Three early career teachers' application of sociocultural knowledge about race in ELA classrooms

To counter the deficit-framed discourses of Black and Brown youth presented by the dominant social narrative (Brown, 2013), it is imperative that teachers hold sociocultural knowledge about how race affects cultural, economic, social, historical, and political contexts in societies and schools. Educators need to (re)imagine the ELA classroom as a space that can drive dismantling white supremacy and antiblackness (Johnson, 2018) in their work toward educational equity. In this multi-case study of three early career ELA teachers - one White woman, one Black man, and one Asian American woman - I explored how they applied their sociocultural knowledge about race to their ELA teaching. Each teacher approached the teaching of race in distinct ways, drawing from their varied and nuanced stores of sociocultural knowledge about race. The teachers taught about race to the extent in which they knew about race, and they drew on their unique knowledge – garnered from their experiential and content knowledge developed in and outside their teacher education programs – in ways that traversed across their orientation to teaching, the curriculum they utilized or designed, and in the enactment or instruction of that curriculum. These early career teachers approached teaching about race in was that shifted in response to contextual factors in their broader classroom spaces, and they took up approaches to teaching about race that were dependent on their sociocultural knowledge about race within their orientation to teaching, curriculum, and enactment of that curriculum.