Anti-racist Education Research Articles

Enhancing racial representation in the curriculum: The case of performing arts programmes at a UK higher education institution

ABSTRACT It is well known that the performing arts industry lacks diversity and that training provision needs to reflect an increasingly racially diverse student body. How to enhance racial representation in performing arts curricula remains an area of conversation. Our university’s Inclusive Curriculum Framework, created and piloted in 2022/23, became the required tool to identify necessary changes to curriculum design, delivery and assessment in the School of Acting. Narrative inquiry was utilised to interview fifteen racially minoritised final year undergraduate and postgraduate students to understand curricula omissions through their training experiences. Findings illuminated learning experiences that lacked racial authenticity, perceived disadvantage in casting decisions and experiences of stereotyping and essentialising. However, their experiences could improve with more external diverse creatives contributing to their learning and developing staff’s racial awareness. Implementing the framework enabled the School of Acting’s staff to identify meaningful actions towards delivering inclusive and anti-racist pedagogies, practices and programmes.

Exploring Antiracist Pedagogies in Project-Based Learning with Preservice Teachers

This exploratory study, grounded in critical race, social-cultural, and critical literacy theories, uses children’s literature as a catalyst for engaging preservice teachers (PSTs) in critical conversations about systemic racism and its impact on curricular and instructional decisions. Integrating tenets from both project-based learning (PBL) and antiracist teaching, we focus on three major practice markers for PSTs: (1) acquiring knowledge of experiences and histories of communities marginalized by society; (2) integrating content and pedagogical knowledge with antibias practices to create a culture of caring and curricular restorative justice; and (3) bridging coursework towards authentic calls to action. We share our experiences as teacher educators alongside an exploration of PSTs perceptions and experiences engaging in an antiracist PBL.

A critical qualitative study to understand current black women medical student perspectives on anti-racist reform in US medical education

ABSTRACT Purpose The US medical education system has a long-standing history of omitting evidence and perpetuating false pseudo-scientific beliefs on the complex and nuanced relationships between race, racism, and health disparities. There is an urgent need to identify and address the historical influence of systemic racism on the current curriculum, organization, and culture of US medical education. The goal of this study was to understand Black women medical student perspectives on race and racism in current medical school training and their recommendations to inform anti-racist action in US medical education. Method The authors conducted a critical qualitative study to understand the perspectives of Black women medical students on issues surrounding race and racism in relation to US medical education. To their knowledge, this is the first study to use qualitative research methods to understand current thinking on the need for anti-racist pedagogy in medical school education among Black women medical students in the US. Results The interviews revealed critical limitations in the teaching of race, racism, and racial disparities, including a lack of historical depth, continuity, and evaluation of this content; lack of actionable guidance to address racial disparities in clinical practice; and dissonance between emerging anti-racist content and national licensing examinations. The qualitative data yielded several anti-racist strategies and practices that can be implemented in US medical schools to redress historical curriculum limitations and better prepare future generations of physicians to care for marginalized populations. Conclusions This study provides actionable feedback on needed reforms to redress US medical school curriculum limitations as it relates to race, racism, and racial disparities.

Preparing Anti-Racist Educators through Critical Transformative Emotional Praxis

In settler-colonial countries like Canada, Whiteness—the customs, beliefs, values, and so on that comprise White culture—is the standard to which all others are compared. Whiteness is woven into the very fabric of our society, working to uphold White supremacy and systemic racism. Education, as part of this system, is also fraught with Whiteness, and its deleterious effects are evident in the persistent inequities experienced by students of Colour. Dismantling Whiteness in education is a daunting task, but one promising solution is to develop anti-racist educators capable of embodying and enacting culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies. However, this requires directly addressing Whiteness in teacher education programs, an endeavour that has proven challenging. As an entry into this topic, this paper explores Whiteness writ large including how it is studied both broadly and within the field of education. Then, approaches to addressing Whiteness in teacher education are reviewed, including what is and is not working. Next, other approaches to teacher education that could ameliorate current efforts to develop anti-racist educators are introduced: transformative learning and critical emotional praxis. Finally, these are woven together in a theory of change to address Whiteness in teacher education and support preservice teachers’ anti-racist development.

