Subverting White Social Studies Through Racial Literacy and Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give

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

Abstract

Many teacher education programs fail to adequately develop white preservice elementary teachers as racially literate educators, leading them to reify and uphold white supremacy in the social studies curricula, a pedagogy termed white social studies (Chandler & Branscombe, 2015). This paper discusses racial literacy development as a disruption of white social studies that took place in an elementary social studies methods course at a predominantly white institution in the fall of 2018. Results urge teacher educators to foreground racial literacy development with an emphasis on the exploration of emotionalities of whiteness with white preservice elementary teachers in methods instruction.

Authors

• Riley Drake, Iowa State University

• Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, University of Colorado - Boulder