‘That really hit me hard’: moving beyond passive anti‐racism to engage with critical race literacy pedagogy

Abstract

This study interrogates how understandings about racism and anti‐racism are constructed through interactions with students as well as peers in preservice teacher education contexts towards a closer understanding of racial literacy as both a personal and pedagogical tool. Critical race literacy pedagogy – a subset of the approaches known as multicultural education, culturally responsive teaching, and anti‐racist teaching – is a set of tools to practice racial literacy in school settings with children, peers, colleagues, and so forth. In this article, I explore the construction of critical race literacy pedagogy for one white preservice teacher in a U.S. teacher education program through two engagements with literacy pedagogy: a reading lesson with two African American students and the discussion of a children's literature text in a teacher education book club. Through the critical, mediated discourse analysis of these two engagements, we see that for Kelly, the process of enacting racial literacy in a reading lesson required anti‐racist discourse patterns not yet available to her; whereas in the book club, interviews, and written reflections she was able to articulate what it means to practice racial literacy, pinpoint the breakdown of her pedagogy, and develop what it means to be ‘actively’ anti‐racist as a literacy teacher. The findings of this study suggest the complexity of the roles and the variety of paths available for white teachers who desire to be anti‐racist teachers. Ultimately, the findings indicate that we do not need only to prepare teachers for identities that ‘transcend’ predictable ways of being white but to construct a more complete framework for what it means to practice racial literacy in educational contexts.