Anti-racism is a global discourse that has been invoked across diverse geographies and educational initiatives for decades. But what do we mean by “anti-racism” in education? In the literature the term tends to be vaguely defined or undefined. And where anti-racism has been defined, the field has (perhaps rightly) avoided settling on a single definition. This article aims to contribute clarity to anti-racist work in education by offering a conceptual map of anti-racism research and discourse. Based on international scholarship published over the last several decades (1990s–2020s), I identify three major types of anti-racism in education: institutional, instructional, and informal. In addition to this typology, the conceptual map documents major critiques and dilemmas involved with anti-racist work in education. These include: (1) disconnects between anti-racist rhetoric and anti-racist practice; (2) possibilities and limitations of White-led anti-racism; and (3) ongoing questions about the continued use of “race” in anti-racist analysis and organizing. I conclude by using insights from the conceptual map to propose directions for future research on anti-racism in education.
Prepackaged social-emotional learning (SEL) programs are too often oblivious to learners’ diverse lived experiences and identities, unnaturally expecting students to develop SEL skills outside of more authentic communities of practice. Particularly in the context of urban education and through the lens of critical race theory (CRT), culturally and racially neutral SEL programs overlook the impact of racial trauma and systemic oppression in favor of a “within the child” pedagogical approach predicated on interest convergence and assimilation. They advantage privileged over marginalized and minoritized communities in pursuit of uniform self-regulation strategies. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) “situated learning theory” posits that learning takes place through a community’s shared quotidian experiences. Employing situated learning theory, this article advances situated social-emotional learning (SSEL) in communities of practice empowers students, families, and communities as co-creators of their own social and emotional well-being. Further, this article proposes that youth participatory action research (YPAR)—a community development approach to learning where students engage in the research process, identifying and investigating problems and advocating for solutions to improve their own lives and institutions—offers a developmentally appropriate pedagogical springboard for nurturing SSEL skills and increasing students’ civic agency. Lastly, this article maintains YPAR projects benefit significantly from direct involvement by school counselors as educator-facilitators working alongside classroom teachers.
This digital ethnographic research explores how Black disabled girls and women use TikTok to narrate and resist racism and ableism in higher education. Using a purposive corpus of ten publicly available TikTok videos, I conceptualize urban as both (a) city-based higher education structured through austerity, surveillance, and bureaucratic gatekeeping and (b) a networked digital commons in which Black girls form counterpublics. Using three analytic dimensions (aesthetic/semiotic design, multimodal layering, and platform affordances/constraints), I theorize Black digital resistant literacies with five cross-cutting themes: disability fatigue/ academic ableism, self-advocacy as resistance, hashtagging as Black urban multiliteracy, narrative sovereignty against anti-Black digital racism, and digital storytelling. Throughout the corpus, creators use platform affordances to capture institutional realities, build counterpublics and defend digital communal space. These TikToks constitute epistemic and political challenges to institutional and platformed structures of legitimacy. This paper advances the field of Black disabled girlhood and affirms digital multimodal composing as literacy, legitimizes its platforms, and argues for institutional transformation aligned with disability justice.
This emerging collaboration between a borderlands bilingual teacher preparation program and a community STREAM Center (Alamito) in Segundo Barrio in El Paso, TX takes inspiration from recent critical scholarship around basketball as a potential space of learning and fugitivity with/in and alongside Latinx youth and communities (Carrillo, 2024); Carrillo Gilliam, 2024). Through ongoing dialogue and dreamings about potential collaborations between the university and Alamito the two authors came to realize that they were both hoop heads, which spurred them to organize a Saturday morning basketball game at Tula Irrobali Park a few blocks down the street from Alamito. The authors aim to make sense of the “second backpack” (Carrillo, 2024) in their local context as they continue playing hoops on Saturdays with a variety of players of different ages, varying skill levels, and connections to Segundo Barrio, and from their unique vantage points and praxis work as a critical scholar in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) and a borderlands pragmatist philosopher.
This study addresses two gaps in the literature. First, summer learning scholars have long demonstrated that family socioeconomic status is the main driver of summer learning, but they fail to account for potential neighborhood effects on summer learning. Second, urban scholars consistently have shown that neighborhood context plays a crucial role in children’s cognitive development and students’ academic performance, but they have rarely considered seasonal changes in neighborhood effects. I fill these gaps by assessing neighborhood effects on elementary and middle school students’ learning rates in the summer and in the academic year, using 3-level piecewise linear models with neighborhood characteristics incorporated. Results indicate that concentrated disadvantage and violent crime have stronger effects on students’ reading outcomes during the academic year than in the summer.
