The purpose of this collaborative reflective article is to explore the promises and problems of whites-only anti-racist groups. Throughout the article, the authors analyze such groups by applying three lenses to a set of critiques of whites-only anti-racist groups: (1) critical race theory (CRT); (2) journaled experiences of the first two authors…

Contemporary activists and scholars have framed how Black males are faced with constant policing and killing of Black bodies by White police officers (Coates, 2015) and how Black boys are being sent to punishment rooms in urban schools (Ferguson, 2000). Therefore it is not surprising that teaching in our politically and racially charged times can…

This article is the third in a series of narrative studies of leaders in the field of multicultural education researched and written by Cheryl Hunter and several of her graduate students at the University of North Dakota. The first in the series featuring Marybeth Gasman appeared in the Fall 2017 issue, the second featuring Gloria Ladson-Billings…

Safety and school culture are both reinforced through a school's disciplinary system. However, when disciplinary action is decided, it would be remiss to assume that the choices made are always objective. A wide range of student needs and behaviors may present themselves in any given school classroom, and at times, the student or family…

The curricular choices educators make when selecting certain words over others, adding or omitting certain characters, or using a curriculum that tells a story from a certain or single perspective will meaningfully determine which prisms or conceptualizations students cultivate to understand the world. The authors believe that expressions of Black…

In this article, the author argues that questions about race should be raised in elementary social studies teacher education in order to better prepare teachers to enter their classrooms. In this study she explores how elementary pre-service teachers situate race within the social studies curriculum and how prepared they feel about discussing race…

This article is the first in a series of narrative studies of leaders in the field of multicultural education researched and written by Cheryl Hunter and several of her graduate students at the University of North Dakota. Other articles in the series will appear in future issues of "Multicultural Education." Hunter and her students…

Now more than ever public education and multicultural education face daunting challenges. From federal efforts to privatize public education through vouchers, school take-overs, and charters, to the manner in which high-stakes testing has marginalized multicultural education in the curriculum and pedagogy of our nation's schools, and to the…

Over the past two decades, the United States has become increasingly more diverse. This growth and diversification of society means that schools are becoming more diverse as well. Students of color now make up 48% of the school population and are projected to reach 55% by 2023 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). Nonetheless, the…

The purposes of this study were to examine the diversity of the authors and illustrators in core reading series and to evaluate the opportunities and limitations of these texts in relation to the goals of multicultural education. The authors began their research concerned about whose stories are told in core reading series, and who gets to tell…

In this article Puchner and Markowitz illustrate a major problem in education and in teacher education, the underlying dynamics of which are a national problem. The problem of negative beliefs about African American families in schools is not a new idea but actually stems from unfounded and untested assumptions about the way the world works and…

This article explores the experiences of two professors as they teach about White privilege in predominately White institutions of higher education. The authors discuss how racial potentiality shapes the classroom climates of each of the professors and then present strategies that utilize safe spaces to navigate students away from the resistance…

Public school curriculum battles offer great examples for illustrating how politics saturates education policy, particularly in the State of Texas. However, Arizona has emerged as another peculiar contender in contemporary battles to control high school curricula. Curriculum battles have deep historical roots in Arizona and elsewhere that go…

In 2005, a group of concerned parents who had arrived in the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia received approval from their local school district to establish the Iftin Charter School (ICS). The K-8 school continues to engender hope and intellectual strength in its students and parents. ICS finds itself uniquely equipped to meet the…

In this article, the author reflects on the 1988 article "The Silenced Dialogue," by Lisa Delpit, which described the lack of communication dividing Black and White educators when it comes to the issue of race, specifically due to the disparity between reliance on theory (White) and reliance on cultural understanding (Black). Nearly a…