Learning Along the Way: Novice Teachers’ Reflections on Developing Critical Race Praxis in Urban Schools

Racial Justice in Education

Public education in the United States has been racialized from its inception (Givens, 2025; Ott & Kohli, 2023). However, researchers continue to highlight the under-theorization of race in education (Ladson-Billings, 2013; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and teacher education (Milner IV et al., 2021). Current attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism; book bans; and erasure of American history are indicative of the progress that social justice advancements have imprinted on education. These recycled strategies are time-worn reactions to progress for groups that are deemed unworthy of access to power, economic stability, human autonomy, and safety.

When considering justice-oriented teaching dispositions, Butler et al. (2021) synthesize research to suggest these as “patterns of observable behaviors that become predictable” and are informed by “one's personal beliefs and value systems” (p. 197). Justice-oriented teaching is essential, but the language of racial justice is being used increasingly, though a clear definition is hard to pin down (Shah, 2021).

A concerted effort and commitment in teacher education must be taken up to acknowledge “the central position of race in any discussion of justice issues in education (Hambacher & Ginn, 2021, p. 329).” Attending to race as a foundational prerequisite to entering the teaching force is imperative (Howard & Milner, 2021) and reinforces Wu's (2024) suggestion for, “teacher educators to equip preservice teachers with theories and praxes to advance racial justice in their future K-12 classrooms” (p. 405). To achieve this, teacher education programs are implicated in both their own curricular advancements around race for teachers and the skills new teachers bring into their classroom practice (Conklin, 2020; Goodwin & Darity, 2019; Milner IV et al., 2021; Ott & Kohli, 2023; Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2023). Hambacher & Ginn (2021) conclude that “race-visible teacher education is necessary to make salient issues of racism that pervade life in U.S. schools” (p. 339). Further, they note Ladson-Billings’ (1998) caution of a “stubborn disconnect between awareness of race and racism and a commitment to transform pedagogical practice to enact anti-racism” (p. 337). In this, I argue that race-consciousness and racially literate dispositions are fundamental to a new teacher's toolbox for teaching for racial justice.

Within the literature that discusses racially equitable and just teaching, researchers note some of these dispositions could involve:

Debunking whiteness and deconstructing white supremacy (Matias & Grosland, 2016),

I interpret this to describe racial justice as intentional disrupting of the racialized inequitable status quo in the United States which protects and reproduces social hierarchies of race, limits economic opportunities, diminishes the quality of academic experiences and educational outcomes, and impairs the physical and mental health of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Noting that all of this occurs and is perpetuated in the public school system and impacts differently raced people in complex and nuanced ways, the reality is that racialized injustices in the U.S. school system are primarily based in a myth of white superiority (Ewing, 2025) that must consistently be interrupted and challenged, until the ideology is eradicated. The actions and dispositions described above include some of the ways new teachers may work toward racial justice; below I describe racial literacy and race consciousness as theories and praxes that could move teachers in the direction of teaching for racial justice.

Racial Literacy

The concept of racial literacy has a foothold in a variety of fields that informs the work of educators: legal studies (Guinier, 2004), anthropology (Twine, 2004), and psychology (Stevenson, 2014). Lani Guinier coined the term as “a more dynamic framework for understanding American racism” (p. 114). Indeed, her work pushed past the concept of racial liberalism, offering “the ability to read race in conjunction with both contemporary institutional and democratic hierarchies and their historical antecedents” (p. 115). This concept of using race as an analytic tool to understand history and the implications of history on current institutions and practices is aligned with Ladson-Billings and Tate's (1995) assertion that the Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an “analytical tool for understanding school inequity” (p. 48). Twine (2004) presented ethnographic research that explored how white parents cultivated black identities in their children who did not share their racial identity. Reacting to the idea that white parents cannot “understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism” (p. 878), Twine found that skills and strategies could be developed by parents in supporting their multiracial children to navigate racism in society.

Howard Stevenson's (2014) work is firmly planted in the psychological and emotional impacts of living, working, and teaching in a racialized society. He contends that everyone in the United States experiences racial stress, regardless of their perceived racial categorization and individual racialization. His work furthers the understanding that classrooms are sites of countless racially stressful moments. His conception of racial literacy is individual, but it offers a skill set to respond to moments of racial stress, by “reading (noticing and identifying racial encounters and their impacts), recasting (reframing the threat level of an encounter), and resolving (making healthy decisions to address the situation)” (p. 3). Racial literacy, for the purposes of this paper, involves both theoretical and skill-based capacity “to examine, discuss, challenge, and take anti-racist action in situations that involve acts of racism” (Sealey-Ruiz, 2021, p. 285).

