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 Brown life.
Design/methodology/approach
Using abolitionist teaching as a guide, the authors use reflexive thematic analysis to examine the rhetorical moves their preservice teachers made to defer responsibility for anti-racist teaching.
Findings
The findings show preservice teachers’ rhetorical moves across three themes: failure to imagine Black and Brown humanity, failure to imagine a connection between theory and practice, and failure to imagine curriculum and schooling beyond whiteness.
Originality/value
By highlighting how preservice teachers fail to imagine spaces for Black and Brown youth, this study offers another pathway through which teacher educators, teachers and English education programs can assist their faculty and students in activating their imaginations in the pursuit of anti-racist, abolitionist teaching.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how critical literacy practices within a community youth program opened spaces for restoration for youth. In turn, youth created civic conversations about race, juvenile justice and school discipline inequities to enact change within their community.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative study used ethnographic methods such as interviews and observation to collect data from youth, community members and adults who run the youth center. Data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis.
Findings
Youth created spaces of restoration by reclaiming historicized narratives about themselves, their families and their community. Youth engaged critical literacy practices to explore their own identity, critique inequality in their community and work as community organizers to lead adults in conversations for change.
Originality/value
This paper explores how critical literacy practices have restorative value when youth use them in authentic ways to research community problems and work for change.
This article explores a 9-month process of youth research capacity-building, beginning with the training of high school and college aged researchers in qualitative methodologies and concluding with both tentative and comprehensive policy recommendations, at the behest of the youth, for altering the landscape of a major Southeastern city to ensure greater equity of opportunity in particular for minoritized youth and their families. Our analysis led us to consider the ways in which community-engaged youth and their adult partners created a culture of reciprocity and respect as they worked together to train other youth to conduct their own justiceoriented inquiry projects.
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