This study examined a collection of social media posts by BIPOC teachers in protest of their experience working at Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). Specifically, we analyzed teachers’ descriptions of accountability and intensification in their work and the prevalence of the emotion of guilt within the cathartic testimonial nature of posts. Grounded in Hargreaves (1994) conceptualization of guilt and Critical Race Theory (CRT), this qualitative study analyzed 401 teacher Instagram posts from a collection of CMO-based BIPOC@ and Black@ protest accounts. We found, consistent with Hargreaves (1994), that teachers expressed feelings of guilt amid a culture of intensification and accountability. Through CRT, we argue that examining posts as counterstories illuminates the racialized nature of the intensification and accountability of teaching in CMOs, highlighting an experience of “moral injury” where Black and Brown teachers described the cultural politics and ethical challenges of working within neoliberal structures.
This article employs Black feminist narrative inquiry to examine basketball as a pedagogical and worldmaking space in the life of a Black queer woman academic in Toronto. Drawing on lived experiences as a former point guard, the study traces how experiences cultivated through basketball can build leadership, resiliency, community, and social advocacy. The narrative documents how basketball skills have influenced and shape pedagogical practice, scholarly identity, and approaches to mentorship. Situating the game of basketball as an informal educational site, the article explores how learning on the basketball court translates into relational teaching, student-centered pedagogy, and knowledge creation within higher education. Basketball emerges as a sanctuary, pedagogy, and site of resistance and possibilities amid intersecting structures of anti-Black racism, gendered exclusion, and academic precarity. The article engages on broader questions of sport, education, and identity formation, particularly in relation to Black girls’ participation and belonging. By centering Black women lived experiences as legitimate knowledge, this narrative inquiry contributes to scholarship on critical pedagogy, Black Feminist thought, and sport-based education. The article argues that exploring the game of basketball can expand how educators and researchers rethink learning, leadership, and worldmaking within and beyond formal schooling contexts.
This paper examines how Black girls enact critical and multiliteracies through digital activism. Focusing on Shauna, a Black high school student of Jamaican heritage living in New York City, the study explores how she uses social media to engage with sociopolitical issues and advocate for justice. Specifically, it investigates how Shauna draws on an intersectional analysis and a coalitional mindset to interpret contemporary issues affecting marginalized communities and shape her digital activism. The insights from this paper demonstrate that Shauna’s digital activism is deeply connected to her participation in a social justice educational space that centers dialogue among girls and women of color. Through these experiences, she developed critical language and analytical tools for examining power and oppression, which she later applied in digital spaces to engage agentic discourse and action. By centering Shauna’s experiences, this study contributes to scholarship on Black girls’ literacies and social justice education by illustrating how dialogic educational spaces can cultivate critical literacies that support youth activism, coalition-building, and civic engagement.
School violence, particularly school shootings, continues to structure educational life in the United States, prompting schools to invest billions annually in security infrastructures. Yet decisions about school safety are still largely made without centering the perspectives of young people most directly affected by these conditions. This study draws on Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) conducted by the Youth Research Council (YRC), a collective of high school students in the Washington, D.C. area, who designed and implemented a multi-method study to examine how, when, and where students experience safety and unsafety in school. Findings show that students’ feelings of unsafety extend far beyond fears of physical violence, encompassing pervasive verbal violence, discriminatory language, and institutional failures to meaningfully respond to harm. These experiences are not evenly distributed, but are structured through intersecting systems of race and gender, producing patterned and unequal conditions of safety. Students frequently described dominant security responses as not only ineffective, but as actively reproducing harm through surveillance, neglect, and differential accountability. In contrast, students emphasized that safety is produced through care, relational trust, and consistent, equitable responses to harm from school adults. We argue that school safety is not a neutral security condition, but an intersectionally structured and politically produced state of being. Implications point to the necessity of redistributing power toward youth knowledge and fundamentally rethinking safety beyond punitive security logics.
Over the last four decades the United States (US) has witnessed an exponential increase in the arrivals of Black immigrants from African nations, many of whom choose to settle in urban areas. Research reveals that the urban context presents a complex ecology for African Black immigrants, providing access to supportive ethnic enclaves and co-ethnic networks, while presenting the possibility of increased exposure to systemic racism and intra-racial Black diasporic tensions. These urban experiences influence African Black immigrants’ identity navigation. In this paper, we work with African Black immigrant youth from a large city in the Northeast US to examine their narratives of identity navigation and the influence of the urban context on these narratives. The findings reveal that African Black immigrant youth authored four main narratives of connection. They praised the value of small learning groups for creating meaningful connections in learning spaces. They also celebrated the opportunity to nurture a shared African ethnic connection, even as they pushed back against essentializing discourses of African identity, and they challenged Black intra-racial tensions, calling for Black diasporic unity. Finally, their narratives highlighted the disconnection that occurs outside of supportive urban spaces. The findings highlighted the urban context as providing access to supportive institutional and ethnic identity structures even while it exposed African Black immigrant youth to intra-racial discrimination. The insights bear implications for how we support Black immigrant youth in urban education spaces as well as the social and affinity structures we establish for Black immigrant youth within urban ecologies.
