Social media is becoming a professional resource in education as teachers aspire to integrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) into their curriculums and teaching practices (Carpenter, 2019; Hardy, 2014; Oddone, 2019). Previous research records 82% of educators use Instagram; this number implies influencers' ideas are reaching a significant…

Achieving equitable educational outcomes for Black and Brown students was at the core of this research. Scholarly work on the persistence of disparate educational outcomes among Black and Brown students rarely contended with a stunning demographic. While U.S. public school students are increasingly diverse, the teaching force in grades K-5 is…

Increased public scrutiny and outcry over police shootings of unarmed Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to name just two, forced a greater awareness of societal demonizing and criminalizing of Black and Brown people due to racial stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination. This examination of American…

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…

Writer's workshop is a popular curriculum opportunity in most US schools. This case study of two Black boys engaging in a Kindergarten writer's workshop richly contextualizes their writing identities and practices. A critical childhood studies framework was used to show how Black boys and their White teachers improvised writing-related…

First-year composition (FYC) has historically functioned as a space for furthering the linguistic assimilation of students into "appropriate" forms of communication in academic spaces. While often going unstated in course/writing program goals, Standardized American English (SAE) has typically been the language variety elevated in FYC…

The following study addressed the raising of racial consciousness of White teachers within predominantly White settings given prior research indicating limited racial consciousness and the tendency for learning within predominantly White spaces to be someone ineffective and limited. The purpose of this research was to study how a White teachers…

The topic of achievement gaps between students of color and White students is much discussed and analyzed throughout our country. Schools that have a diverse student population and have subgroup achievement gaps are slow to adopt change that can close these gaps. One area schools need to examine is the diversity of their teacher workforce. The…

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to understand how Black undergraduate music education students make meaning of their lived experiences in predominantly White schools of music (PWSOM). The study was guided by the overall research questions: (1) What makes the lived experience of Black undergraduate music education…

This article creates a conversation surrounding teacher education and the ongoing need to relearn, reeducate, and understand social hierarchies in the classroom. Drawing on the concepts of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical Whiteness, this article discusses the pedagogical biases that exist for White teachers working with communities of…

Despite comprising almost 15% of students in U.S. public schools (NCES, 2022), dual-identified students--those classified as requiring both Special Education (SpEd) and English as a Second Language (ESL) services--remain an understudied population. Scholars have pointed to the lack of integrated instructional models that address both language…

This three-article dissertation explores the professional learning interests of veteran K-12 teachers and what those interest reveal about how veteran K-12 teachers are presently supported in the teaching profession. In article 1, data analyses of a mixed-methods survey indicated that veteran K-12 teachers in the Urban Public School (UPS) district…

In the chaos and upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been hard to keep a focus on race and equity in schools. And yet in this time of disruption of the very notion of what it means to be a teacher and how teachers do school, keeping race and equity at the center of this work is essential. In this time of exhaustion and uncertainty,…

Teachers in urban schools experience stress and burnout at levels that significantly impact their mental health and occupational functioning, and contribute to alarming rates of attrition. The current mixed-methods study employed a sample of 162 predominantly White and female urban teachers in the United States to examine the role of personal and…

Black children can no longer afford for school and district leaders to overlook and excuse the ignorance and/or blatant racism of its teachers and administrative colleagues. To meet the challenge of racial inequities in the classroom and beyond, White educators must be prophetic in their practice, and that requires that they be political.