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Toward What Justice and Justice for Whom? A BlackCrit Meditation on and against Miami University's Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry's Threshold Concepts

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Title: Toward What Justice and Justice for Whom? A BlackCrit Meditation on and against Miami University's Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry's Threshold Concepts
Language: English
Authors: Nathaniel Bryan (ORCID 0000-0003-3275-5830)
Source: Equity & Excellence in Education. 2024 57(2):210-225.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 16
Publication Date: 2024
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Postsecondary Education
Descriptors: Preservice Teacher Education, Teacher Education Curriculum, Teacher Education Programs, Teacher Educators, Racial Attitudes, Agenda Setting, Curriculum Development, Social Justice, Instructional Innovation
Geographic Terms: Ohio
DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2023.2262481
ISSN: 1066-5684
1547-3457
Abstract: This article is my personal and decidedly unapologetic Black meditation on and against the threshold concepts the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry, where I formerly taught has embraced as a means of addressing issues of social justice. Threshold concepts are a set of guide posts to enact change. Drawing on Black critical theory, this article argues that the concepts ignore Black suffering in and beyond K-12 schools and, thus, are anti-Black in nature. In so doing, I ask, "When anti-Blackness is deafeningly silent and visibly missing from the threshold concepts, toward what justice and justice for whom is the department aiming?" "If threshold concepts are irreversible, transformative, integrative, troublesome, and bounded, what do they mean when the theorization of anti-Blackness is foregrounded within them?" Recommendations are provided for teacher education broadly and the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry in the College of Education, Health, and Society at Miami University (Ohio).
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2024
Accession Number: EJ1437024
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0179220880;eie15feb.24;2024Aug27.02:54;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0179220880-1">Toward What Justice and Justice for Whom? A BlackCrit Meditation on and against Miami University's Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry's Threshold Concepts </title> <sbt id="AN0179220880-2">Introduction</sbt> <p>This article is my personal and decidedly unapologetic Black meditation on and against the threshold concepts the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry, where I formerly taught has embraced as a means of addressing issues of social justice. Threshold concepts are a set of guide posts to enact change. Drawing on Black critical theory, this article argues that the concepts ignore Black suffering in and beyond K-12 schools and, thus, are anti-Black in nature. In so doing, I ask, When anti-Blackness is deafeningly silent and visibly missing from the threshold concepts, toward what justice and justice for whom is the department aiming? If threshold concepts are irreversible, transformative, integrative, troublesome, and bounded, what do they mean when the theorization of anti-Blackness is foregrounded within them? Recommendations are provided for teacher education broadly and the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry in the College of Education, Health, and Society at Miami University (Ohio).</p> <p>The mission statement of the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry (formerly Teacher Education; TCE, henceforth) at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where I was one of three Black faculty members and the only Black man states:</p> <p>We prepare future and current teachers who design and implement culturally and contextually relevant curriculum and pedagogy. Empowered by a critical and substantive understanding of research, these teachers are positioned to confront social injustices, apply global perspectives, and actively participate in a democratic society. (Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry, n.p.).</p> <p>TCE has introduced threshold concepts—a set of guiding principles that supposedly drive the department's ethos, curriculum, and pedagogical approaches intended to be in line with this mission statement. Such concepts are designed to lead to a deeper way of thinking about and embodying ideas, concepts, and beliefs toward transformation (Meyer & Land, [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref1">44</reflink>]). They are irreversible, integrative, troublesome, and bounded (Meyer & Land, [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref2">44</reflink>]). Meyer and Land ([<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref3">44</reflink>]) suggest that when threshold concepts are learned, they irreversibly change the learners' way of viewing and thinking about a field of study, ideas, concepts, and beliefs. Similarly, the learner understands how threshold concepts connect to disciplines, fields of study, ideas, and beliefs, and requires intellectual work/grappling on the part of the learner. Furthermore, the learner comes to understand clear discipline-specific demarcations. When such concepts reflect specific attention to confrontational topics including race, racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, it can lead to real substantive and sustainable individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural change that potentially closes what Glaude ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref4">26</reflink>]) calls the value gap—the differences between the value assigned to white humanity vs. Black (in)humanity.