Race, Reflection and Resistance: An Autoethnographic Journey in Social Studies Curriculum Development

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.