Writing as a Black pastor-scholar rooted in the Black Church and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, I theorize the Black Church as an urban educational infrastructure that built and sustained Black multiliteracies alongside, and in direct tension with, formal schooling. In urban contexts where data capture, digital surveillance, and accountability regimes render Black learning hyper-visible and subject to institutional extraction, dominant literacy systems narrow what counts as knowledge and who is allowed to count as a knower. I develop the framework of fugitive ecclesial literacies to analyze sermon, testimony, and call-and-response as strategies of resistance, refusal, and reframing within Savage and Lynch’s (2024) tripartite framework. I define relational literacy as the capacity to sustain meaning through mutual recognition and accountability to others, cultivated where institutional recognition is denied. I further theorize the Black Church as an urban data sanctuary, a site where communities govern knowledge through relational trust rather than institutional extraction. This framework extends Black multiliteracies beyond definitions tied to formal schooling and equips urban educators and researchers to design school–community partnerships grounded in consent, repair, and the redistribution of expertise.
Urban education systems are increasingly experimenting with place‑based learning communities (LCs) to respond to growing socio‑ecological complexity. Yet empirical research on how such initiatives are organized, governed, and enacted in practice remains limited. This study situates Vienna’s Bildungsgrätzl (BG) initiative within this emerging field of distributed, school‑anchored LCs, addressing the conceptual ambiguities and governance tensions that characterize comparable models internationally. Drawing on semi‑structured expert interviews (N = 16) with educational leaders and stakeholders from seven BGs, we analyze how BGs evolve, how collaboration is structured across formal, non‑formal and informal institutions and how actors negotiate the initiative’s values, governance roles and everyday practices. The findings indicate that BGs combine bottom‑up engagement with light municipal scaffolding, shifting over time from loosely connected Communities of Practice to more intentionally coordinated Communities of Learners. The analysis identifies key mechanisms—hybrid governance configurations, cross‑institutional role distribution and activities that bridge school-community boundaries—that enable BGs to function as extended learning systems embedded in the city’s Smart Climate Strategy. The study contributes new empirical insights into how local LCs can be organized within urban governance structures while retaining local agency, illuminating both the innovative potential and the structural constraints of the BG model. These findings offer transferable lessons for policymakers and educators seeking to establish sustainable, community‑rooted educational networks in other urban contexts.
This analytical essay uses data from a qualitative study by O’Brien (2017) that explored the social construction of bullying. O’Brien interviewed 16 high school students enrolled in alternative and college-preparatory high schools. Although the study did not focus specifically on Black girls, their narratives surfaced a distinctly different story—one that exposed how whiteness, intersectional power, and cultural ways of knowing construct Black girls as quintessential bullies in schools. This re-analysis explores how Black girls are cast within the mythology of whiteness as archfoes—not merely as disruptive, but as symbolic antagonists whose existence threatens the normative order of whiteness itself. Labeled as bullies, they become scapegoats within a racialized discourse that shields white male violence from scrutiny. While white male shooters are framed as anomalies or victims of circumstance, Black girls are criminalized for protecting themselves and others from the violence inflicted upon them by both educators and students. Findings reveal that the intersection of race, gender identity, and adultification positions Black girls not only as subjects of bullying but also as targets of systemic retribution and disenfranchisement.
Where talent provides entrance, quality coaching and mentorship sustains success. This study explores the parallels between basketball coaching and academic mentorship. We seek to discover the collective beliefs, values, and assumptions that drive faculty to pursue doctoral mentorship through the lens of basketball. Through the framework of Culturally Situated Identity and Resiliency Coaching (CSIRC) framework, we provide a standpoint for viewing academic mentorship as culturally contextual, identity affirming, and multi-tiered. We employ a qualitative approach informed by a collective autoethnography (CAE) design to combine reflexive narratives of four doctoral mentors who created a doctoral mentoring program called the Scholar’s Pathway Collective. Through reflexive journaling, mentor focus group discussions, and film study, the mentors collected data on their mentorship experiences, assumptions, and purpose, with basketball coaching as a concurrent analogy. Through inductive thematic analysis, researchers found three themes: (a) seeing the game, (b) mastering boredom, and (c) in the gym. This study then concludes with a discussion of the findings and its significance for future doctoral mentorship.