Race Consciousness

Race consciousness, in this paper, pulls from a variety of discussions on critical thinking, critical consciousness, and sociopolitical consciousness and centers them on race. Having been widely discussed among researchers, the internal capacity to make meaning of race and its impact on society continues to be a skillset that teachers need to develop (Ott & Kohli, 2023). hooks (2010) describes it as “this ‘lived experience’ of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis” (p. 54). Ladson-Billings (2022), in her groundbreaking work on culturally relevant pedagogy, includes critical or sociopolitical consciousness as the capacity for students to analyze, critique, and challenge systemic inequities. Her work describes how educators can cultivate this within students as a pillar for successful teaching, which infers that teachers, too, will need to possess this skillset.

So, though similar, critical thinking and critical consciousness are not the same. Critical thinking is a skill or an intellectual practice that involves analysis, questioning assumptions, and evaluating evidence—what hooks (2010) describes as “a way of approaching ideas that aims to understand core, underlying truths, not simply that superficial truth that may be most obviously visible” (p. 9). Where critical consciousness is a state and a commitment that involves an ongoing awareness of how power, oppression, and social structures shape lived experiences, combined with a sense of responsibility to act (Freire, 2021). hooks (2010) writes about her admiration for Freire's conception of consciousness citing “human beings do not get beyond the concrete situation…only by their consciousness or their intentions,” (p. 45) they must act.

Racial Learning of NTs

NTs generally face a host of challenges as they take up professional classroom teaching roles (Warsame & Valles, 2018). This paper will only focus on racial literacy, racial justice, and race-consciousness, simply because so little in education research hitherto has prioritized this. In this article, teachers with 5 years or less experience as teachers of record are categorized as NTs. Specific to this study, the research on NTs’ development and implementation of racial literacies is scant but growing.

Chen et al. (2025) use Goodwin and Darity's (2019) domains of knowledge (personal, contextual, pedagogical, sociological, and social) to develop a Knowledge of Racial Literacies survey (O’brien et al., 2022). A key finding of this mixed methods study was that “participants identified a lack of opportunities to examine race and racism, or to design classroom environments where students from minoritized backgrounds feel empowered” (p. 358). Researchers (Lammert et al., 2024) conducted another mixed methods study of NTs across regions in the United States to examine their racial literacy knowledge. From the sample of 277 educators from the Northeast, Midwest, and South regions, the team found “significant differences across regions” (p. 60), which indicate that developing skills to apply racial literacy beyond conceptual knowledge should be situated contextually and be responsive.

Supporting NTs in urban school contexts is particularly important because of the confluence of political, social, and economic injustices that likely impact the schooling environment and/or students’ experiences. When white teachers teach in majority–minority school settings, the need to be racially literate and race-conscious is pressing in that a steep learning curve cannot be accommodated. They are immediately positioned to disrupt or perpetuate harm. Williams III et al. (2020) found “that as the percentage of NTs increased, the number of out-of-school suspensions for Black students increased as well” (p. 455). Researchers (Bettini & Park, 2022) recommend that a wide network of support is created for NTs in high poverty schools that includes school leaders clarifying instructional expectations and colleagues skilled in instructional support. Further, a carefully cultivated school culture provided a platform for more likely success in teaching. Huisman and colleagues (2010) found that new teachers developed resilience in urban schools through “access to significant adult relationships, ability to mentor others, ability to problem-solve, hope, high expectations for self and students, sociocultural awareness, and the teachers’ need to access professional development opportunities” (p. 495). This study adds to the burgeoning research on NTs’ racial justice teaching in urban schools by offering three conditions that need to be satisfied for undergraduate learning to endure throughout the early years of classroom teaching.

Case Study Context

The case I draw from was attached to an undergraduate clinical practice seminar focused on equity in education. In the original study (Wilson, 2018), I explored what and how to teach student teachers about race, who were practice teaching in an urban school that predominantly served Black and Latiné students. To do this, I used a critical race inquiry intervention, guiding pre-service teachers (PST) through a systematic exploration of race in situ. Each PST developed and conducted an individual inquiry project during their semester-long placement. While PSTs designed and implemented their projects, I collected data on their process of conducting their own critical race inquiry projects—inquiry on inquiry (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009). Unique to these student teachers’ experience was the reality that they were learning about race as a necessary component of their student teaching, while practicing teaching in an urban school environment, with a majority-minoritized student population. Further, student teachers were supported by both Black and white cooperating teachers, while also being enrolled in a university-based student teaching seminar that was explicitly focused on equity in education (Bell et al., 2022).

