Meet Me at the Corner: The Intersection of Literacy Instruction and Race for Urban Education

Abstract

This article focuses on some languaging that occurred during a race event within a literacy lesson involving a racially White, female adult and a racially Black, male child. I analyze an excerpt from this race event, illustrating an approach to race analysis which might be useful to the field of urban education. I ask, “What is the racial significance of this teacher’s language during literacy instruction?” In other words, I am pursuing what a practice theory of race might allow us to know when this alternative account of race is used to examine an observed episode of teaching. Accordingly, I introduce practice of race theory (PRT) and report my race critical discourse analysis of one teacher’s observed instructional language. Findings are relevant to literacy instruction, and future literacy research is recommended, especially in urban education.

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

“…Although Becca scaffolded Brian's developing print literacies during this race event, she did not help Briana racially Black boy who was himself a youth hockey playerwith developing racial literacies during this race event. This also occurred in the lesson that followed (Croom, 2018b). Given the "commonsense" ways that race is imagined and practiced, as we have described throughout this section, and especially the race "evasion practice" of many racially White teachers (Croom, 2018a), it is not surprising that race and racial literacies were bypassed.…”

“…Racial literacies are not new. Indeed, as Croom (2016dCroom ( , 2018b has defined, this necessary and insightful critical practice has been carried out amid multiple, situated forms of race practice without using the term "racial literacies." The concept of racial literacies does, however, make a contribution to practice, policy, and researchone that helps us further understand race and our situated experiences within racialized human societies.…”

“…401-402). We see from this history that even in the early periods of developing what has since become the "commonsense view" of race (Croom, 2016c(Croom, , 2018b, race was contested and even rejected as obscuring truths about human beings. Forster's (1958) own writings illustrate this early rendering of racial literacies: "Most of the old divisions of the human species have long been rejected anyhow.…”

“…Therefore, as with other examples of racialized Western European "discovery," the "New" in New Literacy Studies is a fully situated term. As this begins to illustrate, racial literacies include critical insights about how race is involved with social practices and conceptions of reading and writing (Street, 2011), as well as how literacies are involved with the social practices and conceptions of race (Croom, 2018b). Table 1 illustrates this perspective and relates race and literacy (or literacies) by showing how the racial literacies concept is a critique and expansion of New Literacy Studies.…”

“…With this history and scholarship in mind, when we think about developing racial literacies today, in more operational language, this means developing those 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, 2016c, d;Croom, forthcoming;Hurston, 2018;Jernigan & Daniel, 2011;Literacy Research Association, 2016;Williams, Metzger, Leins, & DeLapp, 2018). Since most of our racially situated experience is oriented by thebaseless and morally bankruptassumption of racially White superiority, racial literacies are counter-oriented by vindicationist, post-White philosophy (Croom, 2016c(Croom, , 2018b. Importantly, whatever the racial identities of the individual persons involved, our racially situated experience is typically oriented by the false assumption of racially White superiority.…”