ED 439: Critical Race Theory in Education
Fall 2020
Guiding Words
I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them - I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him….and he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth….I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him.
-James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers
Scope & Aims of the Course
This seminar will examine the foundational tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytic framework to study of inequities in P-20 education. Each week will examine how CRT tenets developed in law, or other disciplines, and were taken up in education via epistemology, methodology, and axiology. Consequently, the course will move temporally, spatially, and pedagogically across fields and siblings of Critical Race Theory. We will use the course content as a vehicle to understand the theoretical and analytical power and limits of CRT. Finally, we will explore CRT’s focus on identifying and disrupting white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and interlocking inequities (re)produced in education.
Course Objectives
Understand CRT tenets that have been developed formally from the roots in law to applications in education.
Examine the intellectual ancestors of Critical Race Theory, which are temporally located throughout history.
Explore how race and intersecting oppressions are social constructions with material realities that (re)produce societal inequities in education through structural and interpersonal inequities.
Recognize the ways CRT, as all theoretical interventions, is incomplete, a work-in-progress which brings important strengths, weaknesses, and tensions to epistemology.
Analyze education policies and practices critically through a CRT lens.
Articulate how CRT is a conceptual framework, one that shifts all aspects of theoretical and empirical work, from the framing of research questions to methods and analysis.