This partnership was developed through an existing university-school partnership where the faculty member (my dissertation co-advisor) and school administration collaborated to create a school site-based learning environment that intentionally fostered deeper engagement with the topic and realities of race in an urban school context. Before the full conceptualization of my study, I met with school stakeholders (administrators, faculty, staff, and parents) to discuss what they saw as opportunities and challenges in supporting pre-service teachers through their clinical practice. The equity-focused clinical practice seminar course ran concurrently with clinical practice and PSTs voluntarily participated in my study (Bell et al., 2022). In the course, they experienced intentional instruction about equity in relation to schools, including race and its social and academic implications.

Considering the student teaching participants, alongside professional development best practices (Author, in press), I designed a study that led participants through a full inquiry cycle (Bruce & Bishop, 2014) focused on race in an urban school setting. I served as the undergraduate Clinical Supervisor for some of the teacher candidates. I was also the Critical Race Inquiry Facilitator for the sessions students participated in, alongside their clinical practice seminar which was facilitated by a white woman, where equity was centered (Bell et al., 2022). At the conclusion of the study, 100% of the participants reported having advanced their knowledge and awareness of race. They reported learnings in four areas: racial identity, racial consciousness, race in schools, and race in broader society. A key finding that motivated this current study was that the “explicit practice of discussing race … allowed teacher candidates to more fully engage in understanding the basis of social and academic inequities which they perceived as a force they could impact, in their future classrooms” (Wilson, 2018, p. 134). This longitudinal study asked those same teachers to look back and share out what they learned along the way. Figure 1 depicts this entire timeline.

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Figure 1.

Timeline of research and participant activity.

Positionality

I am a Black American woman who has persisted through primary through graduate study to obtain a terminal degree in Educational Leadership. As a former K–12 English educator, turned Teacher Educator Researcher, it is my dream that future educators who leave my classrooms are well equipped to teach students for the world as it and as we want it to be. I’d come to this original study from two places: (1) having been surrounded by and indoctrinated into whiteness and (2) being raised to be a proudly Black, critically conscious woman. I graduated from a historically white institution, in a traditional 4-year teacher preparation program, where I had only two Black professors and no other professors of color. I was also the only Black woman to graduate with a degree in English and one in Education, in the entire College of Education.

I name these parts of my journey because they influence how I approached research in education, with a desire to center race, but also a yearning to ensure this was not excluded from others’ teacher preparation experiences. I prepared myself to support a group of mostly white women on their individual and collective journeys through race work. Having survived my own teacher preparation undergraduate career in wholly white spaces, I was accustomed to shifting myself and my energy to accommodate white fragility (Chávez-Moreno, 2022). I felt deeply confident that I could support white women in doing race work.

Participants

Recruitment

I purposefully recruited teacher participants from the original undergraduate study participant pool to uncover the information shared below. Originally, there were nine PSTs who opted into the study during a student teaching clinical semester, in one urban emergent school, in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. I reached out to each former participant through the email address I last had on file or was able to retrieve via alumni networks, social media: Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and any phone numbers I still had access to. Out of the nine original participants, five responded to my recruitment outreach. One declined to participate due to life circumstances and four participated in the follow-up study. Out of the four final participants, only three completed the Introduction Reflection which is the core data source for this article's analysis. I focus this discussion on three of the study participants who are now teachers (5–7 years post-graduation). A demographic table is included with information on the full recruitment pool with the current participants identified with an asterisk (Table 1)

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Table 1.

Recruitment Pool Background Information.

Participant	Gender	Self-identified race and/or ethnicity	Certification seeking	Student teaching level	Grade level	Clinical educator Race
Astha*	Female	African-American	K–6/Special Education	STI	Third grade	1. White 2. White
Belinda	Female	White/Italian and Polish	K–6/Middle Social Studies	STII	Third grade	1. White 2. White
Charisma	Female	White	K–6/Middle School English	STII	Third grade	1. Black 2. White
Giselle	Female	White	K–6/Special Education	STI	Fourth grade	1. Black 2. Black
Jannette	Female	White/Jewish	K–6/Middle School English	STII	Fifth grade	1. Black 2. White
Malehna*	Female	White/Jewish	K–6/Special Education	STI	Fourth grade	1. Black 2. Black
Marisol*	Female	White	K–6/Special Education	STI	Third grade	1. White 2. White
Rebecca*	Female	White/Jewish	K–6/Middle School English	STII	Third grade	1. Black 2. White
Sethu	Female	White/Irish	K–6/Middle School English	STII	Third grade	1. White 2. White

Participant profiles

Malehna racially and ethnically self identifies as a white, Jewish woman. She completed her undergraduate degree in Fall 2017, with K–6 and Special Education teaching certifications. She has taught for 4 years in two different urban schools and served as a University Research Assistant for 2 years. Malehna is still a classroom teacher, recently completing a year teaching 3rd grade.

