Overt and Covert Anti-Racist Pedagogies: Student Memories from Secondary and Postsecondary Schooling

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 7:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Toward an Abolitionist Leadership Theory: Concepts and Cases of Anti-Racist Educational Leadership

Abstract

Drawing from Betina Love’s (2019) abolitionist teaching and critical race theory (CRT) (Ladson-Billings, 2020), this research examines how institutional schooling either enacts or neglects antiracist practice. It also highlights how racial consciousness emerges through informal, peer-generated spaces often overlooked by traditional educational leadership frameworks. The researcher employs an interpretive qualitative study, situated within a critical and abolitionist paradigm. Data were collected through three semi-structured focus groups with racially and ethnically minoritized undergraduates (n = 8), guided by questions about their experiences with anti-racist and abolitionist pedagogy. A flexible protocol allowed conversations to evolve organically, illuminating how students made sense of race, learning, and belonging across formal and informal contexts. Thematic analysis was conducted using an inductive coding approach, influenced by phenomenology methods, to identify recurring patterns of memory, perception, and racial engagement. Results indicated that students struggled to recall formal instruction rooted in anti-racist or abolitionist pedagogy. However, they described rich, ungraded, and student-led conversations about race, equity, and justice outside the formal curriculum and instead within peer groups, campus cultural centers, and student organizations. These covert spaces of racial learning offered emotional safety and critical reflection, and were often more meaningful than formal instruction. When overt pedagogical efforts were present, they were usually experienced as performative or inconsistent. This disconnect challenges education leaders to critically assess whether their equity efforts are structurally embedded or merely symbolic.

Author

• Marcus Johnson, Virginia Tech