Re-Conceptualizing Race in New York City's High School Social Studies Classrooms

Abstract

In New York State Public Schools, social studies education centers on employing interdisciplinary approaches to help students learn civic values and historical events. Increasingly, due in no small part to the influence of popular culture, social studies education research is making fewer distinctions about racial and ethnic identities. Following some trends in the larger academic community, more of the research in social studies education categorizes ethnically and religiously diverse European and African groups into the narrow categories of White or Black. This practice of flattening diverse European and African groups into current day race frameworks can be problematic when teaching high school social studies, particularly in highly diverse urban centers, because it perpetuates binary racial constructions that both are rooted in the historical fallacy of presentism and tend to contradict the students' ontological realities.

Preparing Paraprofessionals to Become Teachers: A Study Examining the Effect of Catalytic Interventions

“…Regarding the junction of ethnicity and social class in this work, Kao and Thompson (2003) detailed the intersection of ethnicity, class, and immigration status related to educational achievement. More recently, and specific to college-level achievement, Hodara (2012) and Lehner and Ziegler (2019b) described how firstgeneration college students struggle to learn the dispositions and practices necessary for success in college. To take the particular example of reading skills, Ballantyne et al (2008) contended that social class plays a significant role in the development of underachieving freshman college reading.…”

“…CLDs may be Latinx, members of the African diaspora, or members of a smaller immigrant group. Lehner (2007); Lehner et al (2017); Lehner and Ziegler (2019b); and Ziegler and Lehner (2020) described African diaspora students as first-and second-generation students of African descent from various countries who are both adapting to American culture and enrolled in its schools. This work extends the frameworks deployed by Lehner (2007), Lehner (2011), Lehner (2006 by complicating the straightforward descriptions of CLDs into distinct binaries, and Hodara (2012) conception of the academic problems that CLDs face in their academic careers is central in studying this population's progression in teaching careers.…”

Toward Distributive Classroom Management: Cogenerative Dialogue and Cooperative Inquiry

“…Framing this research site's populations as Black, minorities, or students of color results in a poor heuristic and flattens representations of these student populations (Johnson & Lehner, 2021). 1 Consequently, this research uses AD in nearly all cases and employs different descriptors, such as African American, Black, or students of color, only if the cited authors employed such terms (Johnson & Lehner, 2020;Ziegler & Lehner, 2017;Lehner & Ziegler, 2019a).…”