Marisol racially self-identifies as white woman. She graduated at the end of Fall 2017, with K–6 and Special Education teaching certifications. Marisol had a varied teaching history, having taught 3 total years teaching in two different urban schools. She also taught for 2 years in a suburban school. Marisol is no longer a classroom teacher; she still works in Education, however, at the collegiate level, in Information Technology, supporting faculty to incorporate technology into their teaching practices.

Rebecca racially and ethnically self-identifies as a white, Jewish woman. She graduated at the conclusion of the spring semester, in 2017. Rebecca holds K–6 and Middle School English teaching certifications. She has taught for 7 years teaching in three different urban schools. Rebecca is still teaching; most recently, she leading a fourth grade classroom (Table 2).

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Table 2.

Participant Background Information.

Participant	Gender	Self-identified race and/or ethnicity	Certification	Years of teaching	Grade level	Current Ed context
Astha	Female	African-American	K–6/Special Education	5	Third grade	Urban Emergent
Malehna	Female	White/Jewish	K–6/Special Education	4	Fourth grade	Urban Emergent
Marisol	Female	White	K–6/Special Education	5	Third grade	Urban Emergent
Rebecca	Female	White/Jewish	K–6/Middle School English	7	Third grade	Urban Emergent

Data Collection

This study sought to uncover teachers’ understanding and enactment of racially literate teaching, so I used an interpretive method of inquiry (Guba & Lincoln, 1994), using a small group of early-teachers who had experienced critical race inquiry during their undergraduate student teaching. Using qualitative methods, the now in-service teachers reflected on their journey in education to be racially literate educators through storytelling narratives over 1 full academic year. The approach to research included a participatory process that engaged teacher participants as co-constructors (Stovall, 2019) and thought partners. To collect data, candidates composed an Introductory Reflection prior to our first meeting, which we reviewed and discussed together during that time. I conducted classroom and building tours with each candidate, when possible. Teachers independently created educational journey maps, which we reviewed together. I also composed and shared my educational journey map with participants to engage a reciprocal process (Annamma, 2023). Then, participants revisted their individual undergraduate exit interviews to reflect on what they reported while student teaching, in relation to their experiences beyond graduation, and their current feelings after being in the teaching profession for a number of years. Finally, our last meeting focused on their future goal planning and reflecting on their participation in the most recent study. Participants took on the role of thought partners through contributing to analysis throughout the process. To save time for the educators and with their agreement, I shared my individual analytic memos with them to provide written or verbal feedback. Excluding the shared review of raw data from their undergraduate exit interview transcripts, participants did not review other raw data with researchers, but commented on themes and ideas from memos to clarify meaning, perspective, and add any other relevant contributions.

This paper addresses the research question: When reflecting back on undergraduate racial literacy training, how do current teachers describe their beliefs and intentions about race-conscious and racially literate teaching? The principal source of data used to address this question is the Introductory Reflection that teachers composed, of which three of the four participants completed. Teacher participants could compose their Initial Reflection through writing, audio recording, or a video recording. They all opted to write out their initial reflection. I hoped the prompts would merely serve as inspiration for teacher participants, but each of them listed the individual bulleted prompts along with their response immediately after.

Operationalizing Theory

As I considered the data in connection to the frames of racial literacy and CRP, I operationalized each theory and looked for the relationships between the two. Drawing on the connections I discerned, I developed a priori codes to apply to the data to glean the lessons learned along the journey toward for racial justice (described in the Data Analysis section below).

Within racial literacy, I noted (1) knowledge of race, (2) skills regarding race, and (3) beliefs about race, putting this alongside praxis which includes (1) action, (2) reflection, and (3) change. The relationships that formed are between knowledge of race and beliefs about race that can come about through reflection. Reflection creates space to explore one's knowing and engage in processing to uncover one's beliefs. Skills regarding race can influence action, as skills can provide concrete strategies that lead to action. Knowledge of race, skills regarding race, and beliefs about race all influence change because without each of those elements working together, a teacher may not have enough foundation to even see change as possible, let alone work toward it (Figure 2)

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Figure 2.

Operationalizing theory.

I broke racial literacy down further to see other ways it is connected to CRP. Knowledge of race includes a person's awareness of race and consciousness regarding the impact of race. I treat awareness differently from consciousness because awareness is a prerequisite to consciousness. Racial awareness resists and disrupts color blindness (Kohli et al., 2017; Ott & Kohli, 2023), and consciousness locates self within context (Freire, 1970) as a racialized being. In this case, race consciousness considers teacher participants and the research within the context of having been socialized, living, teaching, and learning in a racialized world that impacts people differently based on their aligned or perceived racial categorization.

