Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this article, we argue that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we begin by examining the linkages between the core practices movement and organizations that advocate market-based solutions to education. We then explore how constructs of practice and improvisation and commitments to equity and justice are taken up, and with what implications and consequences, in core practices scholarship and its applications. In conclusion, we consider how work being done around core practices might contribute to a collective struggle for greater equity and justice in schools and in society.

The African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies states, “The risks that Black and other girls of color confront rarely receive the full attention of researchers, advocates, policymakers, and funders.” The limited awareness of the challenges that Black girls face perpetuates the mischaracterization of their attitudes, abilities, and achievement. Thus, school becomes an inhospitable place where Black girls receive mixed messages about femininity and goodness and are held to unreasonable standards. This study explores how Black girls describe and understand their school experiences as racialized and gendered and the ways a conversation space allows Black girls’ meaning making about and critical examination of individual and collective schooling experiences.

Black girls are more likely to be suspended or expelled through exclusionary discipline than their female counterparts, but continue to be overlooked and understudied. This article presents a case for using critical race feminism and figured worlds as theoretical frameworks for examining the effects of zero tolerance policies on Black girls. We use these frameworks to explore how adults’ implementation of disciplinary policies not only affects the racial and gender identity development of Black girls, but perpetuates anti-Black discipline and represents behavioral responses to White femininity that may not align with Black girls’ femininity and identification with school.

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