</p> <p>TCE's development and implementation of its threshold concepts are well-meaning and consistent with the broader College and university's efforts to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion such as the underrepresentation of Black faculty and students, yet, drawing on Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit), I find that the threshold concepts are anti-Black in nature because they fail to explicitly name, bring attention to, and foreground the specificity of Blackness and anti-Blackness. This creates tension between Blackness and the neoliberal multicultural beliefs of the department, in particular, and the field of education, more broadly. As such, the concepts enact more harm than good with respect to the educational experiences and outcomes of Black children in schools, and the preparation of the teacher population. Black children need white (and other teachers) who understand how anti-Blackness manifests in their schooling experiences in order to teach in ways that overhaul it pedagogically and curricularly (Coles & Powell, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref5">12</reflink>]).</p> <p>These questions drive my meditation on and against TCE's threshold concepts in this conceptual article:</p> <p>When anti-Blackness is deafeningly silent and visibly missing from TCE's threshold concepts, toward what justice and justice for whom is the department aiming?</p> <p>If threshold concepts are irreversible, transformative, integrative, troublesome, and bounded, what do they mean when the theorization of anti-Blackness is foregrounded within them?</p> <p>Without clear answers to these questions, TCE's threshold concepts become another way of "analogizing Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings" (Gordon, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref6">27</reflink>], p. 2) or "gazing past Black suffering" (Dumas, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref7">19</reflink>], p. 35). They unfortunately ignore "what it might mean to begin and ... end with Black suffering ... as a constant meditation and inspiration for education[al] ... practice [that] leads us toward clarity about what liberatory imagination beyond [DEI efforts] might be, must be" (Dumas, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref8">19</reflink>], p. 30).</p> <p>In the sections that follow, I historicize the threshold concepts TCE subsequently adopted, giving specific attention to its implementation toward curricular and pedagogical transformation/reform. Then, I briefly introduce BlackCrit. I provide a review of the literature that highlights the anti-Black nature of both reform efforts and threshold concepts in teacher education programs addressing issues of social injustices. From there, drawing on BlackCrit, I critically analyze TCE's threshold concepts to bring attention to the specificity of Blackness and anti-Blackness. Finally, I conclude with recommendations for the field of teacher education broadly, and the TCE specifically.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-3">Understanding and historicizing TCE's threshold concepts</hd> <p>In 2017, a majority white group of TCE faculty wrote the department's threshold concepts (Martin, [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref9">43</reflink>]). Their objective, in line with College of Education, Health, and Society's mission statement, was to develop the basis to operationalize the department's strategic plan and mission statement and to transform the entire department such that it would produce critically conscious curriculum makers who confront issues of social injustices within diverse schooling contexts and in solidarity with communities (Martin, [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref10">43</reflink>]). Most of our majority white female preservice teachers go on to teach in schools that have a smaller proportion of white students than those they attended as children. White females represent 85–90% of those who teach Black and other children (Picower, [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref11">52</reflink>]). Likewise, Black children are far more likely to attend public K-12 schools than white children (Milner, [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref12">45</reflink>]). Recognizing this, TCE agreed on the following threshold concepts:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Education is not neutral; Teaching is a political act.</item> <p></p> <item> Curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or courses of study.</item> <p></p> <item> Curriculum is co-constructed.</item> <p></p> <item> Both teachers and students have empowerment/agency.</item> <p></p> <item> Teaching is an intellectual engagement.</item> <p></p> <item> Teachers and students engage in critical-consciousness.</item> <p></p> <item> Teaching and learning honors people's full humanity.</item> </ulist> <p>Below I explain TCE's interpretation of these concepts. Although the majority of TCE faculty members have adopted these concepts, some resist them. I also regularly encounter students in my undergraduate language and literacy courses, which are offered primarily to third-year students, who have not encountered them.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-4">Education is not neutral; teaching is a political act</hd> <p>The fields of education and teaching both perpetuate power inequities. White supremacy is a social construction that is foundational to both education and teaching. As such, education and teaching are constructed to benefit those in power, and contribute to the construction of social, educational, and political hierarchies and inequities.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-5">Curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or courses of study</hd> <p>School curriculum is not neutral, and preservice teachers should have a critical understanding of it. The curriculum should be grounded in the lived cultural realities of students, and it should be seen as a path one takes as one lives a life (Grant, Brown & Brown, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref13">28</reflink>]). Curriculum is expansive and exists beyond schooled spaces.