Racial Justice Cannot Be Opt-In

Despite a wave of support for anti-racist pedagogy and practices in the spring of 2020, authentic adoption remained limited, signaling an uphill battle during the present era of racial backlash. This brief, which relies on interviews with 55 New York teachers, found that most teachers showed interest in adopting anti-racist approaches but struggled due to limited support from district and local leadership. These findings suggest that large pedagogical shifts, such as anti-racist curriculum and instruction, are unlikely to be achieved without more broad-based and proactive support from administrators at all levels, especially given the ever-increasing politicization of anti-racist teaching.

Representações sociais, racismo e educação

We intend to address, in this production, reflections on the reproduction of racist social representations in the educational field, the bases for identifying ideological mechanisms that produce and reproduce ethnic-racial inequalities. Based on the theoryof social representations formulated by Serge Moscovici and in dialogue with Historical and Dialectical Materialism, the aim is to interpret the power relations and the instruments that promote oppression and exclusion based on the racialization and hierarchization of society as mechanisms of perpetuation of privileges. In this way, we intend to address elements that obstruct an anti-racist education and reproduce segregating actions, highlighting the recent setbacks that marked the conduct of social policies of social and racial inclusion.

Cripistemologies of Teacher Education: Centering Disabled Ways of Knowing in Learning to Teach

Extant research demonstrates the deeply embedded intersections of racism and ableism in school systems. In response, researchers have proposed DisCrit Classroom Ecology as a framework for teaching and learning that rejects the deficit positioning of multiply-marginalized students and reimagines schooling to amplify their assets. However, little is known about the enactment of these pedagogies by disabled and multiply-marginalized teacher candidates (TCs). This study used DisCrit Classroom Ecology and cripistemology as a conceptual frame to examine how four disabled TCs engaged in culture circles to implement anti-ableist and antiracist pedagogy. Our findings show that disabled and multiply-marginalized TCs offered significant insight into the process of learning to teach but also highlighted the ways in which ableism gets normalized as a standard for teaching proficiency, thus creating unique challenges for disabled TCs to navigate. Implications for teacher education and future research are explored.

Possibilities and limitations of ethnoeducation: rethinking antiracist pedagogies in a Colombian elementary school

ABSTRACT This article examines the possibilities and limitations of ethnoeducation for an anti-racist pedagogical practice. It is based on the study of an elementary school in the Colombian city of Cali. Though severe racial discrimination is naturalised in Colombian educational institutions, the school chosen for this study implements a different educational project based on the valorization of Afrocolombian and Indigenous cultures. The study reveals that the implementation of such an educational project enables the students to acquire basic racial literacy and question overt forms of racial discrimination. However, implicit forms of racial bias and internalized racism persist. In that context, we argue that a comprehensive anti-racist educational praxis needs to emphasise the denaturalisation of internalised forms of racism and the visibilization of the structural aspects of racism. As racism has multiple dimensions, it is necessary to design specific pedagogic strategies to address each one of them.

In-Service Educators Making Sense of Risky Literature: The Cultural Politics of Positioning (Con)Texts During a Yearlong Antibias, Antiracist Book Club

Amidst the backdrop of rising censorship legislation, it is important to understand the influence of teachers’ particular contexts on their perceptions of potentially controversial texts and subsequent instructional choices. This study explores five in-service teachers’ acts of positioning observed in year-long antibias antiracist professional book club, which facilitated educators’ access to such texts and opened space for imagining ways to incorporate them into classroom practice. The findings illuminate how teachers positioned their school’s moral framework, their responsibilities towards families, and specific texts as possible for classroom use. Furthermore, this study prompts critical reflection on the role of facilitators in revising contextual storylines while highlighting the persistent challenges of breaking free from entrenched storylines in pursuit of antibias antiracist pedagogy.

Black Bullet in the Gun: Troubling Silence and Silencing in Antiracist Teacher Education

In this Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education essay, Esther O. Ohito considers with Sherry L. Deckman how silence and silencing are experienced corporeally in socioculturally situated spaces, foregrounding their affective contours and material effects in their exploration of emotionally charged dialogues about race and racism in educational settings. Building their narrative around a Black male teacher candidate’s experience in a social justice–oriented teacher preparation program, they reflect on the presence and effects of silence and silencing in that intimate white space. The essay concludes with implications for critical pedagogy relevant to the potentially transformative force of transgressive race talk that counteracts silence and silencing in white spaces.

