Toward a framework for critical racial literacy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Racial literacy was introduced in the early twenty-first century and has proliferated as a research framework and methodology. In education research specifically, racial literacy has been used as a foundation for empirical research and as a broader concept informing education practices. Mindful of this wide-ranging approach, a multidisciplinary team conducted a summative content analysis of extant education research explicitly drawing on racial literacy to survey the landscape of its applications and effects. We wanted to catalogue the ways racial literacy informs research in teaching and learning and how racial literacy might be used in 2020 and beyond. Evidence from this analysis illustrated varying ways researchers have viewed and appropriated racial literacy. From these findings, we consider implications of using racial literacy in education research and present an approach that moves towards a more unified and critical embodiment of racial literacy guided by the fact that Black lives and literacies matter.