A case study of designing, teaching, and learning racial literacy in an urban seventh grade reading and writing classroom

In the current educational environment of high stakes testing and curricular control (Au, 2007), it is necessary for literacy teachers to be creatively compliant and selectively defiant (Hoffman, 2011) as it suits the learning needs of their students. The purpose of this study was to explore how to co-design and implement antiracist curriculum with one seventh-grade reading and writing teacher in his classroom (Dei, 2006; Troyna & Carrington, 2011; Wagner, 2005), as I aimed to draw upon and develop the racial literacy of the teacher and the students (Epstein & Gist, 2015; Ohito, 2017; Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Skerrett, 2011; Twine, 2004; Twine & Steinbugler, 2006). This research adopted case study methods (Yin, 2014) and consisted of two phases: Phase 1: Collaborative design between myself the researcher and the teacher. Phase 2: Teacher implementation of the antiracist literacy curriculum in his classroom with myself as reflective coach. Making use of qualitative, ethnographic methodologies (Marshall & Rossman, 2014), I collected data around the teacher’s design process and his implementation of the design within his classroom and analyzed all data using an inductive approach of qualitative data analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). Findings suggest a need for teachers to create antiracist units of study within the official curriculum, build such curriculum upon their own conceptual frameworks, and engage in extensive, recursive, and reflective conversations with peer-researchers around relevant texts, tools, and practices. Findings related to what knowledge, tools, and practices where brought to designing this type of curriculum point to the effective nature of teachers developing their own frameworks of racial literacy by drawing on their existing personal, political, and professional racial knowledge and identities. This study contributes to the literature on dialogue in racial literacy instruction (Bolgatz, 2005) as well as literature on antiracist curriculum and a multiliteracies pedagogy (New London Group, 1996) that demonstrate various ways teachers can go outside the box yet stay inside the standards of the official curriculum and instruction (Fecho, Falter, Hong, 2016). Furthermore, this study points to the potential of teachers as co-designers of antiracist curriculum and racial literacy instruction in classrooms and across schools.