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Thesis advisor: Rebecca Lowenhaupt / Critical Consciousness (CC) refers to a critical theory that recognizes oppressive systems and provides those oppressed with a framework to overcome and act against these structures. Although the theory’s origin addressed illiterate adults and empowered them to become critically aware, critically reflective, and active agents of change, researchers have applied this theory to marginalized students in school and other oppressed communities. This study focused on the development of white school leaders as active anti-racist leaders using critical consciousness as a framework for this growth. Exploring white school leaders as transformative leaders - ones who become aware of their whiteness and leverage their positions to address inequities in the face of opposition - may provide a blueprint for other white school leaders. This study lends to the current research because few studies exist on critical consciousness development in white school leaders, the specific leadership strategies they employ, and the seeming effectiveness to foster critical consciousness in their schools. Ultimately, this study explored the development of critical consciousness and the leadership practices white leaders utilized to develop critical consciousness and to nurture active anti-racist educators as a praxis against inequities and oppression. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

This study sought to investigate the efficacy of a professional development designed to equip teachers with antiracist practices and support them in developing an abolitionist mindset. The study was designed for white teachers. Participants of the study engaged in a 6-week course grounded in a constructivist learning theory, TLT, and centered around the text, We Want to Do More Than Survive by Love (2019). Participants also engaged with a variety of other texts and resources grounded in asset pedagogies. The sessions were participant-led and focused on cultivating the skills for antiracist teaching while cultivating a mindset grounded in abolition. The data gathered through surveys and a focus group revealed that some design elements, such as continued reflection, affinity space, and building community before engaging in critical dialogue, were found to be highly effective. Stages of development emerged as teachers moved from leveraging culturally responsive practices, to engaging antiracist practices, to critiquing systems of oppression. As teachers deepened their understanding of abolition, they became more aware of the implications of systemic racism in education, and how educators can play an active role in dismantling it. The current study, along with the growing body of research on asset pedagogies, could provide a road map for what effective asset pedagogy professional development could look like.

Neoliberalism operationalizes the White Supremacist narrative of meritocracy in spaces like no-excuse charter schools in order to coerce teachers to obediently turn out data that is productive for investors, at the expense of both teachers and Black and Brown students’ humanity. This dissertation defines the coercion teachers experience as a process of mechanization, whereby they are inducted into the narrative of meritocracy and threatened with material loss if they do not comply. However, contrary to current research that illustrates their repeated mechanization, I draw from my own experiences as a teacher at a no-excuse charter school to assert that teachers in these spaces do have the capacity to enact anti-racist teacher agency and resist. This dissertation therefore asks, How do educators at no-excuse charter schools engage anti-racist teacher agency to negotiate mechanization and the narrative of meritocracy? Over the course of 13 months, I engaged with six self-described social justice-oriented teachers from three schools across two New Jersey cities through a methodology I developed called critical storying. Functioning in two parts--The Spiral and Speculation--critical storying first pays attention to participants' affective tensions through dialogic spiraling in order to identify mechanizations they experience, and ways the negotiate those mechanizations. Then, using participants’ own narrative imagining, I wrote each participants’ story centering them as a cyborg protagonist confronting and overcoming a core mechanization. The findings, as well as the framework and methodology developed for this study, contribute to research concerned with no-excuse charter schools, anti-racist teacher agency, speculative fiction, and dismantling White Supremacy from school systems.

The study examines how Aboriginal workers and workers of colour experience union solidarity and explores the necessary conditions for the remaking of solidarity and the renewal of the labour movement. Grounded in anti-colonial discursive framework, the study analyzes the cultures and practices of labour solidarity through the lived experiences of Aboriginal activist and activists of colour within the Canadian labour movement. Utilizing the research methodologies of participatory action research, arts-informed research and critical autobiography, the research draws on the richness of the participants’ collective experiences and visual images co-created during the inquiry. The study also relies on the researcher’s self-narrative as a long time labour activist as a key part of the embodied knowledge production and sense making of a movement that is under enormous challenges and internal competing tension exacerbated by the neoliberal agenda. The findings reveal sense of profound gap between what participants experience as daily practices of solidarity and what they envisioned. Through the research process, the study explores and demonstrates the importance and potential of a more holistic and integrative critical education approach on anti-racism and decolonization. The study proposes a pedagogical framework on solidarity building with four interlinking components – rediscovering, restoring, reimagining and reclaiming – as a way to make whole for many Aboriginal activists and activists of colour within the labour movement. The pedagogy of solidarity offers a transformative process for activists to build solidarity across constituencies in the pursuit of labour renewal and social justice movement building.

The study examines how Aboriginal workers and workers of colour experience union solidarity and explores the necessary conditions for the remaking of solidarity and the renewal of the labour movement. Grounded in anti-colonial discursive framework, the study analyzes the cultures and practices of labour solidarity through the lived experiences of Aboriginal activist and activists of colour within the Canadian labour movement. Utilizing the research methodologies of participatory action research, arts-informed research and critical autobiography, the research draws on the richness of the participants’ collective experiences and visual images co-created during the inquiry. The study also relies on the researcher’s self-narrative as a long time labour activist as a key part of the embodied knowledge production and sense making of a movement that is under enormous challenges and internal competing tension exacerbated by the neoliberal agenda. The findings reveal sense of profound gap between what participants experience as daily practices of solidarity and what they envisioned. Through the research process, the study explores and demonstrates the importance and potential of a more holistic and integrative critical education approach on anti-racism and decolonization. The study proposes a pedagogical framework on solidarity building with four interlinking components – rediscovering, restoring, reimagining and reclaiming – as a way to make whole for many Aboriginal activists and activists of colour within the labour movement. The pedagogy of solidarity offers a transformative process for activists to build solidarity across constituencies in the pursuit of labour renewal and social justice movement building.

