‘Schools don’t teach this way and they should’: a study of racial literacy in In-service teacher professional development

This study investigates the development of racial literacy among four teachers participating in a critical professional development (PD) course. The course focused on the counternarrative picturebook The 1619 Project: Born on the Water to explore race and social justice. Using Chang-Bacon’s framework of race-intentional and race-evasive discourse, alongside Reconstructive Critical Discourse Analysis (RCDA), the research team analysed teachers’ interactions with the text. Findings revealed that teachers employed both race-evasive and race-intentional discourses, reflecting the complexity of navigating race in educational contexts. Race-evasiveness sometimes perpetuated dominant discourses, yet also facilitated racial literacy learning. The RCDA highlighted how teachers’ discursive choices both perpetuated and disrupted dominant racial narratives, contributing to their racial literacy development. This study underscores the potential of critical literacy approaches and collaborative PD in fostering nuanced understandings of diverse narratives and enhancing racial literacy among educators committed to social justice.