Talking the Talk, but Walking the Walk? The Situatedness, Development, and Enactment of Humanizing Critical Sociocultural Knowledge in Early Career English Teachers

• In Event: Teachers Accepting Educational Responsibility by Foregrounding Humanizing Critical Sociocultural Knowledge Across K–16 Classrooms

Abstract

This paper reports findings on a multi-case study of four early career teachers (ECTs) situated in four unique secondary English Language Arts (ELA) classroom contexts. The study is informed by Brown’s (2013) humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge (HCSK) and Johnson’s (2018) Critical Race English Education (CREE) frameworks in efforts to examine how four ECTs reflect on and articulate their learning on race, racism, and anti-racism and how this knowledge does or does not transfer to classroom instruction. Part of a larger ongoing study, this paper will focus on the situated understandings of culture within the current local context (changing demographics, divisive political ideologies, and rampant colorblind racism and overt racial violence) as situated within a larger, national anti-racism discursive push happening in the summer of 2020 after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers. Also interrogated in this paper and in this study are the methodological approaches cultivated and implemented by the researcher, a critical White female scholar, in order to conduct humanizing, anti-racist research with ECTs of color and their students. As HCSK is situated, taking up Brown’s (2013) lens as a researcher has methodological implications, as HCSK is always evolving based on context.

Emerging findings highlight the all-encompassing and ever-evolving aspect of sociocultural knowledge in this racially turbulent situated context, both methodologically and empirically. White ECTs and the researcher express a need for an ideological rupture from the sociocultural knowledge ubiquitously transferred from a white supremacist cultural psyche, including denouncing family and friends as well as engaging in frought political conversations with said family and friends to no avail. Conversely, the two ECTs of color highlight how their HCSK may be innate due to lived experiences as people of color in a racist society; furthermore, instead of a rupture from family and friends, it is these relationships that tether them to and help evolve their HSCK.

Across all cases is a theme for the need for language - language also situated and all-encompassing and a tool for the development and enactment of HCSK - in order to engage in racial discourse as a member of society and as a teacher in the classroom. Early data analysis points to a white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) aspect of anti-racist performance through language in needing to know the current, situated, and specific terms and working definitions that are currently maintained by the critical sect of society. For example, one white participant admitted that until she knew if she should be saying “Black” or “African-American” she just didn’t say anything, and thus upheld the white supremacist status quo. In considering how these four ELA ECTs construct HCSK of their students based on the HCSK they have developed in and through a time of societal racial turbulence, I also will highlight how these teachers build upon and address HCSK in their classrooms with their students in the Fall of 2020. They can “talk the talk” but will they “walk the walk”?

Author

• Kelli Ann Rushek, Miami University - Oxford