Constellations of Critical Race Praxis: A Tool to Support Antiracist Teacher Education

• In Event: Critical Literacies, Antiracist Teaching, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Abstract

Anti-racist dispositions do not reliably transfer to teaching practice, and practice-based work doesn’t always take structural racism into account. To support critical teacher educators (TEs) to bridge this divide, we are developing a matrix of knowledge, beliefs, and actions that we hypothesize would, combined in various ways, “add up” to beginning critical race praxis. This framework will support TEs to see and specify various “constellations” of anti-racist knowledge, beliefs, and actions, conjecturing how addressing one element might affect the others and making targeted instructional decisions with the goal of moving candidates more quickly toward critical race praxis. This paper offers a working draft of the framework and unpacks the design process of this tool for critical, practice-based teacher education.

Authors

• Rebecca Gadd, Boston Public Schools

• Laura Jones, University of Michigan