In this current time, we see how the current White House administration is trying to prohibit federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity trainings because they are purported to be divisive and anti-American. The administration is moving to try and ban trainings that examine white privilege, critical race theory, and the racist origins of the U.S. and is actively seeking to cut funding for such programs. Instead of seeing the importance of a critical multicultural perspective rooted in the lives and realities of students, family members and teachers in schools, the administration is squarely focused on the indefensible defense and inherently problematic maintenance of interlocking systems of white privilege, hegemony, and oppression.
In this issue of Multicultural Perspectives, contributing authors examine and write about ways that teachers, teacher educators, and other educators can work to center the experiences of historically marginalized populations and provide readers of the journal structured ways of ensuring opportunities for members of communities to tell the stories of their own lives through their own perspective. Rather than uphold systems of privilege and oppression, the authors challenge us to critically analyze, disrupt, and dismantle these systems in schools, universities, and communities to continue to move our local communities and shared society toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Advancing the Conversation
In “Retaining and Supporting Faculty Who Are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color: The Promise of a Multi-Tiered Mentoring-Partnership Model,” Endo describes alternative paradigms for conceptualizing mentoring for BIPoC faculty as dynamic partnerships with differentiated, equity-focused systems of support that explicitly center anti-racist and anti-deficit frameworks as core values. Endo encourages us to critically analyze dominant mentoring models that often focus on assimilation and integration rather than differentiation and to continue to consider how a college or university can be culturally responsive to the needs of its faculty.
In “Learning About the Stories of Children With Refugee Backgrounds Through the Lens of Positioning Theory,” Cun analyzes how the children in her study enacted multiple identities that are often rendered invisible in U.S. classrooms. Her study suggests that educators, researchers, and policymakers should value the multiple identities of children with refugee backgrounds and promote the development of their own sense of agency.
Creating Multicultural Classrooms
In “‘This Is Manist’: Counterscripts as Catalysts for Change in the English Curriculum,” Panther explains how to use culturally sustaining pedagogies as a framework and how these instructional practices reflect resistance to western, Eurocentric literacy standards and school standards of professionalism that reify white supremacy. By centering orality through multi-party discourse and literary theory, Panther contends that ultimately youth can learn literacies to make agentive decisions about their own bodily autonomy.
In “‘There was Complete Silence’: Reflections on Teacher Preparation for Social Justice Education in a Predominantly White Community,” Hambacher, Silva, and Morelli examine two university professors and one preservice teacher’s attempt to teach for social justice through justice-oriented children’s literature in an introductory level education course. The authors illustrate how teacher educators can facilitate the critical consciousness and social justice praxis of White pre-service teachers who will likely go on to teach in mostly White communities.
As we enter a time in which the current administration tries to minimize and silence the lives, cultures, and stories of students and families in our nation’s schools, teachers and teacher educators in schools need to redouble their efforts in actively and conscientiously resisting these efforts every step of the way. Wherever we work—in schools, universities, or in communities, we must continue to find ways to center the stories and perspectives of BIPoC students, faculty and staff; provide new opportunities for people who have been marginalized to tell their own powerful counterstories against hegemonic forms of oppression; and continue to humanize all people who study and work in schools.