Introduction

To Ask Questions of the Universe: Confronting Habitus for Racial Equity with Descriptive Inquiry

“…Racism manifests in many and varied actions including but not limited to violent physical and verbal attacks (Love 2019 ), the invisibility and hypervisibility of Black children who are punished more frequently and more aggressively (Ferguson 2001 ; Ife 2017 ; Kendi 2019 ; Lomboy et al 2020 ; Richards et al 2019 , Walker et al 2017 ), reduced likelihood for Black children of being identified as high achievers (Boutte & Bryan 2019 ), and increased likelihood of being affixed with a learning disability (Connor 2017 ). This dehumanization is compounded by the privileging of White students and their experiences (DiAngelo 2018 ; Love 2019 ), dominance of Whiteness and White people in curriculum (Baines, Tisdale & Long 2018 ; Picower 2021 ), and disregard of the home culture and interests of children of color as displayed in curriculum, assessment, and daily treatment (Paris & Alim 2014 ; 2017 ). In fact, often injustice manifests as subtle inequity masked in claims of benevolence (Alexander 2012 ; Love 2018 ; Shalaby 2017 ).…”

“…Often characterized as “microaggressions” we instead use Kendi’s description of these daily and more subtle examples as “racist abuse” (47) to emphasize that these acts are cruel, damaging, and pervasive (Hartman 1997 ; Moten 2017 ). We have made this daily and more subtle abuse our focus as the racism of many teachers falls into this category (DiAngelo 2018 ; Picower 2021 ).…”

“…Therefore, changing teachers’ quotidian conduct will benefit the people in these spaces (Boutte & Bryan 2019 ; Jones & Hagopian 2020 ; Love 2019 ). Teachers have the potential to disrupt racism and improve the daily experiences of the children in their care (Love 2019 ; Picower 2021 ).…”

Active Solidarity: Centering the Demands and Vision of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Teacher Education

“…Concurrently to teaching content and methods, some programs attempt to equip teachers with racial, cultural, and structural analyses of schooling (Sleeter, 2013). There is a growing body of scholarship that argues for a focus on racial justice within teacher education (Ayers, Quinn, & Stovall, 2008; Gorski, Zenkov, Osei-Kofi, & Sapp, 2012; Kumashiro, 2015) concentrated on two main topics: (a) preparing teachers to understand the role of race and racism in the experiences of students and communities and (b) unpacking teacher racial identities as it connects to classroom pedagogy (Picower & Kohli, 2017).…”

Coalitional Resistance: Challenging Racialized and Gendered Oppression in Teacher Education

“…Identity matters in teacher education (TED). While there has been increasing attention to the growing gap between the racial/ethnic diversity of American students and their teachers (Boser, 2011, 2014), there remains little in the literature challenging the Whiteness of TED faculty themselves (Ladson-Billings, 2005) and advocating for the importance of racially diverse TED faculty (Picower & Kohli, 2017). As Asian American (AsAm) women, we, like other women of color (WOC) colleagues, often must fight to participate in White-dominated spaces (Fujiwara & Roshanravan, 2018; Kochiyama, 1997), including TED and academia, generally, which can be hostile spaces for female faculty of color (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al, 2012), dismissive of rich cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992) that come from our experiences and communities.…”