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-6">Curriculum is co-constructed</hd> <p>Teachers should honor students' prior and cultural knowledge by collaborating with them to engage in school curricular opportunities that lead to problem-posing education (Freire, [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref14">23</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref15">24</reflink>]). This will empower students to develop and ask critical questions about school-related content and the world/society in which they live.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-7">Both teachers and students have empowerment/agency</hd> <p>Preservice teachers should see themselves as agentic beings who can make professional, curricular, and pedagogical decisions in the best interests of the students they teach and within the context they teach. They should see themselves as responsible for the change they wish to see in classrooms, schools, the field of education, and society at large. They also should help their future students to see themselves as agentic beings.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-8">Teaching is an intellectual engagement</hd> <p>Teachers should see themselves as knowledge producers and researchers who understand how research and theories inform their curricular and pedagogical decision-making. Teachers should reflect on themselves and their practices in curricular and pedagogical decision-making processes. They also should see students as knowledge producers.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-9">Teachers and students engage in critical-consciousness</hd> <p>Teachers should develop a critical awareness of self and educational inequities that negatively impact students' lives and apply critical pedagogies (Freire, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref16">24</reflink>]) and anti-oppressive and democratic educational practices that enable them to read and challenge systems of oppression.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-10">Teaching and learning honors people's full humanity</hd> <p>Teachers should see themselves and the students they teach as whole human beings. In so doing, they must see themselves as part of students' communities, and develop strong and positive relationship with students, which leads to seeing and experiencing the joy of the teaching and learning process.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-11">BlackCrit</hd> <p>BlackCrit is an extension of critical race theory (CRT) that prioritizes the specificity of Blackness by naming Black realities and conditions in and beyond America (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref17">20</reflink>]). BlackCrit centralizes three important framing ideas: (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref18">1</reflink>) anti-Blackness is endemic to American society; (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref19">2</reflink>) Blackness exists in tension with neoliberal multiculturalism; and (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref20">3</reflink>) Black liberatory fantasy is necessary (Coles & Powell, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref21">12</reflink>]; Coles et al., [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref22">11</reflink>]; Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref23">20</reflink>]; Jenkins, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref24">32</reflink>]; Warren & Coles, [<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref25">65</reflink>]).</p> <p>According to Dumas and Ross ([<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref26">20</reflink>]) "[Anti-Blackness is] ... not simply racism against Black people. Rather, anti-Blackness refers to a broader antagonistic relationship between Blackness and (the possibility of) humanity" (p. 429). It "illuminates society's inability to recognize <emph>our</emph> humanity—the disdain, disregard and disgust for <emph>our</emph> existence" (ross, [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref27">54</reflink>], p. 4). It centers on the specific history of anti-Black racism in America and acknowledges the historical and contemporary types of anti-Black violence that Black adults and children have experienced domestically and globally in and beyond schools.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-12">The five types of anti-black violence</hd> <p>As Johnson et al. ([<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref28">35</reflink>]) describe, Black children face violence that is physical, symbolic, linguistic, curricular/pedagogical, and systemic in in K-12 schools. Shakira, a 16-year-old Black girl of Columbia, South Carolina, experienced physical violence when Officer Ben Field threw her across her math classroom for refusing to relinquish her cellphone (Johnson et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref29">35</reflink>]). Students face symbolic violence when a White teacher uses the N-word (Johnson, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref30">34</reflink>]). Discrimination against students who use Black language represents linguistic violence (Baker-Bell, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref31">3</reflink>]; Boutte & Bryan, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref32">6</reflink>]; Johnson et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref33">35</reflink>]). The marginalization of curricula and schooling practices that center Black cultural ways of knowing and being, such as Afrocentricity and culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, represent curricular and pedagogical violence (Johnson et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref34">35</reflink>]). Systemic school violence occurs when school policies, discourses, and practices perpetuate inequities among Black students. For example, when school policies are interpreted in ways that force Black students into the school-to-prison pipeline, Black students become victims of systemic school violence.