Popular Visual Images and the (Mis)Reading of Black Male Youth: a case for racial literacy in urban preservice teacher education

In the majority of public schools across the nation, Black male youth are undergoing what can be deemed as “educational genocide” – the killing off of any chances for an equitable education. This dramatically decreases opportunities for Black male youth to develop into fully participating citizens in a democratic society. In many ways, race is the silent killer because it is frequently masked. Preservice teachers often take their cue for how to treat Black male students from existing stereotypes about Black males and media representations of them. In this article, we argue for the development of racial literacy in preservice teacher education programs as a pedagogical method to mitigate the misreading of Black male students in teacher candidates’ fieldwork experiences and subsequently in their future classrooms. Our argument operates from the premise that in a time when diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion are more widely recognized than ever before, the notion of race, and popular education films that depict race, still influence how teacher candidates view Black male students, and race remains a predictor for how these students experience school. Keywords: racial literacy; urban youth; race and education; urban teacher education; Black youth; teacher education and fil

Mentoring While Black & FemaleThe Gendered Literacy Phenomenon of Black Women Mentors

Black women’s social positions in American society allow them to experience life in ways that are different than other women. In this study, we are suggesting that the mentoring that Black women give and receive is a form of literacy that is distinct

“We Are Our Only Way Forward”: Dialogic Re-imaginings and the Cultivation of Homeplace for Girls, Women, and Femmes of Color

This article narrates the contours of a digital “kitchen table talk”–a conversation that brought together WoC from various areas of literacy and language education to discuss the state of the field and the next steps in transforming literacy studies and education for GFoC. Using bell hooks’s concept of “homeplace,” we bring together the reflections of eleven WoC across intersected Black, Latina, and Asian identities to examine the realities of GFoC, the urgency around their lives and needs, as well as self-examination of our role in the academy taking up feminist projects with GFoC