Literacies of Interrogation and Vulnerability: Reimagining Preservice Teacher Preparation Designed to Promote Social Justice in Education

Theory-Practice Divides and the Persistent Challenges of Embedding Tools for Social Justice in a STEM Urban Teacher Residency Program

“…These faculty definitions of social justice show a commitment to student success and a belief that education can be equitably provided in public schools but indicated only limited understandings of broader structural issues or historical contexts that impact the sociopolitical climate in which contemporary urban education takes place. Without additional context, such sincere and well-meaning beliefs can “succumb to deceptive deficit discourses grounded in common stereotypes about families from cultures not positioned as mainstream” (Croom et al, 2019, p. 3). Although a belief in education as a way to provide equitable access and opportunity is one component of social justice teaching, teacher educators must also make deeper connections to the role of schooling in maintaining, rather than dismantling, institutionalized discrimination and oppression.…”

If “Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research,” Then Take This Racial Turn: Developing Racial Literacies

“…), and individually the common sense view of race should be thoroughly rejected. Instead, the consequential social practice view of race more accurately accounts for race in human histories and cultures (Croom et al, 2019).…”

“…As the term itself suggests, racial literacies enable us to critically recognize and re-engineer the “embeddedness and effects of race [practice]” as involved with literacies and, mutually, literacies as involved with race practice (Croom et al, 2019, p. 31; see also Table 1, p.12). Thus, racial literacies are necessary in the field of literacy research for at least three reasons: (a) Consequential racialization is ongoing in human societies; (b) racial meaning involves multiple modes and situated processes that routinely transpire unstated, unexamined, or unaccounted for; and (c) a growing body of scholarship uses the term racial literacy in various ways (e.g., Guinier, 2004; Sealey-Ruiz, 2011; Skerrett, 2011; Stevenson, 2014; Twine, 2004), which indicates that the concept of racial literacies provides coherence to some conceptual clumping in this body of scholarship.…”

“…Thus, racial literacies are necessary in the field of literacy research for at least three reasons: (a) Consequential racialization is ongoing in human societies; (b) racial meaning involves multiple modes and situated processes that routinely transpire unstated, unexamined, or unaccounted for; and (c) a growing body of scholarship uses the term racial literacy in various ways (e.g., Guinier, 2004; Sealey-Ruiz, 2011; Skerrett, 2011; Stevenson, 2014; Twine, 2004), which indicates that the concept of racial literacies provides coherence to some conceptual clumping in this body of scholarship. Very importantly, racial literacies are not new (Bolgatz, 2005; Brown, 2017; Croom, in press; Croom et al, 2019; Du Bois, 1940/2007; Epstein & Gist, 2013; Fanon, 1968; Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003; Guinier, 2004; Hoover, 1990; Horsford, 2014; J. E. King, 1991, 1992; L.…”

Peer-Reviewed Article

“…a biological] definition of race is impossible; it is easy to prove that physical characteristics are not so inherited as to make it possible to divide the world into races; that ability is the monopoly of no known aristocracy; that the possibilities of human development cannot be circumscribed by color, nationality, or any conceivable definition of race; [and yet] all this has nothing to do with the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration particularly of economic power today puts the majority of mankind into a slavery to the rest. (Du Bois, 1940, p. 137;emphasis added) In other words, (1) the common sense view of race is false (Croom, 2020b); (2) despite the fallaciousness of the biological theory of race, the "plain fact" is that race is real in human history and experience (Croom, 2016a(Croom, , 2020c; (3) warranted is an alternative theorization that demystifies race and more accurately accounts for race in human history and (intersecting) human experience (Croom, 2020d); and (4) the ongoing fact of consequential human racialization calls for racial literacies (Croom, 2016a), that is, race critical "ways of thinking and doing that support human well-being amid the various processes that racially situate our lives, and some of these race practices and racial experiences are violence and trauma(tic)" (Croom et al, 2019).…”