development among a diverse sample of 291 Latinx immigrants ages 18–30. Results from global and local fit indices using structural equation modeling (SEM) demonstrated good model fit. Greater pandemic health impact from the COVID-19 pandemic was linked to greater critical reflection and action, but not agency. Tests of indirect effects with bootstrapping showed that CC development among Latinx immigrants took place in ways that align with theoretical postulations.

Critical consciousness (CC) is associated with beneficial developmental outcomes among youth contending with oppression, yet we know little about how CC develops and how the three dimensions of CC (i.e., critical action, critical motivation, and critical reflection) interrelate over time. Therefore, this study employed second-order latent growth modeling to illuminate the longitudinal interplay between the three dimensions of CC among 518 youth activists (Mage = 16; girls = 53%; 11% Asian, 20% Black, 39% Latinx, 8% Multiracial, and 6% White). Youth demonstrated significant growth in critical reflection and action over time, but not in critical motivation. Participation in community-based activism was positively associated with CC development. Altogether, these findings illuminate channels for fostering youth CC and increase our understanding of CC's dynamic development.

Background: In consideration of the central role of motivation to academic (and other) outcomes, the present study is part of a larger two-year project wherein we apply race-reimaged/race-focused perspectives to examine the ways ethnic studies promote motivation outcomes for Latinx youth. In the first year of the project, we examined curiosity as a central outcome in ethnic studies English language arts courses. Here, we focus on findings from the second year, which included social studies classrooms and a focus on self-regulation—a term that describes the behavioral, affective, motivation, and metacognitive processes that play a role in an individual’s efforts to pursue goals. Focus of Study: the research questions we examined in this study focused on the extent to which SDT was related to Latinx high school students’ self-regulation and examined how ethnic studies courses foster self-regulation through support of psychological needs reflected in SDT. We hypothesized that the race-reimaged and race-focused domains of SDT would predict self-regulation and that Latinx students in ethnic studies courses experience enhanced opportunities for autonomy, belonging, ethnic identity, and competence. Research Design: Using a qualitative-dominant sequential explanatory mixed methods design that consisted of two phases, we began with the administration of student surveys (collected in late fall and early spring of the academic year) that reflect the domains of SDT, as well as ethnic identity, for quantitative analyses. We build on the initial findings using qualitative methods that involved a subset of student interviews chosen by purposive extreme-case sampling based on self-regulation scores for students across each teachers’ classrooms during the second phase. Conclusions: Findings revealed significant paths among’ autonomy, ethnic identity, competence and students’ self-regulation. Moreover, both autonomy and ethnic identity were partially mediated by student belonging, which was found to be significantly and directly related to students’ self-regulation. Consistent with self-determination theory, there were medium to large effects in the relationships (r = .28 to .62) among autonomy, ethnic identity, and competence. Qualitative findings corroborated the paths and indicated that aims to promote student ethnic identity is a salient feature of ethnic studies classes that can support students’ motivation. Implications for future research are discussed.

ABSTRACTUsing Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento—a fluid journey of reflection and knowledge production—we examine how two Latina undergraduates experience critical consciousness within an ethnic studies course. We challenge that critical consciousness is an end-all, be-all state by highlighting contradictions in thinking, internal shifts, bodymindspirit, and actions that move us to praxis. These aspects of conocimiento are capable of disrupting dominant ideologies, systems of oppression, and coloniality, allowing for transformative ruptures to occur. We offer conocimiento as a way to underscore the beauty of tensions and transformations found in the processes of critical consciousness and the significant role of ethnic studies for Latinx undergraduates.

An educational praxis that is concerned with citizen formation ought to aim at the development of critical consciousness and critical thinking, but little research has addressed the dynamics of critical consciousness in mathematical modeling activities. This study aims to characterise and understand the manifestation of critical thinking and critical mathematical consciousness in the modeling process and approach the relationship between both. That said, we conducted qualitative research with engineering students who produced mathematical models involving differential equations. We found that critical mathematical consciousness and critical thinking show variations, as there is a greater occurrence of critical thinking to the detriment of critical consciousness. We conclude this study by presenting some implications for critical mathematical consciousness.

In this paper, we describe and reflect upon the development of critical consciousness and workplace democracy within an experimental workplace called DataWorks. Through DataWorks, we hire adults from communities historically minoritized in computing education and data careers, and train them in entry-level data skills developed through work on client projects. In this process, workers gain a range of skills. Some of these skills are technical, such as programming for data analysis; some are managerial, such as scoping and bidding projects; others are social, perhaps even political, such as the ability to say "No" to projects. In what follows, we describe a workshop series developed to build the workers' critical literacy and consciousness about their data work, specifically regarding the use of data in machine learning systems. After that, we describe a data project the workers questioned and resisted because they determined the work to be harmful. In that process, they demonstrated and enacted a critical consciousness towards data and machine learning. Reflecting on this enactment of data-focused critical consciousness, we identify themes that characterize a democratic workplace, describe the work of designing for organizational action and institutional relations, and discuss how worker and researcher positionality affects this work. In doing so, we argue for enabling workers to resist and refuse harmful data work and challenge the standard power structures of academic research and data work.