Collaboratively Cultivating Critical Racial Literacy Practices for Teacher Education

Abstract

Engaged in the fifth year of an ongoing self-study community of practice (SSCoP), we recognize schools and curriculum as contexts that produce and maintain racism. As a group of eight white, female teacher educators from different institutions across the United States, we share a common goal of dismantling the structures that operationalize anti-blackness and anti-Black racism by foregrounding racial literacy in teacher education. In this multi-site case study, we used 'critical racial literacy' as an analytic framework and the 'Archeology of Self' as an action-oriented process to examine critical incidents from our monthly discussions of shared readings and journals. We found we needed critical love and humility to reflect and interrupt racism. We noticed we did not engage in exploration of our own beliefs and biases, instead we explored incidents of institutional and systemic racism. We recognize we need to examine ourselves in these contexts and systems. In sharing this study, we seek to call others into mobilizing critical racial literacy and the Archeology of Self, perhaps through SSCoPs, to interrogate and (re)imagine teacher education to work towards antiracism. In doing so, we advocate a global and united movement for more equitable education systems.