ABSTRACT. The purpose of this panel is to consider and provide examples of how white scholars, teachers, and activists might combat white supremacy in their thinking, moving, feeling, and action in the current moment. The papers in this panel detail and examine conceptual and practical ways in which white people are reckoning with whiteness in their work as teachers, researchers, and activists. Work shared here will provide insight into how white people might move with patience, caution, and detailed intention as they grapple with white supremacy.

ABSTRACT. BIPOC Alliances: Building Communities and Curricula is a collection of reflective experiences that confront, challenge, and resist hegemonic academic canons. BIPOC perspectives are often scarce in scholarly academic venues and curriculum. This edited book is a curated collection of interdisciplinary, underrepresented voices, and lived experiences through critical methodologies for empowerment (Reilly & Lippard, 2018). Gloria Anzaldu a’s (2015) autohistoria-teorí a is a lens for decolonizing and theorizing of one’s own experiences, historical contexts, knowledge, and performances through creative acts, curriculum, and writing. Gloria Anzaldu a coined, autohistoria-teorí a, a feminist writing practice of testimonio as a way to create self-knowledge, belonging, and to bridge collaborative spaces through self-empowerment. Anzaldu a encouraged us to focus towards social change through our testimonios and art, “[t]he healing images and narratives we imagine will eventually materialize” (Anzaldu a & Keating, 2009, p. 247). For this collection, we use lived experience or testimonios as an approach, a method, to conduct research and to bear witness to learners and one’s own experiences (Reyes & Rodrí guez, 2012). Maxine Greene’s (1995) concept of an emancipated pedagogy merges art, culture, and history as one education that empowers students with Gloria Anzaldu a’s (2015) autohistoria-teorí a to re-imagine individual and collective inclusion by allowing students “... to read and to name, to write and to rewrite their own lived worlds” (Greene, 1995, pp. 147). Greene and Anzaldu a reach beyond theorizing and creating curriculum for awareness and expand the crossings into active and critical self-reflective work to rewrite one’s own empowered stories and engage in a healing process.

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores translanguaging as a theory, pedagogy, and qualitative research methodology. As a theory, translanguaging describes the ways that multilingual learners draw on the communicative resources around them to make meaning (García, 2009). As a pedagogy, it asks teachers to validate all language practices and disrupt traditional language borders (Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015). In bilingual education contexts, translanguaging asks teachers to develop bilingualism and biliteracy for the purposes of social transformation. For teachers in dual-language immersion (DLI) contexts, this can be very challenging due to curricular barriers rooted in the separation of both languages of instruction. Therefore, this study explores the global purposes and tensions of translanguaging pedagogy and highlights how they can manifest locally. Methodologically, it operationalizes García, Johnson, and Seltzer’s (2017) Stance/Design/Shifts framework for two purposes. First, it draws on semi-structured interviews with DLI teachers to identify the global purposes and tensions of a translanguaging stance. It finds that teachers engage translanguaging for the purposes of teaching for more than biliteracy/biculturalism, teaching as a co-learner, and teaching to disrupt raciolinguistic ideologies. Generally, this means that elementary DLI teachers integrate linguistic and cultural variation into the curriculum, continue to learn how to engage translanguaging with their students, and do so to disrupt validate all translanguaging practices as academic and appropriate. However, teachers also shared how they must simultaneously navigate tensions related to resisting English hegemony, negotiating weak and strong translanguaging, and valuing teacher expertise. Generally, teachers confront a largely English-only curriculum, must balance justice-oriented translanguaging pedagogy with standardized literacy instruction, all while their expertise to innovate with translanguaging is commonly undervalued or unrecognized by their administrators. In addition to a global view of the purposes and tensions of translanguaging, this study also integrates local analysis of how they emerge in practice. Asking a smaller group of elementary DLI teachers to create critical translanguaging literacy lesson plans, it presents multiple local examples of each translanguaging purpose and tension in practice, through case studies of elementary DLI teachers design and shift with translanguaging as a critical literacy pedagogy. Findings from the case studies offer further evidence of how teachers practically negotiate these purposes and tensions, in their curricular designs and shifting instructional practices, to critically and creatively teach with translanguaging as a critical literacy pedagogy. Implications highlight the need to expand teacher agency to innovate with translanguaging pedagogy and research agency to innovate with translanguaging methodology.

ABSTRACT. Dual language (DL) programs have historically served emergent bilingual learners and minority students. Many DL today suffer from gentrification, which refers to the direct or indirect actions that push emergent bilinguals (EB) and other minority students out. I centered this study on curriculum theory using Gilmetdinova and Burdick’s (2016) conceptualized translingual curriculum to ensure that language, culture, and curriculum are receptive to the language practice and cultural location of emergent bilingual learners while addressing the power dynamics within these programs.

ABSTRACT. Despite not being compulsory in Brazil, the teaching of English to young and very young learners has grown, mainly in public contexts, and because there are no official guidelines, it is possible to identify isolated initiatives to include the language in the regular school curriculum. In this presentation we are going to share the preliminary results of a collaborative project in which local teachers from a Southern Brazil city highlighted the urgent necessity for resignification of their curriculum, based on their actual practices. The project is being carried out within a broader project at Londrina State University with local government funding.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the relationship between religious traditions in the American South and gender norms that are being perpetuated in the curriculum-as-plan (Aoki, 1993, p. 257; Whitlock, 2017). This intentional effort to create a “null curriculum” that inherently values gender identities that fall within prescribed gender norms and seeks to create educational spaces that preserve gendered power systems in the name of developmentally appropriate practices. In addition, this paper will assert critical approaches for how to leverage autobiographical currere (Pinar, 2012) and lived curriculum (Aoki, 1993, p. 258) as ways to push back against traditional white, heteronormative values.