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-13">Neoliberal multiculturalism</hd> <p>After World War II, the United States embraced a multicultural society (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref35">20</reflink>]) that had blended with neoliberalism by the mid-1980s. Neoliberalism prioritizes privatization and free market advancement (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref36">20</reflink>]). Most Americans believed that neoliberalism would mitigate historical and contemporary racism by providing market opportunities, which supported a narrative that Black people's failure to obtain upward mobility stemmed from personal defect (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref37">20</reflink>]). This created the tension between Blackness and neoliberal multiculturalism. Unfortunately, TCE's threshold concepts celebrate diversity and subsume Blackness in ways that align with neoliberalism. As such, they have "traded away the Black" (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref38">20</reflink>], p. 430): ignored Blackness and the suffering of Black people to embrace a celebratory tone of addressing all forms of institutional and structural oppression.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-14">Black liberatory fantasy</hd> <p>Black liberatory fantasy is a striving toward Black life, freedom, joy, and possibility. According to Dumas and Ross ([<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref39">20</reflink>]), it requires a necessary reordering of society, a chaos that "represents the beginning of the end" (p. 431) of state-sanctioned violence against Black people. It requires that Black people take up arms against oppressions as a way to render themselves free. To that end, Dumas and Ross ([<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref40">20</reflink>]) propose that "chants becoming battle cries, tears becoming stones in clenched fists, and the hand-written signs machine guns—for the idea that the blood of whiteness must flow in the streets" (p. 431). Without the support and efforts of white people, Black people must work collectively to end systems of oppression to taste freedom, joy, and possibility. Because of its lack of commitment to these means and ideals, TCE's threshold concepts must be put to death. In their place, concepts that foreground Blackness and anti-Blackness can lead to genuine transformation, irreversibility, troublesome knowledge and, more importantly, justice for Black children in curricular, pedagogical, and teacher disposition reform in K-12 schools.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-15">Review of literature</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0179220880-16">Anti-blackness in curricular, pedagogical, and teacher disposition reform efforts</hd> <p>Education reform focuses on the development of accountability measures for educators and students (Hollar, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref41">30</reflink>]). However, few scholars have addressed reform in particular fields of study within education such as teacher education. In teacher education, scholars have focused on curricular, pedagogical, and teacher disposition reform efforts (Baker-Bell, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref42">3</reflink>]; Ladson-Billings & Tate, [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref43">40</reflink>]; Love, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref44">42</reflink>]). Much like reform efforts in general, reform efforts in teacher education have been and continue to be reluctant "to begin and, in some way, end with Black suffering" (Dumas, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref45">19</reflink>], p. 35). Instead, they are unapologetically anti-Black. For example, frameworks including culturally sustaining pedagogy to change the schooling conditions for students of Color have been co-opted in ways that ignore the schooling realities of Black children (Ortiz & Ruwe, [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref46">49</reflink>]; Parker, [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref47">50</reflink>]). This has blocked Black children from curricular and pedagogical approaches that are designed to acknowledge, value, and center their cultural ways of knowing and being (Ortiz & Ruwe, [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref48">49</reflink>]) to ensure that Black children are well and that Black lives matter in K-12 schools (Boutte & Bryan, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref49">6</reflink>]; Jones & Hagopian, [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref50">37</reflink>]; Parker, [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref51">50</reflink>]).</p> <p>Critical scholars have encouraged teachers to engage in what Sealey-Ruiz ([<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref52">56</reflink>]) terms the archeology of the self: "self-exploration, probing, and understanding of where issues of race and racism live within" (p. 24). Teacher education programs and the teachers they prepare can engage in the <emph>collective archeology of the self</emph> to engage in self-exploration, probing, and understanding of where issues of anti-Blackness live within themselves and their departments. Without this, threshold concepts, much like TCE's, can follow an anti-Black trajectory by excluding Black suffering and possibilities in and beyond K-12 schools.