Grounded in critical and emancipatory theories, five critical ethnographies about the lives of children, grandchildren, colleagues, students, and teachers are analyzed and synthesized to illuminate the ways in which individuals are racially socialized over their lifespans. Three propositions for early childhood contexts were apparent across the studies: (1) racial identity and dysconsciousness are learned over time and across multiple spaces; (2) critical racial literacy is a complex, cyclical, and sometimes contradictory process; and (3) critical racial literacy demands acknowledging and confronting blind spots. Building on these propositions, the authors present implications for enacting practices that promote critical racial literacy in early childhood education settings around the globe.
This article features a culturally sustaining practice that many early literacy teachers can adapt and use: la historia de mi nombre/the story of my name. The practice is described in the context of a second‐grade bi/multilingual class as the Latinx students are learning about their names through culturally authentic literature, translanguaging, and writing their name stories.
This article explores parallel findings from two critical ethnographies (Miller in Whiteness, discourse, and early childhood: an ethnographic study of three young children's understandings about race in home and community settings. University of South Carolina, Columbia, 2012; Nash in Blinded by the white: foregrounding race and racism in a literacy course for preservice teachers. University of South Carolina, Columbia, 2012) of white early childhood teacher educators using a critical race stance as they researched race and racism in two contexts: an early childhood education course and home and community settings with the author's own three young children. In each context, the researchers/authors found that participants used discourse to both resist and reify racism. The authors share these findings, offering implications and questions for critical reframing of the socially and historically located meanings of race and racism in early childhood education and teacher education.The teacher education field is rife with promises and commitments to challenging inequities and promoting teaching excellence in diverse, urban settings. Current accreditation and licensure policies mandating attention to issues of diversity have resulted in a sprinkling of courses in urban education, culturally relevant pedagogy, revisions of mission statements, and increased attention to diverse field placements
This article builds a rationale for using the transformative pedagogy of critical race theory (CRT) to reframe early literacy teacher education and create counternarratives to address pervasive issues of inequity among minoritized students. This article also highlights the tensions that resulted from the author's use of such a framework: Preservice teachers enrolled in the author's early literacy methods course expressed feelings that focusing on issues of race and racism was at the expense of their ''literacy training,'' problems accepting the idea that they could be personally biased, and notions that the CRT frame was inapplicable to them because they were at White schools. This article makes practical suggestions for teacher educators' efforts to counter such tensions and use CRT in order to address inequitable practices and meet the needs of minoritized students.
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