Teacher Agency and the Role of Racial Literacy in Designing and Implementing an Antiracist Curriculum

• In Event: Emancipatory Practices in Antiracist Classrooms

Abstract

Educational researchers still have much to understand about the processes of justice and equity in the middle school literacy curriculum. This paper describes a year-long case study (Yin, 2014) spotlighting how a teacher who identifies as Black designed and implemented a so-called antiracist (Ohito, 2016; Wagner, 2005; Dei, 1996) approach to a 7th grade Humanities curriculum. When this teacher strategically sought out and used texts that foreground racism in his focus to grow students’ racial literacy skills (Epstein & Gist, 2015), his identity was shaped in the dialogical exchange (Bakhtin, 2010) between himself and his students and the selected text.

Author

• Alina Adonyi Pruitt, The University of Texas - Austin