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-17">The anti-blackness of threshold concepts in teacher education</hd> <p>Meyer and Land ([<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref53">44</reflink>]) introduced threshold concepts as a tool of teacher professional development designed to change thinking about a topic, discipline, and/or field of study. If they are explicit, not implicit, they can produce transformation. In the sole literature on threshold concepts in teacher education known to me, Sander et al. ([<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref54">55</reflink>]) detailed how threshold concepts are, and can be, used to transform a teacher education department by centering issues of social justice. However, although I applaud this department's effort, I believe its failure to center anti-Blackness in its threshold concepts ignores the everyday suffering of Black people, including children. As such, the TCE's failure to name anti-Blackness in threshold concepts designed to address systemic racism means these concepts will fail, especially with people who do not fully understand race, racism, white supremacy, and especially anti-Blackness (DiAngelo, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref55">13</reflink>]). Maintaining implicit references to race, racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness serves no purpose expect to make white teachers comfortable rather than overhauling actions that dehumanize Black children (Love, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref56">42</reflink>]). As such, we must mediate on how the refusal to explicitly center Blackness and anti-Blackness in the threshold concepts is anti-Black.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-18">The utility of meditating</hd> <p>I have been meditating on the threshold concepts since they were introduced to our department. In so doing, I follow in a long tradition of Black thinkers, scholars, poets, justice workers, and others who are committed to the well-being of Black children and Black people (Baldwin, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref57">4</reflink>]; Douglass, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref58">15</reflink>]; DuBois, [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref59">16</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref60">17</reflink>]; Dumas, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref61">19</reflink>]; Love, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref62">42</reflink>]; Sealey-Ruiz, [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref63">56</reflink>]; Warren, [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref64">64</reflink>]; Woodson, [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref65">67</reflink>]). I have wrestled with transformation, irreversibility, integration, and bounded and troublesome knowledge (Meyer & Land, [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref66">44</reflink>]). In this way I engage in the Black liberatory fantasy to cause "the blood of whiteness [in this case, preservice teacher education programs] ... [to] flow in the streets [K-12 schools and classrooms]" (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref67">20</reflink>], p. 341). Meditation is my taste of Black freedom, my desire to see Black children thrive in and beyond K-12 schools (Love, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref68">42</reflink>]). In this process I have become troubled by the lack of engagement with anti-Blackness as foundational to the threshold concepts.</p> <p>While this is a personal meditation on and against TCE's threshold concepts, I want the personal to become the collective, by which I mean Black people. As such, this is <emph>we-search</emph> rather than <emph>me-search</emph> (Douglas, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref69">14</reflink>]). Any fight against anti-Blackness must be a collective fight inclusive of all Black people regardless of gender, sexual orientation, and other social identities that may divide us. This is the only way we can collectively move from #Blacklivesmatter to Black liberation (Taylor, [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref70">61</reflink>]). It is our way of loving Blackness to death, or better yet, to life (Johnson et al., [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref71">36</reflink>]; Tichavakunda, [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref72">63</reflink>]). With such considerations in mind, I offer my meditation on and against TCE's threshold concepts.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-19">A Black Crit Meditation on and against TCE's threshold concepts</hd> <p>In this section, I situate the threshold concepts within the three framing ideas of BlackCrit, outlining some of the problems related to each concept as space does not permit raising them all. Here, I explicate how BlackCrit can provide the department and the teachers it prepares with a necessary lens through which to understand the concepts and to work against the Black suffering that occurs in K-12 schools. I encourage readers to refer to the Appendix which contains resources I have used to center anti-Blackness and Blackness when I introduce them to my students.</p> <p></p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Threshold Concepts</td><td>Beneficial Resources*</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Education is not neutral; Teaching is a political act.</p></list-item></list></td><td>James Anderson's <italic>The Education of Blacks in the South</italic>. Carl Grant's <italic>James Baldwin and the American School House</italic> LaGarrett King's Perspectives of Black histories in schools. Betinna Love's <italic>Punish for Dreaming</italic>: <italic>How school reform harms Black children and How we heal</italic> Vanessa Siddle-Walker's <italic>The Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South</italic></td></tr><tr><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or course of study. </p></list-item></list></td><td>Denisha Jones and Jesse Hagiopian's <italic>Black Lives Matter in Schools: An uprising for educational justice</italic>. Joyce King's Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the new century Kofi Lomotey's <italic>African-centered education: Theory and Practice</italic></td></tr><tr><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Curriculum is