Beliefs about race involve mental reflection and the potential to contribute to intentions around race. Beliefs, in general, involve mental representations or attitudes toward what individuals hold to be probable (Churchland & Churchland, 2013; Seitz et al., 2018). They account for the cognitive mapping a person employs to see the world, informs their societal interactions, and of course, their planning, teaching, perceptions of students, etc. Beliefs are subjective, and they often influence a person's actions.

Skills regarding race include the development of intellectual processing that influence learning strategies that can lead to actionable change in practice regarding race. Skill is a complex concept that is still being studied (Attewell, 1990), but a consensus is that the word is used to describe acquirable abilities to perform a task, apply knowledge, or solve problems (Shaughnessy & Boerst, 2018). Specifically, in teacher education, skills are often included within general competencies that teachers are recommended to possess and perform in order to proficiently function within educational spaces (Nguyen, 2023).

Data Analysis

The Initial Reflection was a written document that I coded until no new codes emerged (Hatch, 2023). I used open coding to uncover themes that emerged from the written document and created a code book to document this open analysis (Harry et al., 2005). The purpose of the initial open coding was to distinguish all themes the data had to offer.

After I completed my initial open analysis, a research assistant reviewed the same data independently. She developed her own list of open codes with examples. Together, we reviewed our code books and had a negotiating conversation to create a shared dictionary with codes, descriptions, and examples. We then returned to the data, together, with our refined coding procedure to ensure our coding process was aligned with the mutually decided framework, resulting in 50 open codes identified.

Next, we returned to the same data set and applied a priori codes (Hatch, 2023) from the two theoretical frameworks. These are described in the Operationalizing Theory section above. We developed individual code books and repeated the negotiating process to add to the shared dictionary. An example is included in Table 3.

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Table 3.

Coding Procedure.

Code	Description	Example
Conversations about race	Participant discusses having oral conversations about race with adults or students	I also had open discussions with students when something inappropriate was said about someone's race.
Status quo	Participant discusses what they perceive to be normalized	Though I have been fortunate enough to be at schools where anti-racism is valued. I feel that often data and academics are prioritized above all else.
Racial representation	Participant describes the importance of racial, ethnic, or cultural representation in classrooms or classroom materials	Students will feel more included when their personal experiences/backgrounds/race are brought into the classroom and they are represented.
Student-centered	Participant discusses a situation that places students and their experiences at the center of importance	When a teacher recognizes a student's race and all of the things that may come along with it (socio-economic status, cultural norms, hidden rules at school, learning styles/preferences, etc.), students feel more understood and therefore more motivated to succeed.
Othering	Participant creates distance between students and educators based on facets of identity (race, culture, language, socio-economic status, etc.)	I make sure to understand cultures and rituals that are different from my own.
Intentionality	Participant discusses being purposeful in their thinking or actions	In order for things to be equitable, we need to be intentional about amplifying voices and experiences, particularly voices that are not represented as often as white voices.

Finally, we looked across codes from both sets of analyses to create a shared coding map that chunked codes into themes and categories. “Constant comparative analysis aided in identifying patterns, coding data, and categorizing findings” (Anfara et al., 2002, p. 32). The thematic findings (Vaismoradi et al., 2016) that we identified from these two rounds of analysis allowed me to share a framework that contributes to scholarly work on teacher education, teacher professional development, and CRP in education. Inductive and deductive analyses strengthened the findings by ensuring that I was not simply looking for what I hoped the prompts would elicit. This analysis and relationship mapping between codes, theoretical frames, and connected themes are detailed on a code mapping chart in Table 4. This map is meant to be read from the bottom up and shows how all open codes were included, were mapped against a priori codes, and chunked to form themes that are offered as the conditions necessary to prolong NTs’ racial learning, building toward CRP teaching in urban schools.

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Table 4.

Code Mapping: Three Iterations of Analysis (to be Read From the Bottom Up).