ABSTRACT. In the recent essay “Making Room and Occupying Space. Women Conquering and Designing Urban Spaces,” by Chiara Belingardi and Claudio Mattogno the authors look at how feminists are highlighting the invisibility of women and finding ways to claim presence in our physical environments. This research and presentation take Belingardi and Mattogno’s study and seeks to further recognize the hidden curriculum that is engrained in our historical patterns, beliefs and behaviors. For us to change, we must change current practices, policies and procedures for a more equitable naming of healthy public spaces and places. As Dewey recognized: “To name anything is to give it a title; to dignify and honor it by raising it from a mere physical occurrence to a meaning that is distinct and permanent. To know the names of people and things and to be able to manipulate these names is, in savage lore, to be in possession of their dignity and worth.” It is such dignity and worth that women’s contributions to society deserve remembering by honoring them with their names. These subtle, but important actions will flip the hidden curriculum to one that teaches the members of our communities that the work of women also matters.

ABSTRACT. This literature review analyzed the scholarship on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the off-reservation boarding schools for Indigenous children modeled after Carlisle. The purpose of the literature review was to understand the central themes and the sources used for research on Carlisle. The findings of the literature revealed the central themes included policies, curriculum, and school practices, meaning of the schools, personal experiences, and the abuse, trauma, and deaths in the schools. Sources included interviews, newspapers, policies, archival information, letters, images, textbooks, institutional reports, and correspondence.

ABSTRACT. Drawing dialogues across educational traditions, this paper uses two years of sonic ethnographic data that thought with students of color to understand how they negotiated an overwhelmingly white high school in the Midwestern part of the United States. This paper examines the many ways that schools continue to engage in educational necropolitics, or a system of dictating whose ways of being, knowing, and doing should survive and thrive in schools, and to what degree minoritized students’ ontoepistemologies should be silenced or murdered through various forms of curriculum.

ABSTRACT. This paper will briefly critique the critical pedagogical practice of overemphasizing ontology and theory to the detriment of cultivating embodied understanding of oppression and one’s personal role in the dialectic of hegemonic violence. Positioning my own work as a critical scholar and teacher educator as the main object of critique, I will identify areas where contemplative pedagogy and practices may serve to enhance critical consciousness and self-understanding within students. In order to serve a wider conference audience, I will also apply my findings to a lesson for the secondary social studies classroom.

ABSTRACT. Much like police and prisons, schools play a key role in reproducing racial capitalism. Why, then, do I believe in police and prison abolition, but not school abolition? This paper presents my exploration of this question. Building on scholarship and activism dedicated to police and prison abolition, I present three sets of interrelated arguments—historical, structural, and practical—against using “school abolition” as a guiding framework for educational thought. Along with each set of arguments I share questions still lingering for me, the pursuit of which might provide potential pathways forward for abolitionist teaching, research, advocacy, and organizing in education.

ABSTRACT. This paper will demonstrate the activities which the authors used in the Introduction to the Learning and Teaching Programme for early academics at Kingston University London UK. The purpose of the session was to facilitate participants awareness and knowledge of the hidden curriculum, the Inclusive Curriculum Framework and decolonial praxis. The paper will offer participants the opportunity to reflect on their teaching and practices and share ideas on how to transform curricula across all levels. This practice-based session will provide ideas and suggestions to those involved in training teachers and academics to engage in critical pedagogical praxis.

ABSTRACT. This study examines the lived curriculum of urban, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) by examining their missions and how the universities’ curriculum, financial priorities, operational behaviors, and leadership narratives align or fail to align with those missions. The researchers examine twelve minority-serving institutions in the Northeast where 50% or more of their students are Pell-eligible. Based on their findings, the researchers make recommendations to ensure urban MSIs support justice, equity, and inclusion missions.

ABSTRACT. This article, using data collected from two teacher preparation programs at Midwest regional, comprehensive universities in two different states, uses poetic inquiry to explore the cultural phenomenon of “Midwest Nice” in response to issues of systemic racism. Pulling from 330 preservice teachers’ (PTs) survey responses since the COVID-19 pandemic began, this study explores the self-reflexive nature in which PTs engage, explore, negate, avoid, deny, reflect, and move through issues of racism through both retrospective (past/present selves) and prospective (possible selves) reflection. Through poems, created from survey responses, 20 different voices articulate the varied approaches to address systemic racism in their own lives as well as their future classrooms.

ABSTRACT. This highlighted session will showcase the multifaceted approaches being taken by Penn State’s Restorative Justice Initiative to change the perceptions of and educational access available to incarcerated individuals. Individuals participating in a number of RJI-related programs will share challenges and celebrations about their efforts to pursue transformative justice in and outside of carceral settings. Highlighted programs will include the RJI student organization, background on Penn State courses taken by both campus-based and incarcerated students inside of local correctional facilities, and efforts to establish credit-bearing opportunities for incarcerated students, among others.