This work brings an anti-colonial reading to the production and maintenance of racial logic in Cuban schooling, through conversations with, and surveys of Cuban teachers, as well as through analysis of secondary and primary documents. The study undertaken seeks to contribute to the limited existent research on race relations in Cuba, with a research focus on the Cuban educational context. Teasing and staking out a middle ground between the blinding and often hollow pro-Cuba fanaticism and the deafening anti -Cuban rhetoric from the left and right respectively, this project seeks a more nuanced, complete and dialogical understanding of race and race relations in Cuba, with a specific focus on the educational context. With this in mind, the learning objectives of this study are to investigate the following: 1) What role does racism play in Cuba currently and historically? 2) What is the role of education in the life of race and racism on the island? 3) What new questions and insights emerge from the Cuban example that might be of use to integrated anti-racism, anti-colonialism and class-oriented scholarship and activism? On a more specific level, the guiding research objectives of the study are to investigate the following: 1) How do teachers support and/or challenge dominant ideas of race and racism, and to what degree to do they construct their own meanings on these topics? 2) How do teachers understand the relevance of race and racism for teaching and learning? 3) How and why do teachers address race and racism in the classroom? The data reveal a complex process of meaning making by teachers who are at once produced by and producers of dominant race discourse on the island. Teachers are the front line race workers of the racial project, doing much of the heavy lifting in the ongoing struggle against racism, but are at the same time custodians of an approach to race relations which has on the whole failed to eliminate racism. This work investigates and explicates this apparent contradiction inherent in teachers’ work and discourse on the island, revealing a flawed and complex form of Cuban anti-racism.

O presente estudo têm por objetivo a investigação da relevância educativa do Jornal Ìrohìn, um jornal cujas publicações enfocam o universo afro-descendente ,que trata de assuntos de interesse dessa comunidade, bem como de sua especificidade no combate ao racismo. A presente investigação é desenvolvida a partir de referencial teórico elaborado por meio da noção de epistemicídio, como desenvolvido por Carneiro, ou seja, tratando-o como um processo de destituição da racionalidade, da cultura e da civilização quando se apresenta com o objetivo da negação da legitimidade das formas de conhecimento do Outro e um instrumento de dominação étnico/racial. São também abordados estudos de Sodré, Munanga, Cardoso, Fernandes, e metodologicamente adota-se a análise de discurso conforme proposta que Van Dijk desenvolve para a interpretação do falante a partir de sua força ilocucionária. Por meio do estudo de caso a investigação analisa artigos publicados pelo jornal que explicitem proposições da produção da racionalidade, cultura e visão de mundo afrodescendente (e africana), dentro do contexto do debate nacional e internacional que envolve a questão nos últimos anos, com especial ênfase à educação. A atenção especial dada aos artigos sobre Cotas e a Lei 10.639/2003 ocorrem devido à importância que estes temas adquiriram nos últimos anos no que diz respeito às questões próprias ao pensamento antiracista. Foram analisadas publicações do Jornal Ìrohìn no período de 1996 a 2007, comparando-o com a opinião de outros veículos de comunicação sobre os mesmos temas, bem como também foram utilizados estudos sobre comunicação. O desenvolvimento das investigações expõe as proposições do universo epistêmico afro-descendente constantemente contraposto a resistências e interdições, delineando um quadro paradoxal entre os discursos sobre identidade nacional elaborados pela visão hegemônica nas últimas décadas e as proposições contidas no universo epistêmico afro-descendente. Para sintetizar este quadro delineado, contextualiza-se a imprensa negra e sua proximidade com o Movimento Social Negro, procede-se o acompanhamento retrospectivo de reivindicações, desde fases iniciais até o momento deste estudo, contrapõem-se falas para observação de visões de mundo e posições sociais e intelectuais, bem como, examina as alternativas, tendências e desafios nos últimos anos. / This study aims to investigate the educational relevance of the Jornal Ìrohìn (Ìrohìn Newspaper), a newspaper which focuses the African-descendent universe in Brazil and in the world, giving approaches related to the African-descendent communitys interests, particularly the specificity of combating racism. The present investigation is developed taking as departure point the theoretical reference based in the notion of episthemecide, as developed by Carneiro. The references include also Sodré, Munanga, Cardoso, among others, and the methodological approach is related with discourse analysis, combined with theoretical studies. The definition of articles, essays, interviews and other matters approached by Ìrohìn was done having in mind to give emphasis to the educational aspects as attitudes to be developed or as matters focusing especially education, as public policies to attend civil rights, as the Law nr. 10.639/2003 and the fight for Quotas, in Brazil. The spread of time is from 1996 to 2006, also comparing opinions presented by other media vehicles, in favor or against the main agenda proposed by Ìrohìn.