Beyond Good Intentions: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Teaching Tolerance’s ‘Teaching The New Jim Crow: A Teacher’s Guide’

ABSTRACT

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the alignment between the stated goals and the discursive implications in a scripted curriculum published by Teaching Tolerance, a progressive education organization in the US. Social justice education and critical race theories ground the analysis of ‘Teaching The New Jim Crow: A Teacher’s Guide;’ this set of 10 lessons and related resources claims to structure learning for open racial dialogues, democratic participation, and both standards-alignment and social justice education, yet my analysis of the lesson plans’ language and structure reveals procedural instructional practices that uncritically transmit progressive messages while constructing an implied White audience. Implications focus on pathways for teachers and teacher educators to pursue social justice and critical pedagogy while rejecting superficiality and indoctrination.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical discourse analysis
• critical pedagogy
• Critical Race Theory
• scripted curriculum
• social justice education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Lechtenberg

Dr. Kate Lechtenberg ([email protected]) is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Iowa and a middle school English language arts teacher in the Des Moines Public Schools. A former high school English teacher and school librarian, her research focuses on how educators work within systems to curate texts and create critical curriculum about complex sociocultural issues.