ABSTRACT. In contrast to extensively used research methodologies that perpetuates oppressive colonizing oppressive research traditions, we will share the use of Feminist Decolonizing Indigenous Epistemologies in our scholarship and activism, specifically in a special issue of the Rio Bravo Journal. We understand the topic of this year conference, Practicing and Cultivating Humanizing Ways of Being in Education in the Pursuit of Social Justice as an opportunity to highlight that social movements, community engagement, and grassroots activism in our localities and from other geographies of reason, particularly the USA borderlands—which we include as part of the Global South—are spaces of resistance, creations, and learning where we can imagine a not-yet-imagined future. Each one of us, faculty at different departments and universities, are actively working towards the same purpose, going back to our roots, engage with the current conditions, and search for possibilities of building a world inclusive of our social realities, lived experiences, genderized and minoritized bodies.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how two teacher educators of color–each working at racially diverse 4-year, public Hispanic Serving Institutions–addressed diversity in relation to equity and justice in their methods courses. Utilizing Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) and multiple theorizations of care to read the professors’ competing moral and immoral perspectives on inclusion (a) complicated the binary in critical teacher education between (idealist) thoughts/beliefs and (materialist) transformative action, (b) opened up ways of thinking about economic justice in relation to educational, democratic, community engagement, and (c) reaffirmed that an ideology of ability is inherent in thinking about curricular transformation.

ABSTRACT. The academy continues to marginalize students with exceptional needs even as Colleges and Universities work to integrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into the curriculum and systemic structures. While student success centers and disability services meet the letter of the law under ADA, there are still numerous obstacles that students with exceptional needs face prior to being able to access these services. These obstacles include; ineffective transitional planning at the secondary level, completing college applications, inequitable grading systems, college applications, and entrance exams, financial aid packages are just a few that create barriers to students with exceptionalities to even entering the academy.

This presentation and talk will explore the many ways that students with exceptionalities are excluded from higher education, and offer solutions from our experience in providing institutional structures to support students to attend and succeed at the academy.

ABSTRACT. Our educational system often oppresses students, taking them on a seemingly meaningless journey through an out of touch rigid system telling them what to think, not how to think. Through my work as a paraprofessional, I have taken on the challenge of bringing back a sense of agency to my students, helping to construct a curriculum based around their individual interests and skill sets to raise the level of engagement and connection to their academics.

ABSTRACT. We as humans have always told our stories through varied forms. Early humans made drawings on the walls of caves. Throughout time, humans have written poetry and plays. We have made art and music. We have kept diaries, journals and written letters that help document our world around us. It is from these personal stories told through different means of expressions and rooted in our lived experiences we come to know our shared histories of the agony and anguish from world calamity and local tragedies, as well as our resilience, collective successes and personal triumphs.

The COVID-19 pandemic that our world has been experiencing over the past two plus years, has united human beings around the globe in a collective pain of uncertainty and loss. Additionally, we are currently battling threats of a global recession, colored with interweavings and fallout from political strife and wars. Our education profession, long revered as a catalyst for social change, has not been immune. All of our stakeholders, from students, to teachers, to parents, community and business partners, are feeling physical, emotional and psychological fatigue that is difficult to identify, impossible to quantify, but nonetheless leaves an indelible scar. As we consider ways to combat the learning losses of our students and find solutions to right some of our society's ills, one remedy may lie within the use of inquiry based writing.

Writing within the classroom can sometimes feel like a daunting and secondary task, something that must be taught through formulas or prescription. Rarely have we as educators been taught to view and understand writing as a vessel of healing. It is a root of our self expression, and inquiry based writing can be a remedy to ignite social change.

Inquiry based writing is taught with intention, and it can equip students to engage the world around them, to delve into the investigation of who they are, and to find modes of expression that can be a catalyst for change. Educators walk alongside students to guide them in developing a writerly identity. They are allies that advocate for and support a space and help students think critically about the intentional decisions they are making and how each choice they make empowers their work. Writing deepens complex and creative thinking and prepares students to engage in the critical work of sustainable transformation in our world.

This session will equip educators with immediately usable strategies, activities, and pedagogies that can help foster an environment within the classroom where writers thrive. Through this session educators will explore inquiry based feedback, a strategy designed to build student thinking around writing, and help them strengthen their voice. It will focus on partnering with students to build a writerly identity, one where they take ownership of their work and begin to see writing not as a task, but as a means to further engage the world and people around them.

ABSTRACT. Under the tenets of Identity Negotiation Theory, this study examines the multimodality of five immigration-themed graphic novels by Critical Content Analysis. The study uncovers identity tensions between personal and socio-cultural identities through the identity negotiation process including identity inclusion, identity transformation, and competent identity negotiation. When we finish the study in progress, we hope that our findings will be helpful for informing additional studies on multilingual education. The findings can help teachers and students regard graphic novels as a powerful tool to acquire knowledge of component identity negotiation and to value sociocultural and personal identities.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, I seek additional evidence to the continued ascendence of immigrant groups and how the policies put in place are dehumanizing many immigrant students in the school setting. Given to the ascendence of immigrant groups policy makers find it necessary to create and impose aggressive polices. In a multitude of ways, these policies dehumanize immigrants. Once these vast majority of families cross, local educational institutes are not meeting the needs of immigrant children in all aspects of

ABSTRACT. Explore a curriculum unit developed by a middle school World Cultures teacher used to engage sixth-grade students in the study of “difficult history” and counternarratives around the experiences of marginalized groups oppressed by racism and white supremacy. Using South Africa and the United States as “historical case studies,” she describes how she conceptualized, designed, implemented, and reflected on how she taught the unit with the theme of “the power of the human voice,” which Black South Africans and African Americans have used as a means for gaining power and leveraging democratic structures to achieve racial justice.

Objectives: - Participants will learn about our experiences designing and implementing curriculum that comprises critical analysis of difficult history. - Participants will learn how I found and used authentic, multimedia resources that provide counter-narratives to “official history.” - Participants will engage in discussion about how to create this type of history curriculum for students.