The Critical Montessori Model

Despite an increase in race-related Montessori research over the past decade, the Montessori community lacks a unified framework to examine the Montessori Method and its philosophy through a critical racial lens. Without explicit discussions or universal training about race and whiteness, the Montessori Method can be interpreted through a color-blind lens unless scholars and practitioners explicitly use a critical racial perspective. This paper proposes the Critical Montessori Model (CMM), which centers high-fidelity Montessori practice—including the Montessori materials, child development, respect for and relationships with children, and observation as a learning tool—encompassed by critical race theory, as a way for researchers and practitioners to interpret the Montessori Method. This theoretical model critiques systems of whiteness and instead proposes centering the lived experiences and knowledge of the BIPOC community, drawing from theories such as culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogy and community cultural wealth (CCW). The hope is that this model will be the start of calibration among critical Montessori research to unify Montessori practitioners in their interpretations of Montessori education and the possibilities it provides for anti-racist education that centers Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). The paper ends with recommendations for future research using the CMM as a framework and calls for more BIPOC voices to be highlighted in the Montessori research community.

They only hate the term: policy branding and the politics of critical race theory

Abstract How does the public form preferences on racialized policy issues that are both widely discussed and broadly misunderstood? This has been the question centering around the sudden attacks on academic terms like “critical race theory” (CRT). I argue that the politicization of, and opinion polarization around, critical race theory is evidence of what I call policy branding, where political parties or organizations brand an arbitrary concept that has national salience into a policy issue. Using a series of original survey experiments, this study shows that one of the primary sources of opposition to critical race theory is the literal use of the term. I juxtapose this with evidence that the education policy issue at the core, antiracist teaching, maintained strong public, bipartisan support. This study has implications for the consequences of political elite capture of academic concepts and ideas.

Call to Action: Integrating Anti-racist Philosophies in Dismantling Racism and Anti-Black Racism in Nursing Education in Canada.

Despite nursing's stated mandate of health equity and social justice, concrete steps to address racism and anti-Black racism in the profession and nursing education remain mainly non-significant and are often seen as performative. It is crucial to implement tangible measures to dismantle racism and anti-Black racism in nursing education to address racial health disparities. Throughout history, nursing education has been shaped by colonial and Eurocentric ideologies, leading to the silencing and erasure of the knowledge, culture, perspectives, and ways of knowing of Black and other racialized communities. Consequently, urgent action is required to dismantle embedded racism and anti-Black racism in the nursing profession. Drawing on anti-racist philosophies, we argue that dismantling racism in nursing education goes beyond superficial discussions of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Instead, it demands a proactive approach to tackle the underlying causes of racial inequities. In this article, we propose several recommendations and implications for nursing educators, researchers, policymakers, and educational institutions to eliminate racism and anti-Black racism in both nursing education and practice. These recommendations include acknowledging the historical and contemporary impacts of racism and anti-Black racism on the health and well-being of Black individuals, engaging in critical self-reflexivity, integrating and prioritizing Black knowledge and perspectives in nursing education, practice, and research, and intentionally adopting anti-racist pedagogy.

FROM THE TRAFFICKERS TO THE OUTSKIRTS: DOMINATION, RESISTANCE AND STRUGGLE

This article examines the subordination of the black population in Brazil from the colonial period to the present day, highlighting the persistence of racist legislation in the Brazilian legal system and the marginalization of Afro-Brazilian voices in literary historiography. Using the interdisciplinary approach of Law and Literature, the research analyzes divergences and convergences in the treatment of Afro-descendants throughout Brazilian history, focusing on the short story A escrava, by Maria Firmina dos Reis. It is argued that Firmina's exclusion from canonical historiographies is a reflection of a political-ideological project rooted in Brazilian Romanticism, whose purpose was to sustain an elitist and Eurocentric national identity. The study concludes by defending the implementation of an anti-racist education, based on Law 10.639/2003, as a way to decolonize knowledge, promoting representation and recognition of Afro-Brazilian contributions in the literary, historical and cultural spheres.

