Black women have a legacy of pedagogical expertise. However, Black women teachers' mathematics pedagogy remains woefully under-theorized and under-researched. This is to the detriment of Black and Brown mathematics students. Mathematics education in the U.S. mirrors our broader society, which continues to reinscribe patterns of intellectual and…

Young children draw from verbal and nonverbal input to make meaning from texts, a skill that is foundational for later reading comprehension and academic achievement. However, prior studies have focused solely on teachers' verbal input during prekindergarten read-alouds. We examine four Black, female prekindergarten teachers' multimodal enactments…

The current study examines the contribution of racial congruence on young children's speech and language production to determine if African American children produce more or different language with an African American assessor, as opposed to a White assessor. Participants for the current study were selected from a larger group of children…

Over the course of 18 months, I found myself on a journey that began with two research questions based on my wonderings and observations about the lives of the women I witnessed engaging with young Black children in ways that the academic literature had not expounded upon. In this article, I use poetic inquiry to elucidate the liberatory practices…

Diverse children's literature can support understandings of our world as culturally, linguistically, and socially rich. It can cultivate empathy and understanding, and open a dialogic space of possibilities. In this article, we examine how "purposefully selected" children's literature prepares needed conditions for dialogic space:…

There is a slow but growing body of literature on the pedagogies and schooling practices of Black male teachers. However, few of these studies elicit the voices of Black maternal caregivers regarding the ways in which pedagogies and schooling practices support Black boys in early childhood classrooms. In this article, the author uses a…

Concerns about preschool effectiveness have increasingly led to early childhood education policy changes focused on teacher quality. While these reforms intend to ensure children's educational well-being, they rarely consider the impact policies have on teachers. Additionally, child care work is a feminized profession with distinct social…

In the most recent edition of the Handbook of Reading Research, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and colleagues (2020) identify the need to recontextualize critical literacy pedagogy and research in ways that center Black and Indigenous communities. Although critical literacy has a rich tradition in emancipatory work (e.g. Freire, 1996), Thomas et al. argue…

The racialized hostile work environments that many Black women educators experience may lead to their departure from the P-12 schools where they work. Studying the experiences of Black women educators provides a distinct pathway for inquiry due to their positioned intersectionality of gender and race and their percentage of representation within…

This essay uses the concept of the white imaginary to reflect on Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) in education. It examines the field's value but also its limitations, specifically its preoccupation with converting white people as the solution to systemic racism. The conversion approach ignores the fuller structural nature of whiteness and often…

Despite research (Cormier et al., 2022; Lindsay & Hart, 2017) highlighting the positive impact Black male educators have on Black students, and Black male students in particular, the representation of Black, non-Hispanic male teachers in the U.S. public and private K-12 teaching workforce remains notably low at 1.3% (Taie & Lewis, 2022).…

In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the national enrollment rate for pre-k children ages 3 to 4 was 40% (a drop from 54% in 2019; National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). This is partly due to fewer children in the 0-5 age group (23.4 million of 72.8 million children in the United States in 2020; U.S. Census Bureau, 2020).…

There is an alarming rate of students in the United States who struggle to read and do not reach grade-level proficiency before leaving elementary school. Like many school districts across the country, the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) system has turned to the Science of Reading (SoR) to improve student literacy outcomes, and there…

This study explored challenges non-Indigenous educators face in centering Indigenous histories and experiences in anti-racist professional development (PD) workshops for PK-12 educators. It addressed the process of transforming anti-racist PD and the significance of learning from Native American community members. The invisibility of Indigenous…

Teachers' knowledge impacts their practices in classrooms. While considerable research has sought to understand teachers' broad emergent literacy knowledge, less is known about the specific knowledge teachers hold regarding early writing. The present study engaged 66 diverse early childhood teachers in five Head Start programs across two states to…