Participants experience: Participants will learn about how a middle school teacher collaborated with a university professor to conceptualize, design, implement and reflect on a unit plan with the theme of “the power of the human voice,” which Black South Africans and African Americans have used as a means for gaining power and leveraging democratic structures to achieve racial justice.

An overview of the presentation includes: - How we used conceptual frameworks for difficult history and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy to inform the design of the unit plan - How I came up with the idea and the theme for the unit - What considerations were important to take into account in the design of the unit - How I organized the unit - Student reactions, work, response, and feedback - Conclusions and next steps Participants will discover tools that can be used in researching resources that offer counternarratives in the study of “difficult history”.

This presentation demonstrates an example of incorporating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy through an original “difficult history” unit by focusing on the experiences of marginalized people of color with government, critical consciousness around social/political inequities, and possibilities for socially transformative learning.

ABSTRACT. Exploring how ethical principles fit into the modern social studies classroom, this project reports on the reconceptualization of a national organizations statement on what it is to be ethical educators in the social studies. Through both a Progressive turn towards a desired tomorrow, as well as an Analytical turn examining what is being done now committee members share their Currere’s, considering the scope and power of such a statement, considering what is and is not possible while engaging a conversation around six principles – Justice, Authenticity, Responsibility, Pluralism, Civic Engagement and Integrity.

ABSTRACT. [Online] In this phenomenological study, I seek ways to support preservice teachers’ engagement with the topics and practice related to race, racism, and cultural diversity by naming complexities in teacher education. This study focuses on the phenomenon of hegemonic insider-outsider. A hegemonic insider-outsider is one who finds their positionality and privilege in flux depending on the dominant culture’s values and the values of the social group to which they identify. My analysis show how the phenomenon is produced as individual preservice teachers navigate various forms and levels of relationships, dominant discourses, oppressions, and marginalization.

ABSTRACT. Transformative learning allows adult learners to make meaning of their lived experiences if they engage in a critically reflective process. Central to transformative learning theory are the goals of giving rise to lasting personal change, shaping learners’ views on their world, and creating a shift in their perspective of the way they act and interact with their world (Mezirow,1991). Essential for this transformation to happen, adult educators need to create an environment that is conducive to such a transformation. That is, the pedagogical models used to create such a learning experience should focus on embracing the personal experiences of the individual learners as well as their cultural values and identities. In other words, humanizing the learners is essential to fostering transformative learning (Frier, 2005; Ukpokodu, 2009a). Previous literature, revealed that using art-based pedagogy as a humanizing pedagogy fostered transformative learning among adult learners (Zinn et al., 2016, ). These studies focused on using art modalities like drawing or using literary texts utilizing participatory photography (Clover, 2006). One such art-based pedagogy is photovoice, which utilizes both photography and storytelling as tools for learning, empowerment, awareness, and agency (Latz, 2017). the unique integration of both photography and storytelling as artistic expressions that tap into both rational and extrarational processes of awareness disposed this pedagogical approach as a holistic transformative pedagogy. To date, no explicit framing of photovoice pedagogy as a holistic transformative pedagogy that focuses of empowering learners.As there is a growing interest in this approach due to its potency to increase authentic academic engagement, there is a need to understand the affordances this teaching method could offer. In this theoretical paper, we discuss the transformative dimensions of the approach and how it has high potency to foster transformative learning within higher education classrooms. Specifically, we situate photovoice as a transformative pedagogy and discuss a proposed model for such a framing. We identify four components for this model: (a) the use of photo prompts to elicit provocative learning, (b) the use of photography to integrate both academic learning and cultural and personal experiences, (c) the use of artistic expression to engage with critical and emotional reflections, and (b) a brave learning space. We discuss each of these components in detail highlight how it relates to humanizing the learners and their learning experience in adult classrooms. Further we discuss the transformative outcomes aligned with this model such as identity formation, connectedness and perspective transformation.

ABSTRACT. Teaching social justice in the CRT format might be seen as a controversial subject. This is significantly driven by its impact on how people perceive and interact with their environment, which is an embedded component of the curriculum being taught and will be taught in all educational settings. I recognize the need for social justice in the curriculum as an international graduate teaching assistant who is engaged in teaching-related topics to sociocultural foundations of education and specifically teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT).. In the spirit of teaching CRT, I was able to identify a variety of perspectives and topics regarding social justice education and also drew attention to the significance of connecting social justice in a critical manner that takes into account both theoretical and practical contexts.

ABSTRACT. Aware of a multiplicity of understandings of race as social category for both identity and identification, this paper examines how nuanced embodied and social dynamics like phenotype, gender, language and accent, and nationality are attributed different racialized significance relative to migratory (re)location and local context. Implications for teacher education and curriculum practices are also offered.

ABSTRACT. The goal of this project was to pilot a critical coaching model to interrogate whiteness and dehumanizing pedagogies within early childhood education teacher educator courses. Over the course of two semesters, our team was able to engage in productive cycles of critical dialogue and reflection, and changes in practices through our critical community of practice. This community disrupted hierarchies between teacher educators and graduate students, and tenured faculty and graduate students. Positioning graduate students as critical coaches to tenured faculty is a novice and innovative way to disrupt power asymmetries within the college of education. These practices expanded not only the teacher educators’ critical consciousness, but also made space for the PSTs to engage in more productive dialogue and engagement around anti-racist practices and pedagogies.

