Counterstory as Spatial Practice: Embedding Critical Race Theory in Public Schools

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Mapping and Meaning-Making of Location and Movement in Classrooms

Abstract

Based on a 6-year ethnographic project in a public school (City Elementary), this paper discusses how school-based research and professional development efforts can embed critical race theory (CRT), and counterstory in particular, in order to build the spatial awareness necessary to sustain racial equity efforts. Centering the counternarratives of racially literate teachers and administrators of color is fundamental to antiracist community building in desegregated schools and helps to counter the spatial and race-evasive discourses that justify the ongoing segregation of students of color and that hinder racial equity efforts. This paper argues that when counterstory specifically engages critical race forms of spatial analysis, it has the potential to disrupt the dominant discourses that normalize structural and institutional forms of racism.

Author

• Benjamin Blaisdell, East Carolina University