The education system has been heralded as a tool of liberation and simultaneously critiqued as a tool of social control to maintain the oppressive status quo. Critical consciousness (CC), developed by the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, advanced an educational pedagogy to liberate the masses from systemic inequity maintained and perpetuated by…

While a wealth of scholarship has investigated White teachers' abilities to realize the aims of culturally responsive teaching in urban secondary English classrooms, studies that query the canonically-specific challenges teachers face when attempting to actualize equity-driven instruction are less frequently forwarded. To that end, this…

Based on a 3-year ethnographic project at a public elementary school in North Carolina, this article discusses how the concept of racial realism can be useful to researchers trying to live up to the goals of critical race studies in school-based research. Racial realism maintains that racism is a permanent aspect of U.S. society and schools. A…

This paper describes preservice teachers' (PTs) dispositions toward diversity, social justice education, and critical pedagogy (CP). PTs were enrolled in elementary Literacy Methods courses in two geographic locations, one rural and the other urban. We employed CP (Darder et al. in "Critical pedagogy: an introduction." In: Darder A,…