ABSTRACT. How can we humanize learning by normalizing failure? This interactive workshop emphasizes failure as an active part of literacy learning through improvisational theater practices and a social justice framework. Attendees are invited to participate in improv exercises and debriefing conversations aimed at shifting perceptions around failure and learning.

ABSTRACT. During this session the facilitators will guide participants through a creative process of reflection, writing and embodied practice (i.e. Theatre of the Oppressed) to reimagine the ways in which racism can be interrupted in their own institutions and communities. By tapping into creative sensibilities, participants will engage in a process that allows them to open up different ways of knowing and knowledge production. This is a powerful approach to addressing racism that merges theory and practice, as well as mind and body.

ABSTRACT. Overwhelmingly white, middle class, and female, American teachers are typically nice people who strive to create welcoming environments in their classrooms. In this paper, I consider the inadequacy of niceness for addressing tensions related to race, language, and nationality as they trickle down into the classrooms of even the youngest children. The disciplinarity of niceness, although considered a critical component of moral education and development within many progressive schools, may deter teachers from practicing a vision of classroom citizenship that can meet the challenges of a multicultural, heterogeneous America.

ABSTRACT. The call for proposals for this conference began by quoting from W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1940 book Dusk of Dawn: people “must be changed by influencing folkways, habits, customs and subconscious deeds” (p. 111). He continued: “Here perhaps is a realm of physical and cosmic law which science does not yet control” (ibid.). It was both his mention of the subconscious and his observation of the limitations of science that caught my attention. How might we understand the subconscious today and how might that new understanding affect how we create change, particularly as it related to teaching antiracism. To begin to address this question I turn to Katherine Hayles’ (2017) who defines cognition as “a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning” (p. 22), though she complicates this statement by pointing out that most of human cognition is not conscious. One of the major factors in this interpretation and connection is the continuity present between newly introduced ideas and those already accepted by an individual. This continuity is not just preferential but is crucial to the health of a consciousness (Hayles, 2017; see also Edelman & Tononi, 2000). If new ideas must be interpreted and connected by those already present: where, then, do our already-held ideas come from? It seems obvious but worth stating that those already-held ideas come from our own sedimented histories. Ideas that wish to join my current collection must contend with my own sedimented histories of teaching in Chicago and my graduate studies for example. Also, they must content with my lifelong engagement with macro and micro systems as a white cis-gendered male. Significantly, these sedimented histories and pre-approved ideas are not limited to those I have consciously selected as worthy of my allegiance. Again, most of cognition is not conscious. As argued by Derrick Bell, racism is endemic to our social system and part of the hidden curriculum we encounter every day and thus also sedimented into our consciousness. To explain this further and draw the connection between the epistemic level of ideas and the ontological level of the physical brain, I will turn to Jennifer Eberhardt’s work, particularly her 2019 book Biased in which she takes this non-conscious processing and applies it to theories of bias and the material restructuring of the brain that it causes. The cognitive nonconscious is constantly filtering most of the deluge of information that comes into our minds leaving only those idea which have been non-consciously determined to be worth our time. In other words, before we even have a chance to consciously deploy antiracism, racist ideas have already had a say. Antiracism must contend with the sedimented ideas of racism embedded through long years of exposure. This paper is a deeper exploration of the theories of the cognitive non-conscious, bias, the protean nature of racism, and the tools that teachers might use to reframe their preexisting ideas to better hear and process new resistances to racism.

ABSTRACT. The lived educational experiences of Muslim American youth are deeply affected by the white, mainstream landscape where they navigate their realities as a minoritized and demonized group. Muslim American populations in North America have underwent traumatizing Islamophobia since the 9/11 attacks, which forced many Muslim families to return to their countries of origin in the face of racist threats or choose lifestyles where they could not be identified as Muslim. The Trump era unleashed further bigotry and hatred against Muslim Americans and brought on an alarming increase in hate crimes against this vilified demographic. Muslim American youth experience a distinct marginalization experience as part of their lived reality. This lived experience is one of challenges and resilience, invalidation and strength, as Muslim Americans navigate their intersectional realities with hyphenations and multiplicities of identity at play (Sirin & Fine, 2008). MusCrit creates a space under the umbrella of Critical Race Theory for the exploration of this population's lived experiences.

ABSTRACT. Conversations about decolonization have become more and more widespread in recent years. How do we integrate such conversations in our classrooms and help high school and college pupils understand the context they live in? Enter Miguel Street, a novel by VS Naipaul, which largely explores the implications of British colonialism in the Caribbean with 17 complex characters. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an eerie account of how colonialism can shape and distort education, opportunities, and even one's sense of self. The novel both reinforces and challenges our cultural assumptions of gender roles, domestic violence, privilege, and more. Teaching Miguel Street through the lens of postcolonialism can open the conversation in education for social justice, as this intriguing book is rich in its use of the English language (and in particular Trinidadian Creole), it integrates the smart use of dual narration, shows the reality of Trinidad and Tobago after changing hands throughout history, and highlights the use of calypsos to demonstrate cultural truths. It also largely explores the detrimental effects of patriarchal values on men, and the extraordinary lengths women must go to in order to survive and thrive in such a society. It also addresses race and its connection to privilege. All in all, the novel is a solid interpretation of the connections between imperialism, patriarchy, and colonialism, and how these three systems depend on one another to survive.