co-constructed. </p></list-item></list></td><td>Gloria Ladson-Billings' <italic>Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children</italic> Rich Milner's <italic>Start where you are, but don't stay there: Understanding diversity, opportunity gaps, and teaching in today's classrooms. </italic></td></tr><tr><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Both teachers and students have empowerment/agency </p></list-item></list></td><td>Nathaniel Bryan's <italic>Toward a Blackboycrit pedagogy: Black boys, male teachers, and early childhood classroom practices</italic> Cynthia Dilliard's <italic>The Spirit of our work: Black women teachers (re)member</italic> Jarvis Given's <italic>Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black teaching</italic> Chezare Warren's <italic>About centering possibility in Black education </italic></td></tr><tr><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Teaching is an intellectual engagement. </p></list-item></list></td><td>Carl Grant, Keffrelyn Brown & Anthony Brown's <italic>Black intellectual thought in education: The missing traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke</italic></td></tr><tr><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Teachers and students engage in critical-consciousness. </p></list-item></list></td><td>Molefi Asante's <italic>Afrocentricity: The theory of social change</italic>. Gloria Boutte's <italic>Educating African-American Children: And how are the children?</italic> Kamania Wynter-Hoyte, Eliza Braden, Michele Myers, Sanjuana C. Rodriquez, and Natasha Thompson's <italic>Revolutionary Love: Creating a Culturally Inclusive Literacy Classrooms</italic></td></tr><tr><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Teaching and learning honors people's full humanity. </p></list-item></list></td><td>April Baker-Bell's <italic>Linguistic Justice: Black language, literacy, identity and pedagogy</italic>. Christopher C. Jett's Black Male Success in Higher Education: How the mathematical brotherhood empowers a collegiate community to thrive. Lamar Johnson's <italic>Critical Race English Education: New visions, new possibilities</italic>. Nicole Joseph's Making Black girls count in math education: A Black feminist vision for transformative teaching. Gholdy Muhhamed's <italic>Cultivating Genius</italic> Bettina Love's <italic>We want to do more than survive</italic></td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>1 *Note: This list of resource is not exhaustive. Other texts can be added to support the threshold concepts.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-20">Education is not neutral and teaching is a political act</hd> <p> <emph>How will understanding education as not neutral and teaching as a political act change the conditions of Black life and schooling?</emph> To make such a change I propose foregrounding the antagonistic historical and contemporary relationship between education and teaching and Black people and, therefore, contemporary Black suffering in K-12 education. This implies addressing historical denial of access to education and how it is tethered to contemporary issues in Black education. The equation that if "one has access to education, because one is not Black (p. 2)" continues, as education continues to be a white advantage and a Black disadvantage. Anti-literacy laws that prevented Black enslaved people from learning to read and write (Anderson, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref73">2</reflink>]; Everrett & Moten, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref74">21</reflink>]) and that were enforced brutally—there are cases of removal of fingers and arms as punishment (Williams, [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref75">66</reflink>]; Perry et al., [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref76">51</reflink>])––affects my understanding of "education is not neutral; teaching is a political act." As I reflect on images of such punishment, I understand that education is more than not neutral, but rather anti-Black. Such images might help preservice teachers understand the anti-Black nature of education, but texts we use in higher education typically omit them.</p> <p>I think we can better understand the anti-Black violence Black children face in contemporary K-12 schools by educators (and other professionals) who are "sworn to do no harm" (Boutte, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref77">5</reflink>]) in light of the physical assault Black children frequently faced as they journeyed to school and by the burning of Black schools, built by formerly enslaved people, by mobs (Butchart, [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref78">10</reflink>]). This juxtaposition may prompt aspiring teachers to consider the way white mobs––teachers in this case––metaphorically set schools on fire because they do not believe in the possibilities of Black children. The physical violence Officer Fields subjected Shakira to is not a new phenomenon, but is tethered to the history of anti-Black violence against the mind, bodies, and souls of Black children.</p> <p>Any teacher who is preparing to teach Black children must enter schooling spaces with an understanding of the broader antagonistic relationship between education and teaching and Black people, and TCE must ensure they are aware of such antagonisms to not only inform teachers' curriculum and pedagogical practices, but also to help them resist other ways anti-Blackness shows up in K-12 schools (e.g., academic and opportunity gaps; unfunded and underfunded schools; lack of access to culturally relevant teaching; Love, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref79">42</reflink>]; Milner, [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref80">46</reflink>]). I believe this is how TCE can develop critically conscious curriculum makers in line with the departmental mission statement—teachers who confront anti-Blackness (rather than social justice), and work in solidarity with Black children and communities to achieve better academic and social outcomes for Black children who attend K-12 schools.