Purpose: Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across disciplines. The authors investigate stories in which white English teachers who teach substantial proportions of black students and who self-reported anti-racist…

Purpose: There is a pressing need to teach students how to talk critically about race to understand the personal and political implications of racism in the contemporary US society. Classroom race talk, however, often includes moments of discomfort or confusion as teachers and students navigate new norms for making sense of race and racism. The…

Purpose: This paper aims to highlight a reconstructive lens on one white teacher's critical approach to teaching literacy. This work equally highlights the importance of anti-racist approach to critical pedagogies centered on a humanizing ethic of cariño. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on portraiture and qualitative methods, this paper uses…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways that their efforts and shortcomings shaped both teacher agency and classroom spaces. Design/methodology/approach: This study's methodology centers participants'…

Purpose: This paper aims to identify how white preservice teachers' inability to imagine an equitable space for Black and Brown children contributes to the ubiquity of whiteness in English education. Further, the authors contend that the preservice teachers' responses mirror how the larger field of English education fails to imagine Black and…

Purpose: This qualitative research study examines classroom observations and transcripts, teacher and student interviews and student writing to investigate how white English teachers can cultivate students' critical literacies regarding race and oppression through classroom literature. As research and practice in the field of critical literacy has…

Purpose: Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the cultivation of anti-racist practices with pre- and in-service teachers in post-secondary contexts, and the tensions of engaging in this work for equity and justice in urban teacher education. Design/methodology/approach: The paper relies on critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies (CWS), as…