In many ways, the hardships in Miguel Street parallel those of people in places such as Puerto Rico, a territory that is complicated by years of colonialism and corruption. Young adults and professionals who leave the island (something which is usually called the brain drain) often do so for the very same reasons the narrator of Miguel Street does, to achieve a meaningful life and identity that may lead to some prosperity, after years of witnessing the ways in which his opportunities are limited. I highlight this because the story of Miguel Street in many ways is the story of any place that has suffered colonialism. The difficulties many countries and their peoples now face are due to exploitation. As such, it is my hope that discussing Miguel Street can allow educators and students to make greater connections on the ways of the world, and grant them the opportunity to reflect on their part in it. After all, in the same way that one character’s actions can reverberate in the street, so do our actions in this world.

ABSTRACT. We report on research examining a virtual exchange for pre-service English language teachers from two countries. Our presentation underscores the potential of virtual exchange as spaces to enrich students’ perspective-taking and captures the process of deepening awareness of positionalities and cultural identities as well as relationship building.

ABSTRACT. In Australia, the concepts of competency-based learning, transformative education and social justice are tightly linked together in the national and state school curricula. This paper will contribute to the global discussion concerning systematic application of inclusive curricula in the context of practice.

ABSTRACT. This paper seeks to substantially examine how Mexico/Texas border teachers selectively appropriate the White curriculum in a region where the minoritized population is the majority. The way stories are told in curricula is dependent on power, and in the RGV, there is a need for a balance of stories to achieve a balance of power (Moreira, 2016). The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the narratives of teachers’ efforts to balance that power and target majority minority needs by utilizing lived curriculum as ways to appropriate or subvert the traditional white curriculum.

ABSTRACT. [Online] We invite educators and scholars to join a critical inquiry to support elementary teachers’ engagement with justice-oriented education. The vicious cycle of blaming teachers and schools for the failure of providing just, inclusive education and imposing undue burdens and expectations with superficial policies has persisted in education in South Korea. This study seeks to problematize the expectations and demands placed on teachers that continue to scapegoat teachers while providing minimal advocacy and support for their professional growth in social justice education.

ABSTRACT. This project looks to develop and present a narrative exploration and understanding of those members of a technical writing committee dedicated to redeveloping social studies standards within a provided framework of fewer, clearer, and higher as well as social justice, anti-racism, and equity. Considerations of purpose and the intent of those members and the standards are explored within the framework of critical curriculum inquiry lead to a narrative exploring how curriculum and standards are understood in today’s education.

ABSTRACT. As I sorted through my Mother’s belongings, I reflected on things that shaped my childhood and continue to inform my life experiences, including how I engage with curricular materials and my students. As a former elementary teacher, turned teacher educator, I understand that students’ knowledges and experiences shape their academic learning. Framed by Pinar and Grumet’s theory of currere, and through poetic inquiry, this paper considers childhoods as a synthetical, proleptic, moment. My stories, combined with stories of my former students, inspired this project.

ABSTRACT. The privileging and constraint of the voice in qualitative research has long been a topic of discussion (Lincoln, Guba, 2005; Mazzei, Jackson, 2009; Souto-Manning, 2013; Pillow, 2003; Lee, 2020). Qualitative researchers are trained to privilege the voice, allowing participants to find their authentic selves and use their multiple voices. However, in humanizing research, the researcher needs to understand their own multiple, changing subjectivities and their voices and that their subjectivities influence the meanings they attach to what they see. By not critically reflecting on our voices or multiple subjectivities as researchers, we would deny that the researcher influences their research and limits the study's possibilities. In this ethnographic endeavor, three ethnographers (White female American, Japanese female, South Korean female) critically reflect on their positionality and each other to continue the conversation about researchers' positionality and reflexivity in the field and how those positions affect the data. Ruth Behar (1996) wrote, “nothing is stranger than this business of humans observing others write about them”(p.5). The authors, newer to fieldwork, concur with Behar and have numerous conversations about the strangeness of the ethnographic observation. The subjectivity of the ethnographers influences the observation, the crucial action in ethnography, and is often underestimated within the research (Devereux, 2014; Geertz, 1973; Davis & Craven, 2022). The three authors of this paper acknowledge the strangeness of the observation and the tension that observation creates. They start an endeavor to unpack and explore their relations to the research and their participants. Working within feminist ethnographic methodologies, the authors seek to humanize their own stories within their studies. Over several months, the authors have journaled about their subjectivities and positionality as well as how their stories impact their data collection and interaction with their participants. The three authors have read one another entries and have provided comments, questions, and another entanglement of thoughts. The authors discuss the comments throughout the process to recognize that self-reflexivity does not stop at a positionality statement. All three authors acknowledge that seeing our subjectivities as fluid and impactful in our research allows us to see (im)possibilities. What is presented here is the initial thoughts and dialogue that has come out of the act of journaling and dialoguing together. While all three ethnographers are conducting their research, they acknowledge that humanizing research allows for the possibilities of consciousness-raising. Presentation Format: Paper/Roundtable

References Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart. Beacon Press.

Davis, D. A., & Craven, C. (2022). Feminist ethnography: Thinking through methodologies, challenges, and possibilities. Rowman & Littlefield.

Devereux, G. (2014). From anxiety to method in the behavioral sciences. In From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. De Gruyter Mouton.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures (Vol. 5019). Basic books.

Lee, C. C. (2020). “I Have a Voice”: Reexamining researcher positionality and humanizing research with African immigrant girls. Multicultural Perspectives, 22(1), 46-54.

Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0951839032000060635

Souto-Manning, M. (2013). Critical for whom? Theoretical and methodological dilemmas in critical approaches to language research. In D. Paris & M. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 201–220). Sage

ABSTRACT. A Victim No More is a short autoethnographic play. The play relays my personal experiences growing up in the American educational system. It reveals how I felt excluded in a heteronormative classroom and reflects on the idea of transforming curriculum and instruction to be more inclusive. The set is metaphoric; the various times and locales should be defined by lighting and minimal props. The costumes also should be minimal: Actors in basic black, perhaps adding a hat or scarf to suggest who they are. The cast of five should be diverse and representative of multiple races and ethnicities. Although this play is written primarily from a gay male’s perspective, liberties may be taken with the script to adjust the writing to pertain to LBTQ+.

ABSTRACT. How we define ourselves, and the ways in which our bodies occupy classrooms and other spaces of pedagogical exchange, matters deeply to our shared definition of education. How does the increasingly violent rhetoric used to define educators, school systems and higher education support an effort to destroy American education? In this panel, three educators present their findings on the status of social justice pedagogies in modern American society; a scholar-educator working in the public school system, a scholar-educator and tenured professor of education at a liberal arts college, and a scholar-educator and term professor at a minority-serving public university.

ABSTRACT. Neoliberalism has been described by many as the greatest threat to global democracy (Brown, 2015; Chomsky, 1999; Giroux, 2015). One of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism is the built-in belief that there exist no other possibilities for thinking and being (Brown, 2015; Chomsky, 1999; Tuck, 2013). For the purposes of this proposal, we take up the definition of neoliberalism as a governing rationale (Brown, 2015) enacted through the marketization of all domains of society. Within neoliberalism everything, including education, becomes subjected to marketization. Markets are no longer a source of truth, but rather the source of truth (Brown, 2015). In order for neoliberal governance to work effectively, a particular type of subject is required. We argue neoliberal subjectivity is constructed through discourses of market outcomes, physical extremes, and fleeting time (Gates, 2021). Neoliberalism does not operate in a vacuum and instead interacts with other discourses to create complex subjectivities. One such discourse is whiteness. Whiteness is a “racial discourse” that supports white supremacy (Leonardo, 2002). Describing whiteness, Tanner and McCloskey (2022) draw upon Thandeka’s (1999) research on whiteness. They argue whiteness creates subjects characterized by conditional inclusion in communities, the need to be controlled and be controlled, and repressiveness (Tanner & McCloskey, 2022). In this way, whiteness, like neoliberalism, requires particular types of subjects in order to work effectively. Recognizing neoliberalism and whiteness are intertwined, we believe they work together to produce particular subjectivities. For example, in the aims of ever-increasing the value of its own human capital, the neoliberal subject will push itself to physical and mental extremes to produce (Gates, 2021). Similarly, Thandeka (1999) describes the emotional toll articulating their race is for White people, creating an “emotional fallout” from losing, “one’s own sense of coherence, efficacy, and agency” (p. 26). In both cases, people are pushed to an emotional breaking point, in one case (neoliberalism), for the market, in the other (whiteness), in an effort to be accepted by the White community. Within a neoliberal, white supremacist system, emotions are to be controlled through the market and racialization. In our presentation, we will describe how neoliberalism and whiteness work together in seemingly compatible and contradictory ways. We will explain how neoliberalism forces individuals to understand themselves personally, with little regard for the relationships and communities around them. We contest this and other qualities of the neoliberal subject play into supporting whiteness, creating a unique neoliberal subject of whiteness that continuously refies both neoliberalism and white supremacy.

ABSTRACT. Critical pedagogy confronts the question that has traditionally haunted teachers & embraces it wholeheartedly as a path toward humanization— ‘Why are we learning this?’ The RIPE Method offers four paths (Reverence, Imagination, Problematization, and Enhancement) for learners to construct purpose for their actions by answering their own why, their own way.

ABSTRACT. Historically, the United States education system has been inconsistent in addressing issues of injustice and inequity (Adams & Bell, 2016). Recently, educators, community members, and researchers have pushed for the inclusion of curriculum and instruction that promotes critical thinking regarding social injustice issues (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017; Spitzman & Balconi, 2019). Researchers emphasize fundamental education goals should be to allow students the space to understand the difference between equality and equity, address inequitable structures, and build their awareness of self, others, and social systems (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012; & Gay 2018).

Any time teachers develop a social justice unit, there are uncertainties in how students respond. These uncertainties arise because of inexperience with topics, conflict between the social relationships of what is taught in schools to what may be discussed at home, and the impact of social and political pressures (Flores-Koulish & Shiller, 2020). Therefore, this collaborative teacher research focused on understanding how students responded to this newly designed unit that investigated systemic racial oppression in society. In addition to understanding student response, it would be crucial to connect with families to build supports so they could interact with and discuss the social justice topics taught in this unit (Marchand et al., 2019; Picower, 2012; Yull & Wilson, 2018). Hence, the research questions that guided the authors' work were: - How do students respond to classroom experiences that encourage the critical analysis of racial oppression? - What are important factors to consider when developing home-school engagement social justice connections specific to a unit on racial oppression?

The first author of this study designed a five-week unit on oppression taught during Spring 2021. As the first author designed and implemented the unit, the second author captured the student learning experiences through observational field notes and explored ways to engage families in social justice topics through an anonymous caregiver survey, sharing insights with the research team. Both authors engaged in reflective journaling to capture their thoughts and reflect on how their positionalities intersected with the teaching and learning throughout the unit.

Findings revealed that students recognized the impact of hidden societal messages and how society devalues particular identities of minoritized groups. Students also demonstrated an in-depth understanding of colorblindness, the erasure of human experiences, and the histories of people of color. Further, opportunities arose to support meaningful social justice-focused family engagement. Essential factors to consider for students and families when teaching a social justice unit are shared in this presentation.