</p> <p>Furthermore, I contend that foregrounding the history of Black education in the threshold concept can illuminate current research studies that have documented that, due to anti-Blackness, Black children have been and remain the most marginalized group in public K-12 schooling. That being said, educational data which indicate that Black children underperform in all academic areas (Ladson-Billings, [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref81">39</reflink>]) reflects the fact that Black children are schooled in what Hartman ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref82">29</reflink>]) calls "the afterlife of slavery," a centuries-old racial calculus that retains a strong hold on Black educational life and possibilities. Schooling for Black children therefore "remains coterminous with the paradigmatic position of the slave" (Gordon, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref83">27</reflink>], p. 2). This is not by happenstance, but is tethered to a long history of educational neglect and education that has been situated against Black children (Anderson, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref84">2</reflink>]; Williams, [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref85">66</reflink>]).</p> <p>Without situating education as being beyond neutral, preservice teachers may adopt and continue to uphold neoliberal multiculturalist ideologies that blame Black children for their own educational conditions through narratives such as "they are not interested in education" and "they are uneducable" (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref86">20</reflink>]). If we do not interrupt the white supremacist knowledge with which aspiring teachers enter preservice teacher education programs, if we do not explicitly teach how anti-Blackness negatively impacts education, we become complicit in what (G, Ross, personal communication, July 24, [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref87">53</reflink>]) calls the imprisonment of white education––entrapping white students in a system of education that ignores Black suffering. TCE's students deserve to be free from the prisons of their white supremacist minds and, thus, TCE must expose them to threshold concepts that begin and end with anti-Blackness.</p> <p>Moving beyond the idea that education is not neutral also requires us to not only acknowledge Black suffering, but also to infuse into the threshold concept Black freedom, joy, and possibilities. I posit that this is how preservice teachers come to understand that Black children want to do more than survive, but thrive (Love, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref88">42</reflink>]) in their schools. This involves understanding how Black children have resisted, and continue to resist, anti-Black schooling conditions. For example, during enslavement, Black children often played with white children to learn how to read (Perry et al., [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref89">51</reflink>]) or built pit/underground schools in which they taught each other to read and write (Williams, [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref90">66</reflink>]) so that they could aid their enslaved parents to escape the enslavement plantation (Perry et al., [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref91">51</reflink>]). These historical stories of resilience, agency, and empowerment should be highlighted alongside contemporary stories of how Black children achieve Black excellence in schools, despite the anti-Black violence they face therein. Stories of Caleb Anderson, who learned to read at 1-years-old, and who is currently a 13-year-old student at Georgia Tech University (Strassman, [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref92">60</reflink>]) are important to share. Such stories can help transform preservice teachers' deficit views and thinking about Black children and their experiences with and in K-12 schools.</p> <p>Anderson's ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref93">1</reflink>]) scholarship on white rage also can be essential to understanding the threshold concept––education is not neutral; teaching is a political act. She argued that Black resilience, agency, and empowerment have bred and triggered white rage, which targets Black ambition and is solidified at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels of American society and is the catalyst of our racial divide (Anderson, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref94">1</reflink>]). The response of white teachers to the ascendency of President Barack Obama elucidates this understanding of white rage.</p> <p>On November 5, 2008, I was an assistant principal at a predominantly white magnet school in the South, and many of my colleagues were visibly, silently upset by Obama's electoral victory the day before. They pouted and frowned the entire day. These were the teachers who were charged with the responsibility of teaching the few gifted and talented Black students who attended the school. So, I could only imagine how they felt when Black students overachieved and outperformed their white counterparts. Ford ([<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref95">22</reflink>]) has documented over decades that white teachers do not recommend Black students for gifted and talented programs and other advanced placement classes. Due to white rage, Black valedictorians have been robbed of their academic titles and positions (Jett, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref96">33</reflink>]). With such considerations in mind, I contend that as preservice teachers come to understand that education is not neutral; teaching is a political act, they cannot only learn to identify their anti-Blackness, but also to control their white rage in the face of Black resilience, agency, and empowerment.