Recent legislation in Tennessee regarding "divisive concepts" in secondary education negatively impacts teachers. It causes them to question previously taught content for fear that parents or administrators might deem it too controversial, which could put educators' jobs in jeopardy. Secondary educators used various approaches when…

What should U.S. schools teach about U.S. actions abroad when students in the classroom have varied or conflicting memories, ideas, and experiences? Should schools teach the dominant narrative of U.S. benevolence and innocence in world affairs so as to instill patriotism in children? What kind of patriotism are we concerned with here? Or should…

Overwhelmingly, elementary social studies standards focus on Native Americans in past tense. If elementary teachers follow state curriculum for social studies, students are often not provided the opportunity to learn about Native people in the present. The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the number of current state elementary (K-5)…

Peggy McIntosh published "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" in 1989. Thirty years later, I revisit McIntosh's seminal work on White privilege to reframe her discussion to one involving heterosexual privilege, most notably as that privilege affects LGBTQ teachers. I rewrite several of McIntosh's first-person statements to…

How do teacher preparation programs re-culture themselves so that we can supply educational settings with teachers who work toward liberation from racism and other systems of oppression? Abolitionist education is one strategic framework that can be utilized to support this systemic re-culturing. I share my experiences in re-designing and…

Queer is difficult to pin down conceptually; it is willfully disruptive, intentionally destabilizing everything from identity to knowledge to politics to power. The intent of this article is to illuminate some of the ways teacher educators are conceptually connecting queer to transgender identities and experiences in their classroom curriculum and…

In this paper, the authors draw on interview and observational data generated with Black teachers at a public high school in the Black Belt to describe resistance. This work is situated in prior theorizing about pedagogies of resistance (Jaramillo and Carreon, 2014; Patel, 2016; Love, 2019; Givens, 2021) to describe how teachers resisted through…

This article presents popular misconceptions on teaching culturally relevant books and provides strategies that can inform the search, selection, and teaching of books in culturally responsive ways. Informed by relevant research and insights gained from collaboratively teaching a children's literature course at college level, I discuss how the…

This article unfurls in the aftermath of an event where three first grade children at a reputable progressive elementary school were found playing slavery during school recess. As word caught on, parents ignited into a frenzy: some railed against the teacher, others demanded an answer, while still others believed this was precisely the meaning of…

This essay begins by naming liberal forms of multiculturalism as a complicit discourse and theory in the erasure of Indigenous peoples. For example, it troubles the false narrative of the United States as a "nation of immigrants," offered up so frequently as a corrective to the current administration's divisive rhetoric and policies. The…

The impact of the election of a new U.S. president and his far right ideology and agenda has reverberated across the entire world. This new reality calls for all critical equity-seeking educators; multicultural, social justice, culturally responsive, and others to be reflective and engage in deep thinking on ways to respond. Within a framework of…

In this article, Cindy Coe describes how after wrapping up her eighth grade "To Kill a Mockingbird" unit, one of her students came to her about derogatory terms being used around school and expressed that she wanted to do something about it in light of their recent unit. In a meeting with the principal, the student shared her frustration…

Conflicts over territory are about the power to establish dominant cultures in territories and are often accompanied by cultural claims to legitimacy by each side. The cultural claims, or ideologies, are often expressed in terms of "homeland" dwellers versus "intruders." Two recent movies, "Dawn of the Planet of the…

In a 2007 issue of "Multicultural Perspectives," Johnson and Nieto highlighted the need for more deliberate, robust, and balanced conversations regarding disability, especially within the context of multicultural education. Although researchers echo the importance of disability-based discussions and related curriculum, disability…

Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans live within the United States surrounded by misconceptions about their culture and religion, in part because of the limited inclusion of positive contributions by these groups within the social studies curriculum. This article attempts to highlight Arab-American and Muslim-American contributions within the U.S.…