Code mapping
Teaching for racial justice in urban schools
(THIRD ITERATION: CONNECTED THEMES FROM DATA SET)
#1: Consciousness	#2: Commitment	#3: Concern
(SECOND ITERATION: PATTERN VARIABLES w/ a priori CODES)
Racial Literacy
1A: Knowledge	2A: Skills	3A: Beliefs
Critical Race Praxis
1B: Reflection	2B: Action	3B: Change
(FIRST ITERATION: INITIAL OPEN CODES)
1A: Race consciousness 1A: Mindful/aware 1A: Race 1A: Inclusivity 1A: Knowing students 1A: Culture 1A: Systemic bias 1A: Motivational 1A: Students’ identity 1A: Discipline disparities 1B: Teacher informal learning 1B: Experiential learning 1B: Ignorance of colleagues 1B: Students’ lived experiences 1B: Students’ school experiences 1B: Teacher bias 1B: Intersectional 1B: Status quo	2A: Implementation/integration 2A: Teacher formal learning 2A: Professional development 2A: Included 2A: Validating students 2A: Vague 2A: Talking about race 2A: Affirm students’ racial identity 2B: Dialogue/conversation 2B: Intentionality 2B: Equity 2B: Anti-racism 2B: Student-centered 2B: Classroom environment 2B: Disrupt status quo 2B: Better student learning experience 2B: Affirm students’ identities	3A: Challenges 3A: Racial representation 3A: Student expectation 3A: Diversity/differences 3A: Acceptance 3A: Fear 3A: Responsible to students 3A: Limited control 3A: Equality 3A: Family challenges 3A: Othering 3B: Challenges 3B: Intentionality 3B: Media 3B: Support from admin 3B: Books/classroom materials 3B: Limited control 3B: Practice/practical 3B: Academic success
RAW DATA	RAW DATA	RAW DATA

Out of this analysis, my findings clarified how my participants discussed their thinking about race, racial literacy, and race-consciousness after undergraduate training and in the process of gaining early years of classroom teaching experience. The data show that teacher participants used racial literacy to enact a form of CRP involving consciousness, concern, and commitment. I use these themes to describe the conditions necessary for these teachers to teach for racial justice, which is illustrated in Figure 3. A cross-code matrix is also included in Table 5 to show that though the above referenced codes were helpful for analysis, the data attributed to connected themes and categories often intersected and were layered (Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2023).

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Figure 3.

Theory in practice.

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Table 5.

Cross-Case Matrix.

	Consciousness	Commitment	Concern
Malehna	I am mindful of the disparities in education and the challenges students of color face vs. white students, but I also still hold every student to a high standard.	I make sure to understand cultures and rituals that are different from my own.	Without race-consciousness, there may be implicit bias and explicit bias that negatively impact student learning.
Marisol	While this was helpful to learn, it wasn’t until I was in my own classroom and participating in my school initiatives where I truly saw the impact race had on students’ learning, behavior, and development.	I participated in a variety of professional development training [programs] that were helpful in growing my understanding of race-consciousness and racial literacy.	When a teacher recognizes a student's race and all of the things that may come along with it (socio-economic status, cultural norms, hidden rules at school, learning styles/preferences, etc.), students feel more understood and therefore more motivated to succeed.
Rebecca	Being real about the history of our country and our current state in a developmentally appropriate way.	In order for things to be equitable, we need to be intentional about amplifying voices and experiences, particularly voices that are not represented as often as white voices.	Since I myself am not a source of representation for my students, I am very aware of this and intentional in my practice to ensure my students still receive a racially conscious education and are affirmed in the learning experience to the best of my ability.

Consciousness

Consciousness is an awakening to and an awareness of the potential of seeing race as an experiential element in educational settings, social interactions, and political issues. El-Amin and colleagues (2017) summarize Frieire's (1970) concept of consciousness as “gaining knowledge about the systems and structures that create and sustain inequity” (para. 6). Carter (2008) defines racial consciousness as “a critical understanding of the asymmetrical power relationships that exist between Blacks and Whites in America” (p. 14). While Tatum (2001) notes “a positive sense of racial/ethnic identity not based on assumed superiority and inferiority is an important task for both White people and people of color” (p. 53) in pursuing race-consciousness. I offer consciousness as including a situating of self within the context of a racialized world which includes “developing a sense of power or capability” (El-Amin et al., 2017, para. 6).

Race consciousness is an intellectual thought process and a mental exercise that acknowledges race. Marisol describes “race consciousness in education [as] being mindful and knowledgeable about different ethnicities, cultures, traditions, strengths, and challenges the students in your classroom face as students of color.” Her understanding is rooted in knowledge, alongside impact, which stems directly from engaging with students in her classroom.

Malehna writes, “It wasn’t until I was in my own classroom and participating in my school initiatives where I truly saw the impact race had on students’ learning, behavior, and development.” Consciousness makes room to move beyond the conception of race as a simple phenomenon to seeing the realities of its implications, which Freire (2021) explains “is integrated with reality” (p. 88). As an undergraduate teacher candidate, Malehna's participation in critical race inquiry groups necessitated attending to racial elements in urban schools, but this was an external assignment that she opted into. What Malehna discusses above is coming to her own consciousness, without external prompting, but potentially related to her practice of noticing race while in her undergraduate senior semester of teacher preparation. In Malehna's case, her experiences in her classroom and those within the school building allowed her to witness the impact race had on her students, which led to a deeper recognition.

