Beyond Good Intentions: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Teaching Tolerance’s ‘Teaching The New Jim Crow: A Teacher’s Guide’

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the alignment between the stated goals and the discursive implications in a scripted curriculum published by Teaching Tolerance, a progressive education organization in the US. Social justice education and critical race theories ground the analysis of ‘Teaching The New Jim Crow: A Teacher’s Guide;’ this set of 10 lessons and related resources claims to structure learning for open racial dialogues, democratic participation, and both standards-alignment and social justice education, yet my analysis of the lesson plans’ language and structure reveals procedural instructional practices that uncritically transmit progressive messages while constructing an implied White audience. Implications focus on pathways for teachers and teacher educators to pursue social justice and critical pedagogy while rejecting superficiality and indoctrination.