Anti-racist moral education: A review of approaches, impact and theoretical underpinnings from 2000 to 2015

Abstract

Racism is a moral issue and of concern for moral educators, with recent social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter highlighting how far we are from obliterating racial oppression and the unearned privilege whiteness confers. To contribute to a more formalised approach to anti-racist moral education, this article systematically reviews 15 years of peer-reviewed scholarship concerned with anti-racist education, to establish the definitions and aims of anti-racist education drawn on, the theoretical frameworks underpinning these, the methods used in education efforts, and their intended impact. It also considers the geo-political aspects of knowledge production in the field, such as author country location and implementation context of empirical studies. It concludes with implications for moral education in classroom and community contexts and advocates for anti-racist moral education that comprise three interconnected components—making visible systemic oppression (visibilising), recognising personal complicity in oppression through unearned privilege (recognising) and developing strategies to transform structural inequalities (strategising).

Keywords:

• Anti-racist education
• anti-oppressive education
• critical pedagogy
• systematic literature review

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Molemo Ramphalile and Safiyya Goga for their critical reading and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. In some instances the separation of multicultural and anti-racist education into two distinct areas of focus can be considered artificial, since over time many scholars have worked in and contributed to both areas.

2. Proponents of anti-racist education generally align themselves with a black consciousness definition of the racialised category ‘black’ to include all people of colour, partially explaining the absence of racial categories other than ‘white’ and ‘black’ in the studies under review (Biko, 1981; Mansfield & Kehoe, 1994). This approach has been critiqued as reductive in that it obscures other axes of oppression that some racialised groups may experience (Mansfield & Kehoe, 1994).