First Advisor

Shanté Stuart McQueen

Term of Graduation

Spring 2025

Date of Publication

6-3-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Educational Leadership: Curriculum and Instruction

Department

Curriculum & Instruction

Language

English

Subjects

Autoethnography, Predominantly white school environment, Racial Literacy, Social Studies, Teachers of Color

Physical Description

1 online resource (xvii, 336 pages)

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative, self- study, autoethnography is to explore my instructional practices, strategies and decision making as I navigate my attempts to build a more anti-racist, racial justice social studies curriculum in a predominantly white school environment. Critical Race Theory as well as racial literacy provided me with a conceptual framework, but also with the language I need to articulate the research problem and my findings. Three research questions guided how I collected and analyzed my data: 1) How do I plan social studies lessons that address the topic of race/racism? 2) How can I use social studies content to foster racial literacy? How does racial literacy appear in my instructional practices? 3) In what ways does working in a PWSE impact my planning and/or teaching about the topic of race/racism?

As I attempted to explore how I was planning and implementing race-related United States history content I collected data from a variety of sources. With the help of the LETS ACT Framework I found that my instructional plans included learning opportunities for students to love and listen to each other, talk, scribe, analyze systems and conclude through deliberation. Through viewing video-recordings of my teaching I was able to determine that when I was able to foster racial literacy I created race-centered learning activities, made the content relevant to student’s lives, provided opportunities for racial dialogue and used inquiry/differentiation. When I was unable to foster racial literacy, my lesson implementation had an ambiguous connection to race, a lack of alignment to learning targets, was teacher directed and suffered from passing issues. Both my planning and implementation of race-related social studies lessons were impacted by the predominantly white school environment (PWSE) I worked in through the way I collaborated with colleagues, the type of feedback I received and the way I delivered content.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43882

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