CritSEM: Advancing QuantCrit to Examine Racialized Resegregation in Special Education

The field of education urgently needs research, aligned with QuantCrit, to disrupt the racialized overrepresentation [resegregation] of Black and Latinx students in special education. Our concern about how statistics have been (mis)applied motivated us to consider the possibility of quantitative methods for use in educational research that aims to dismantle white supremacy. Therefore, we developed CritSEM (Critical Structural Equation Modeling) as a methodological intervention for the purpose of telling a Critical Race Counterstory. Specifically, we examined the extent that anti-racist educators can disrupt processes causing the resegregation of Black and Latinx students in special education, using restricted data from the 2011 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Our study concludes with a discussion and implications about working toward an anti-racist special education system and applying QuantCrit in advanced statistical methods.

What Can We Learn from Early Childhood Theory and Practice?

Education doctoral programs have an essential role to play in this moment of American history, as we train, teach, guide, and prepare education professionals to learn, unlearn, and lead as antiracist education activists. EdD program faculty and administrators sit in critical roles and must examine our own antiracist beliefs, while also facilitating anti-racist learning for our doctoral learners, who, in turn, must create anti-racist learning communities where they teach and lead.

Cultural Diversity: Inclusion and Integration Through Education

Society as a whole is complex and contradictory, as is man himself, and it will be vital for the purposes of achieving true inclusion through education to address those problems that constitute discriminatory treatment in different social spaces, such as valuing individuals by the color of their skin. From these perspectives, the objective of the research is to promote anti-racist education by incorporating the historical approach, scientific culture and real humanism as theoretical and practical premises, since in its dialectical unity anti-racism emerges as a value, a purpose of great interest for the Caribbean region, where still in different degrees of intensity there is a tendency to divide society between whites, mestizos and blacks and even non-whites marked by many years of discrimination remain in the lower levels of society.

Analytic autoethnography: Centering students’ linguistic and cultural experiences in assessment

utoethnography is often used as a field research method and by educators to foster intersectionality in, and critical reflection upon, their own pedagogy. However, autoethnography is not commonly used as an assessment tool. There appears to be no literature on its use in a linguistics course, and this paper aims to address that gap. Analytic autoethnography is a productive assessment method for a linguistics course. The goal of analytic autoethnography is to connect one’s lived experience to theoretical concepts and research. I argue that using analytic autoethnography as an assessment method can help students critically reflect on their own lived linguistic and cultural experiences and to connect these to course content. Importantly, I argue that the assessment is more meaningful and more inclusive than standard exams. Additionally, analytic autoethnography is well suited to antiracist teaching as it requires students to examine the ways linguistic privilege and discrimination have affected their own lives and their communities of practice, thereby creating a linguistics classroom that is inclusive of all students’ linguistic and cultural identities. As analytic autoethnography is written using the authors’ native dialect(s) and language(s), it mitigates the privileging of Standard English in the classroom and puts into practice linguistic justice.

Using Bloom’s taxonomy to visualise antiracist teaching strategies

ABSTRACT 2020 marked a surge in the uprisings for racial and social justice in the United States and around the globe. Universities met the moment with aspirations to become antiracist institutions. However, there has often been a disconnect between universities’ antiracist goals and support for educators in their day-to-day instruction. Moreover, many educators – primarily those racialised as White, who have seldom had to consider their racial identity in predominantly White environments – are unfamiliar with antiracist teaching strategies. This essay is for university instructors who are new to antiracist pedagogy but want to use its principles to transform their teaching. It provides an overview of instructional processes and practices organised using Bloom’s taxonomy, a well-known educational framework. The essay concludes with reactions to and implications of the antiracist taxonomy.

Quest for Equity: Using multiple methodologies to promote collaboration and engagement in anti-racism education

This article explores how multiple methodologies can create new spaces to reimagine anti-racism work and enhance engagement in anti-racist education. Through the combination of two methodologies, namely design-based research (DBR) and gamification, the paper describes the design formation of the game Quest for Equity, a collaborative and engaging speaking tool. The game improved player engagement and effective collaboration, while challenging performative and racist practices in higher education. This paper provides methodological contributions such as the unique use of facilitation observation and presents an interesting way to extract elements of multiple research approaches to suit contextual goals, reimagining new solutions to historical and contemporary problems.