In this article we outline the importance of reinserting the voices, experiences, and contributions of Black women as critical citizens into the narrative of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement. In order to examine the history of Black women as critical civic agents, teachers must interrogate how Black women's raced and gendered identities…

In June 2015, Melissa Harris-Perry infamously analogized the possibility of trans-Black identity to the reality of transgender identity. Such analogies happen often and are used mostly for the benefit of learning about a less familiar form of identity. Building from a recent article by Suthakaranm, Filsinger, and White (2013) that presented a…

Queer is difficult to pin down conceptually; it is willfully disruptive, intentionally destabilizing everything from identity to knowledge to politics to power. The intent of this article is to illuminate some of the ways teacher educators are conceptually connecting queer to transgender identities and experiences in their classroom curriculum and…

Michèle was hurrying to class. How, she thought, could she offer the students in her African American English in Society and Schools class a method of understanding, comparing, and abstracting the studies they had been reading in class? The heuristic described in this study evolved from a desire to capture aspects of several seminal studies that…

Children's names reflect their gender, culture, religion, language, and family history. Use of students' personal names has the power to positively affirm identity and signal belonging within the classroom and school community. However, naming practices also have the power to exclude, stereotype, or disadvantage students. For many students from…

Middle school classrooms can be fertile ground for positively impacting students' cultural and racial assumptions and understanding, given an effective multicultural curriculum and school structure. This article presents a narrative of the author's contrasting experiences teaching a text with racial themes. Applicable literature provides a…

This paper presents an inside look at the rhythms of a year-long teacher research group by highlighting the experiences of four alternatively certified urban middle school teachers of color as they engaged in practitioner research about issues of gender equity, racial identity, and culturally relevant teaching. Using examples from "data dilemma"…