As communities and educational institutions navigate increasing cultural diversity alongside political polarization and social fragmentation, leaders require innovative approaches to foster connection, learning, and behaviors that bridge divides, leverage differences, and improve outcomes. Grounded in Critical Sport Pedagogy and the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS), this conceptual analysis positions basketball as an ideal representation of intercultural leadership. Through historical and scholarly examination of the game’s origins, global reach, and cultural adaptations, the article demonstrates how basketball has consistently accepted, adapted to, and integrated diverse identities, traditions, and values. Biographical reflections from legendary players and coaches further emphasize the game’s capacity to transcend any one individual or culture. Based on this analysis, the author proposed three “rules of play” for intercultural leadership – “Who’s Got Next?”/“I Got Next!”, Positionless Play, and The Extra Pass. These three rules - each aligned with DMIS orientations of acceptance, adaptation, and integration – offer educators a practical framework for facilitating inclusive learning environments that foster collective growth and success within diverse groups. This analysis provides a starting point for further scholarly inquiry seeking to understand how shared social experiences, such as basketball, can help educators understand, cultivate, teach, and strengthen intercultural leadership.
Recognizing that schools are often sites of suffering, we – an Atlanta-based teacher residency team – have attempted to take a critical turn in teacher residency work by moving from traditional teacher preparation toward a way of knowing/being/doing that centers abolition via (1) attunement to geo-socio-historical and political situatedness, (2) democratic/participatory structures, (3) commitments to onto-epistemological orientations rooted in critical theories and abolition, and (4) an emphasis on learning as liberation. In this article, we explore the affordances/possibilities, constraints, and challenges of moving toward actualizing an abolitionist teacher residency and illustrate the complicated and sometimes contrasting perspectives of our teams as we negotiated this work. Overall, findings illustrate the complexities of anti-Blackness in education, tensions of labor inequalities and striving towards more democratic possibilities, and the challenges/constraints of abolitionist aspirations within our current policy context.
This work examines the social, structural, and cultural realities conveyed through women’s basketball in the 21st century. This study utilizes a critical autoethnographic approach to examine author experiences navigating women’s basketball through four distinctive experiences: (1) As a high school boys’ basketball player at a school where the girls’ basketball team competed for four consecutive state championships; (2) as a practice player for a women’s basketball team at a Division 1 school; (3) as a graduate student examining collegiate athletes’ experiences of emergent Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) policies; and (4) as a professional conducting NIL research. Risman’s (2004) gender as a structure framework is utilized to examine shifts of individual, social, and structural attitudes within and surrounding basketball to inform policy and practice recommendations.
Public [basketball] courts are increasingly recognised as informal urban spaces where civic relations are learned, contested, and renegotiated. However, existing scholarship often gives limited attention to how human and non-human elements, affective relations, and dialogic practices together shape pedagogical becoming under conditions of social and political constraint. This study conceptualises Tehran’s public basketball courts as spatio-dialogical territories where improvisation, micropolitics (generative negotiations that unsettle fixed social positions), and socio-material relations shape youth participation and sustain educational citizenship as an ongoing process of becoming. The study develops an assemblage-informed dialogic methodology that connects the authors’ (dis)embodied engagements with these sites to sustained dialogic exchanges across time and space. Drawing on lived experience, social observation, and interactive geography, the study introduces the concept of crystallisation to describe the temporary stabilisation of affective atmospheres within these courts, through which relations between socio-material arrangements and dialogic territorialisation—mobilising relations and polyphony—become visible. The findings show that public basketball courts are not merely physical settings, but more-than-human territories that generate affects, mobilise youth participation, and support forms of tacticalism. Within urban education, these courts become deterritorialised into zones of discourse, empathy, communicative exchange, and amplified voice, before participation is gradually reterritorialised. Educational citizenship is therefore understood not as a fixed attribute, but as a dialogic and (dis)embodied process through which presence, movement, and self/other relations are continually negotiated and recomposed.
This quantitative study examines gendered patterns of financial resource allocation between men’s and women’s basketball programs at National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in Texas. Using the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) data from 13 institutions, we examined operating expenses, total expenses, and revenues. Guided by a critical feminist framework, paired-samples t-tests and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were conducted to examine differences in financial allocations between men’s and women’s basketball programs. The finding revealed that women’s basketball programs consistently reported lower operating expenses, total expenses, and revenues than men’s programs. Results indicated that these disparities were systematically patterned across institutions. This study contributes new empirical insights into gender equity within HSI athletics. The article concludes with implications and future research within HSI athletic programs.
Student mobility is highly prevalent in the U.S. and often has negative impacts on students’ academic performance. Within-year mobility may be especially disruptive; however, research on its impacts is limited. Additionally, less is known about how impacts may vary across school academic and geographic contexts. This study leverages longitudinal student-level data collected over nine years across five counties to investigate how within-year school mobility impacts academic performance over time and across contexts. Using random-effect panel regression models results indicate that within-year mobility predicted significant declines in academic performance the following year. Transferring to higher-performing schools initially led to poorer performance, with gradual improvement over time. Findings suggest that school context does matter. We provide implications for policy and practice.