ABSTRACT. Building on sociocultural theoretical perspectives – in particular, social situation of development, the researcher conducted action research with student teachers of World Languages in his teaching methods course. This study examines researcher’s use of student teachers’ multimodal narratives as orienting bases for mediating their learning to teach World Languages through the lens of social justice. This study reports three student teachers’ cases. Preliminary findings reveal that researcher’s personal-narrative-informed mediations inspired student teachers to enact criticality as pedagogy, including destabilizing heteronormativity with teaching material, holding conversations of “controversial” topics in a space of ideological disjuncture, and using racialized past as teaching context.

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the role of play in learning in all classroom settings. It explores the context of restricting play from urban, low SES students of color, and the impacts that has on learning and development. It then addresses ways to ensure that pedagogy emancipates children by centering playful experiences which are culturally relevant, hands on, choice based, and social. Many strategies are explored to understand the role of engagement, joy and acknowledgement in enacting equitable instruction.

ABSTRACT. Those of us who embrace critical pedagogy as a lens through which to approach our scholarship, teaching, and activism, that obligation is even more heightened during this moment in history with the lethal toxicity that has permeated the political and social landscape. Fundamental to framing that pedagogical lens is one’s commitment to truth, which must be necessarily open to the theological, more specifically to liberation theology. In short, liberation theology centrally situates the concept of “preferential option for the poor” as its analytical theological starting point.

And, of course, liberation theology is about liberation, which “expresses the aspirations of oppressed peoples and social classes, emphasizing the conflictual aspect of the economic, social, and political process which puts them at odds with wealthy nations and oppressive classes” (Gutiérrez , 1973, p. 24). To put another way, the notion of liberation suggests that something or someone must be “pushed back” to bring attention to a problem, an unfairness, an injustice. Simultaneously, however, as a historical process, something must be proclaimed in bringing a solution or a way out of that problem or injustice. In other words, the denunciation of any form of dehumanizing activity must be accompanied by the annunciation of the path leading to transformative justice (Freire, 1985).

And transformative justice in action must necessarily be illuminated by love. The depth of God’s love, therefore, speaks to the concept of agape, a Greek term that expresses the highest form of love, in which no conditions are placed. Indeed, Martin Luther King, Jr. often talked about how an agape form of love must be the cornerstone of the civil rights movement, exhorting all to rise to the level of “God operating in the human heart,” enabling the possibility of what King called the Beloved Community (King, 1967, p. 42).

To be sure, love is intimately linked to justice. And doing justice is a social endeavor that engages in the realm of equity, equality economics, opportunity, education, health care, employment, race, ethnicity, gender, the environment, and other related themes. In the final analysis, social justice work will always be animated with what John Lewis calls “good trouble” in a work that ultimately enables the praxis of critical pedagogy, filtered through a liberation theology lens. To that end, this roundtable session will be dialogical in nature, exploring how a liberation theology lens is essential in the praxis of critical pedagogy.

References Gutiérrez, G. (1973). A theology of liberation, history, politics, and salvation. New York: Orbis Books. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. New York: Bergin & Garvey. King, M.L. Jr. (1967). Where do we go from here: Chaos or community? (p. 42). New York: Harper & Row Publishers.

Short Overview of the work: This dialogical session explores how a liberation theology lens is essential in the praxis of critical pedagogy.

ABSTRACT. Drawing from experiences in play therapy and from contemporary relational psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari, and New Materialism, in this paper I draw from my experiences as a play therapist and a curriculum theorist to think differently about the role of speech and representation in learning. My analysis raises questions about what we may be doing through our speech as critical educators.

ABSTRACT. Scholars theorizing affect evoke ontologies and epistemologies of experiencing, sensing, and feeling that cannot be fully qualified or quantified, studied via traditional means of inquiry, or encapsulated in academic language. This theoretical paper explores the potential of an affect-based inquiry methodology that engages and complicates emotion/reason binary often associated with traditional forms of inquiry. Affect can extend beyond the boundaries of language, cognition, certainty, and “understanding,” in the traditional sense. The larger project for theorizing a pragmatic approach to affective-based inquiry framework contributes new approaches to inquiry, methodology, and ultimately anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogies to address emotional attachments to problematic value systems that further perpetuate racism, misogyny, and other negative affective value systems.

ABSTRACT. Education is one of the very much recognized factors of socio-economic development of individuals, group and community. It helps in achieving many life results such as employment, income, social status etc. and predicts the attitude and behavior of people. In this paper, the author analyses the educational status impacting social and economic development for Kumhar community, also known as potters or clay crafting community in India. Most of the families who practices pottery are having education below higher secondary. The paper will help in finding out the relationship between the pottery practice with education along with the socio-economic position of the Kumhar community in three villages of Saraikela Kharsawan, Jharkhand mostly with the help of primary data.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation authors will share a project aiming at providing place-based, and inquiry-based learning to communities in remote villages in Kenya without access to formal schooling or not currently being served to develop skills/knowledge that can positively impact their community.

ABSTRACT. In 2020, Penn State’s College of Education launched its Social Justice in Education Minor, open to students across the university. In this panel presentation, a variety of stakeholders from minor developers and co-directors, to faculty teaching in the program, to students enrolled in the minor will share thoughts and reflections on how it works to humanize participants along with the constituents with whom they hope to work in the future. Additionally, participants will have an opportunity to engage in experiential learning driving by a critical pedagogical approach, a mainstay of the learning facilitated within the minor.