In my work with these teachers during their undergraduate clinical practice, it appears that experience, witnessing, and direct discussions foster consciousness. Particularly, when it comes to work that considers race, the need to see it to believe it seems paramount. hooks (1994) supports this in writing about “the necessity of verifying in praxis what we know in consciousness” (p. 45). These teacher participants were explicitly taught to notice racialized moments during their undergraduate training, within a majority-minoritized urban school context, under the leadership of a Black woman who worked with them, inside the school building. During inquiry group sessions, race was always at the forefront of conversations, and they were supported to hold that phenomenon in conversation and comparison with the world they lived in. This specific guidance to practice a racial awareness may impact developing race consciousness.

Concern

Concern is the responsibility to acknowledge and/or address problems with race at the core. Concern is also a mental exercise that can lead to action. Marisol writes: “Race-consciousness allows for an open dialogue and acceptance of differences. Without race-consciousness, there may be implicit and explicit bias that negatively impacts student learning.” Here, Marisol is sharing concern regarding students’ learning when teachers are not race-conscious. This concern expressed in her language of “there may be” articulates a concern for how students of color could be impacted by race-blind or race-neutral perspectives. Research is clear that color blindness is detrimental to the education of children of color and white students (Kohli et al., 2017; Love, 2019; Matias & Grossland, 2016; Rolón-Dow et al., 2021; Ullici & Battery, 2011; Zemblyas & Matias, 2024).

Marisol discusses the benefits of sitting in the awareness of race-consciousness as a freedom that permits the practices of “open dialogue and acceptance of differences,” which one can infer that a racially unconscious or dysconscious mindset can be limiting and prohibitive. In my work with these teachers, when they were undergraduates, the option to discuss race and not to ignore it was one each of them remembered as being powerful (Wilson, 2018). Freire (1970/2000) asserts dialogic engagement as an essential component of critical consciousness, while Sealey-Ruiz (2021) recognizes engaging in critical dialogue in racial literacy as a core skill. hooks (1994) contends “to engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differences” (p. 130). Marisol's statement expresses a desire to move beyond the bounds of silence around race.

Malehna recalls being concerned for students’ experiences with educators beyond her classroom: “I worked with many educators who refused to address their own biases … some simply wanted to continue teaching the way they always had by treating everyone equally.” Education in the United States has long promoted and upheld white supremacist ideals and norms, which are exacerbated by a predominantly white teaching force (Ott & Kohli, 2023; Zembylas & Matias, 2024). Malehna's statement expresses concern for her colleagues’ refusal to engage in personal work to better understand why students of color may have different experiences than their white educators. Sealey-Ruiz's (2021) Archaeology of the Self, a framework to building racial literacy, is offered as “key to developing interrupters of educational status quo,” which Malehna describes her colleagues’ resistance to. Malehna continues, “So while I did my best in third grade to promote a race-conscious environment, once a student left my classroom, they may not experience it somewhere else.” She also alludes to concern for students’ experiences with these same educators who preferred to maintain the inequitable status quo that she knew would ultimately harm them.

Concern is fostered through a consideration for the negative impacts of a racist educational system on students’ learning, experiences, and life outcomes. Concern involves a form of intentionality: purposefully seeking out information, events, and moments to show and prove or improve accountability to necessarily attending to race. I purposefully use the word “concern” here to describe what it takes to teach for racial justice instead of the word “care” because the work on care is nuanced (Hos, 2016; Nieto 2006) and often attends to interpersonal relationships and relationship building (Rolón Dow, 2005; Schindel & Tolbert, 2017). Concern is similar to care in that it may encourage action for justice, but does not necessarily involve it (Hos, 2016). Concern could be simply a conceptual practice, although I hope that it always leads to action.

Matias and Grosland (2016) highlight considering, “the complexities of emotions, particularly the emotionalities of Whiteness” (p. 155) in deconstructing the hegemony of whiteness in schools. They write, “to do the work of racial justice, students [need] to emotionally invest in the work itself” (p. 156). Malehna is an example of this. She sees the damage that her colleagues may enact on her students, and this concerns her. In her statement, she points to “promot[ing] a race-conscious environment” in her classroom as her action, lamenting the reality of the harms other teachers may enact by ignoring race. In a way, Malehna is referring to the educational survival complex (Love, 2019) that her students will likely cycle and suffer through (English et al., 2020; Legette et al., 2022). Dumas (2018) argues for Black suffering to be the beginning and end of racial justice in educational research, and I would add PK–12 teachers to his audience. Recognizing that Black suffering is normalized in the U.S. school, and is often relatively inconsequential, Malehna's attention to what might it mean for her students to suffer through educators who perpetuate the inequitable status quo by refusing to acknowledge race is an example of allowing the attention to Black suffering to inform her concern and guide her actions.

