Many schools see teaching African American boys as a daunting challenge. However, in many schools the primary focus of Black male children's educational experience is maintaining order and discipline rather than student learning and academic achievement. By the time Black boys reach the 3rd or 4th grade their teachers and other school personnel no…

In this article the author examines the lives of formerly incarcerated African American girls of ages 14-17 who participate in a playwriting and performance program in an urban southeastern American city and who consequently find themselves "betwixt and between" incarcerated and liberated lives. Through interviews with formerly incarcerated girls…

As Filipino Americans continue to struggle academically in our public schools, we must seek alternative frameworks to understand how their historical backgrounds and cultural identities have impacted their educational experience. Filipino Americans have a colonial history that has produced what scholars termed as "colonial mentality", a…

This research explores autobiographies of young women in detention, rehabilitation, and education as counter-stories to the official, institutional stories of their lives. The context of the study is a private detention facility in the United States; the participants are young women aged 15-19 years in a detention classroom; and data for the study…

Recognizing the unprecedented proliferation of prisons in the United States, Blackout Arts Collective (BAC), a grassroots organization working to empower communities of color through the arts, education, and activism, launched a national tour--"Lyrics on Lockdown (LOL): Slamming the Prison Industrial Complex." As a BAC member, I participated in…

This study examines the ways in which playwriting and performance provide tools for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls to prepare for their lives beyond detention centers and probation. In a three-year multi-sited ethnography journeying through regional youth detention centers (RYDCs), a multi-service center serving formerly incarcerated…

Schools provide a context or moral space for youth to develop their identity; however, with the racialized ideology, language and practices that promote Black youth criminality, criminalized schools become a racialized, classed, and gendered moral space that feeds into the school-to-prison pipeline. The criminalization of schools refers to a…

The way in which anti-racist education is currently conceptualized and practiced holds very few benefits for students of color. By using whiteness theory and the politics of identity and difference, many educators have developed pedagogical interventions that are concerned with bringing white students into a consciousness about racism and white…

This study interrogates how understandings about racism and anti-racism are constructed through interactions with students as well as peers in preservice teacher education contexts towards a closer understanding of racial literacy as both a personal and pedagogical tool. Critical race literacy pedagogy--a subset of the approaches known as…

This ethnographic study uses discourse analysis to examine how one White college-educated activist worked in coalition with other White and African American activists to create a "Community Learning Center" for African American residents of a low-income housing project. Dissatisfied with Whiteness theories that mark White activists as privileged…

This article examines the complex social production of white racial identity. Specifically, the author theorizes white people's fear of people of color and make a case for conceiving of white racial identities as profoundly ambivalent. Drawing from a larger ethnographic interview study conducted in a small, rural, white community in the Midwest of…

In education, it is common to put the condition of "safety" around public race dialogue. The authors argue that this procedural rule maintains white comfort zones and becomes a symbolic form of violence experienced by people of color. In other words, they ask, "Safety for whom?" A subtle but fundamental violence is enacted in safe discourses on…

In this article, the authors introduce the epistemological concept of CRiT walking based on critical race theory (CRT). Using performance methodology, an operational extension of critical race theory is introduced as a CRiT walk through academic neighborhoods. The authors recommend openly questioning the structural inequities deeply embedded…

This article is based on a small qualitative case study that examined the perceptions of undergraduate Muslim American and Muslim international female students regarding the campus religious climate in a predominantly Christian four-year research university. Specifically, it seeks to understand the opportunities and challenges of female Muslim…

This article uses empirical data gathered during a pilot study funded by a local education authority to consider Gypsy and Traveller parents' perceptions of education. It examines the changing role of education within the lives of Gypsy and Traveller parents and children reflecting changing social circumstances, in particular how many parents now…