Measuring Parent and Teacher Critical Consciousness

• In Event: Understanding and Responding to Bias from Childhood to Adulthood

Abstract

Critical consciousness (CC) refers to an individual’s awareness of oppressive systemic forces in their society, sense of efficacy to work against oppression, and engagement in anti-oppressive action. Teachers and parents play a key role in socializing CC in young people. However, lack of available measures has hampered empirical research on these key socialization agents; in addition, the literature has not yet capitalized on the potential for parents to report on their children’s CC. This flash talk will present findings from an ongoing study that aims to develop reliable, valid measures of CC aimed at parents and teachers of elementary school aged children. The talk will focus on measure development and mixed methods evaluation of the initial measure. However, large scale quantitative evaluation of the refined measure will be completed in Fall 2022 and the talk will include an update on this work.

Measure Development. Measures in this study were informed by a review of the CC literature, including published CC measures. No existing measure examined all three components of CC: critical reflection, motivation, and action. In addition, no existing measure included items about parenting and teaching roles, general attitudes about child CC, or parents evaluations of their own children’s CC, all of which were of interest in the current study. Our initial measures therefore incorporated both items based on published measures and novel items.
Participants and data collection. Participants were 112 parents and 93 teachers, all of whom completed the CC measure and a demographic questionnaire. In addition, 26 participants completed individual interviews about their CC, their experience completing the measure, and related topics.
Analysis: Analytic procedures included thematic analysis of interviews and analysis of item-level performance using item response theory. In addition, we held an expert roundtable focused on the evaluation and revision of our measures prior to Phase 2.

Findings generally suggested that our novel measures were well-understood by participants and that the majority of items on our measures were representative of the latent construct space and response options were distinguishable to capture variability of the constructs. Items that performed poorly in IRT analyses were generally those that reflected negative action (e.g., discouraging children from discussing race and racism), reverse-coded items that reflected relatively specific negative stereotypes and, conversely, items that reflected broad, general justice-oriented attitudes (e.g., “racial equality should be our ideal”). Thematic analysis indicated several areas in which parents and teachers saw themselves as engaged in critical consciousness that were not reflected in the measures; however, our team determined that most of these did not actually reflect CC (e.g., donating items to a food bank was given as an example of critical action, but donating is not inherently critical) or were highly geographically or demographically specific.

Discussion will emphasize the challenges of developing a measure of CC for use in a demographically diverse national sample of adults. In addition, the implications and challenges of studying a construct that is interwoven with individual moral and political values (for participants and researchers) will be discussed.

Authors

• Amy Heberle, Clark University
  Presenting Author

• Anna Wagner, Clark University

• Alena G Esposito, Clark University

• Andrew Stewart, Clark University