Commitment

Commitment is being dedicated to the cause of noticing, discussing, learning more, and teaching about race and its impact. It can take the form of making space for bringing race intentionally into conversations, classrooms, interactions, and decision-making. Stevenson (2014) writes about addressing the elephant in the classroom, as a necessity for navigating racialized moments in schools. A commitment to calling race into the conversation is imperative. Commitment, however, can be both mental and action-oriented. Rebecca writes, for instance:

I am also a white educator who has spent the past 7 years serving a predominately Black student population. Since I myself am not a source of representation for my students, I am very aware and intentional in my practice to ensure my students still receive a racially conscious education and are affirmed in their learning experiences to the best of my ability.

Being committed can mean a person is consistently loyal to and motivated in thinking about race, which, over time, may mean they feel compelled to do something about the problems the categorization creates. Rebecca describes her mental commitment as being “very aware” but it leads to action which she expresses as being “intentional in my practice.” At the point of action, it may mean a development of sustaining activities and actions that further support the cause of racial justice. The move from awareness to practice is an example of demonstrating CRP (hooks, 2010).

From my undergraduate work with Rebecca, she was raised to value social justice and civil rights. She proudly shared in her exit interview that her grandfather marched with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but she also notes that she wasn’t taught to consider her own white privilege in her upbringing. Freire (1970) suggests that “those who authentically commit himself to the people must re-examine themselves constantly” (p. 60). So, though Rebecca had some familial grounding in talking about race and pursuing equity, there were still lessons about race that she needed to learn, and this took her work beyond undergrad to 7 years into her teaching career. Her recognition of white privilege, as a student teacher, points to her development of seeing race as a social problem that looks systemically at a problem, and beyond race as a problem of individuals. Her intentional act to name her race as a “white educator” and then decenter her whiteness to affirm her “Black students” identities advances her learning and commitment to racial justice.

Rebecca's commitment seems to be rooted in her awareness of the impact of race on her students’ educational experience. She strives, purposefully, to interrupt the harms of white supremacy on them by offering a race-conscious curriculum and affirming them. Relatedly, she consciously celebrates their Black identity as a positive element within their learning experience. This is noteworthy as research (Kohli et al., 2017) shows that Black students can often encounter color-blind, passive racism and overt racial discrimination (English et al., 2020) in their educational experiences. Rebecca's commitment includes their educational experience and their positive socialization as racialized beings.

Opportunities to Advance CRP

Though participants were able to point to systemic bias, racism in education systems, and even social issues that impact student experience, none discussed their own actions in systemic level change. The focus on local level interventions and actionable steps centered within their classrooms as their sole locus of control. Further, none of these participants discussed power and equity together. Thus, it led my findings to align with racial justice, rather than anti-racism. Drawing from Dei (1996), anti-racism “explicitly names the issues of race and social difference as issues of power and equity, rather than as matters of cultural and ethnic variety” (p. 25). The participants discussed more examples on matters of cultural and ethnic variety, while simply being able to acknowledge and name issues of racial difference in relation to power and equity. Laughter et al. (2023) propose a “critical racial literacy that could engage individual, institutional, and societal structures of racism” (p. 85). In their Introductory Reflections, there is no discussion of what they have done or could do to systemically address power or equity, limiting their responses solely to what they can accomplish within their individual classrooms. This could demonstrate a perceived lack of power to enact systemic change, but as classroom teachers, it is appropriate for these educators to focus on what they can, do, and desire within the bounds of their classroom walls. This might have been addressed had I included a specific prompt on power and equity.

Beyond intervening in the well-established system of racism in U.S. educational institutions, it is necessary to dream, create, and actualize the anti-racist opportunities and possibilities that exist when learning is fueled by racial justice. In conceptualizing critical, Leonardo (2012) argues that a “framework is critical not only because it exposes lies and myths but equally because it makes possible a new regime of truth” (p. 429). Freire (2021) posits, “if men are unable to perceive critically the themes of their time, and thus to intervene actively in reality, they are carried along … (p. 53).” Fighting against what exists is a necessary exercise, but it becomes futile if that is the beginning and end of the work. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley (2022) notes that “without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down” (p. xii), which encourages us to move beyond freedom dreaming to freedom doing. In preparing teachers for classroom service toward racial justice, they must be able to understand the historical implications on contemporary society, along with envisioning and acting in liberated ways. The participants in this study describe ways that they expand racial representation in their classroom texts and materials and facilitate conversations about race, but that is the extent of their expression of freedom.