Calls to prepare all teachers to effectively teach multilingual learners are not new. Nevertheless, preservice preparation programs continue to fall short of this goal, despite enormous effort from teacher educators and researchers alike. This commentary leverages this IMRJ special issue on Critical Multilingual Awareness/Critical Consciousness in…

Racial understanding is essential for many reasons, one being that the United States population is growing increasingly diverse while many communities are still racially segregated. At the same time, many white teachers are uncomfortable investigating their racial identities, and do not engage pupils in discussions about race. Using critical…

Working as concerned colleagues grappling with the notion that today's schools reflect the social inequalities that exist in today's society and are often characterized by racial, ethnic, social class, linguistic and cultural diversity with school curricula, instructional strategies, and teacher demographics that rarely reflect this diversity,…

In this article, Andrea Dyrness, Jackquelin Bristol, and Daniel Garzón explore how cultural mentoring with elementary students was enacted by undergraduate and graduate students from minoritized backgrounds attending a predominantly white university. They examine how these mentors engaged with a framework of community cultural wealth and…

The causal-comparative research study examined if academic achievement differs between African American 8th-grade students in schools where they constitute the majority versus the minority in Clarendon County, South Carolina. The research questions investigated 8th-grade African American students' academic performance in English Language Arts and…

Schools, and subsequently teachers, have found themselves at the center of the nation's most recent "culture war." Vitriol over the honest teaching of social studies has been discussed in school board races, state legislatures, national media conversations, and presidential politics. Despite book bans, state laws, political rhetoric,…

This phenomenological study was designed to explore the lived experiences of 11 Black male teachers in predominantly White K-12 public schools. Specifically, the goal was to capture the thoughts and experiences the 11 Black male participants held on racial identity development and persistence as a teacher, and the influence mentoring had on their…

This dissertation study explores the implementation of Project-Based Learning (PBL) in first-grade classrooms and its impact on student engagement. The study emphasizes the importance of collaborative grade-level teams and teacher support in successfully implementing PBL. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach and takes place in a small rural…

Black male teachers (BMEs) make up less than two percent of the entire educator workforce in the U.S. (Clark, 2020; DeRuy, 2016; Eng, 2020; Oakley et al., 2009), and in Florida, Black male elementary teachers (BMETs) comprise about 1.5% of all educators (FLDOE, 2022). Stephens et al. (2019) shared that all children benefit from experiences with…

This article focuses on the experiences of a Black junior faculty while reading, rereading, and reflecting on one children's picturebook--"My Rainbow" that included a multidimensional main character--with preservice teachers (PSTs) to address cultural responsivity within the class.

Purpose: While Black teachers have engaged in racial justice-oriented teaching for centuries and the body of research on racial justice-oriented teachers is growing, very little is known about how teachers come to this work. The purpose of this paper is to focus on where and how Black teachers who teach with racial justice aims learned to engage…

What do Black parents say about the curriculum in a predominantly White independent elementary school in a large urban area? This study explores tensions around topics such as slavery and immigration. While parents did not say they wanted a critical multicultural curriculum, many valued attention to racial diversity. Because parents did not want…

Equity for students includes access to a healthy teacher workforce across all school settings. This study sought to disentangle the role of racial/ethnic (in)congruence in teacher stress from school resources by using propensity score analysis to match Black, Hispanic, and White elementary teachers on individual, classroom, and school…

To better understand the challenges Black boys face, one needs to understand the obstacles they face. The purpose of this study was to focus on the lived experiences of Black boys in predominantly White elementary schools (PWES). My desire in conducting the study was to better understand young Black boys' experiences in a PWES and then use this…

Disparities in exclusionary discipline practices are well-documented; however, variation in Black students' disciplinary experiences across different racial and ethnic school compositions remains understudied. Utilizing a state-wide dataset (N = 769,050 students in J = 1296 schools), we examined student- and school-level factors that contribute to…