</p> <p>Highlighting the resilience, agency, and the empowerment of Black children aligns with Black liberatory fantasy and what Tichavakunda ([<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref97">63</reflink>]) calls centering Black life. Centering Black life alongside Black oppression can help preservice teachers understand that Black people are not only victims, but also victors, as they have overcome and continue to overcome the anti-Black atrocities they face in and beyond the K-12 education systems. Similarly, I believe that understanding Black oppression and Black life will push preservice teachers toward irreversibility. It would be extremely difficult to understand the historical educational marginalization and the possibilities of Black education, and return to the same old whitecentric pedagogical and curricular practices that continue to dehumanize and enact anti-Black violence against Black children's humanity, mind, bodies, spirits, and souls (Boutte, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref98">5</reflink>]).</p> <p>Since one of the characteristics of the threshold concept is that they are integrative, explicitly naming anti-Blackness can help faculty integrate the rich history of Black education into pedagogical and curricular practices, allowing preservice teachers to engage in troublesome knowledge that can lead to irreversibility. Thus, white preservice teachers can rescue themselves from their own psychological imprisonment of anti-Black ways of knowing and being. When preservice teachers and education faculty deeply understand this nuanced Black education history, then they will truly move toward understanding that curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or courses of study, but are informed by children's lived realities.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-21">Curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or courses of study</hd> <p>Without explicitly naming anti-Blackness in this threshold concept, it becomes difficult for teachers to draw on curriculum that centers the lives of Black children. And I propose that to obtain transformation and irreversibility, naming anti-Blackness is a necessity. To that end, I propose a deep understanding of how K-12 school curriculum is in tension with Black children. It is inherently socially constructed to ignore the cultural ways of knowing and being of Black children, which leads to opportunity gaps (Milner, [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref99">46</reflink>]). For example, Black literacy has always been about "minds and pens as weapons to battle injustice" (Muhammad, [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref100">48</reflink>], p. 8). Literacy in K-12 schools is void of arming Black children with the tools to combat anti-Blackness. Rather, it is solely based on preparing for high-stakes testing without any opportunity to build political clarity and critical consciousness (Everrett & Moten, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref101">21</reflink>]).</p> <p>If preservice teachers are to transform curriculum and ground it in the lives of Black children, we must centralize Black-specific pedagogical approaches that explicitly name Blackness, including African Diaspora Literacy and pro-Black pedagogy. The former is a language and literacy practice that highlights the lived realities of Black people across the African diaspora with the goal of helping them remember and reconnect to their ancestral land (Boutte et al., [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref102">7</reflink>]; Johnson et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref103">35</reflink>]). The latter centers and honors Black people's full humanity to acknowledge their quotidian love for Black children in K-12 classrooms (Boutte et al., [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref104">7</reflink>]). These pedagogical frameworks represent what it means to center Blackness in the curriculum. Their intentional focus on Black and African people and their diasporic experiences makes it difficult to decenter Blackness, but there are courses within TCE that rarely prioritize Blackness and Black-specific pedagogies.</p> <p>Furthermore, TCE faculty must consider the message we are sending to our preservice teachers through such absences: that Black lives do not matter at school (Jones & Hagopian, [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref105">37</reflink>]). This gives preservice teachers no choice but to continue to carry out an anti-Black curricular regime, feeding an unhealthy curricular diet of anti-Blackness to Black and non-Black children. We can reverse this by helping preservice teachers to see the possibilities of explicitly centering Blackness in the curriculum. This will enable us to prioritize the conditions of Black life and Black curricular experiences and pedagogies in and beyond schools. When such conditions are prioritized, teachers can then co-construct curriculum with Black children.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-22">Curriculum is co-constructed</hd> <p>Without understanding how anti-Blackness informs the curriculum and the lives of Black children, teachers cannot co-construct curriculum with Black children. Because students enter the teaching profession with deficit, anti-Black views of Black children (Sealey-Ruiz & Green, [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref106">57</reflink>]), most of them do not see Black children as knowledge holders who are capable of such co-construction. This perpetuates anti-Blackness in the form of curricular violence (Johnson et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref107">35</reflink>]), which then leads to teacher's reliance and, in most cases, overreliance on the banking model of education to teach Black children, treating them as if they have no prior knowledge, encouraging rote memorization, and making little effort to engage them in problem-posing methods that challenge systems of oppression, including those that inform school curricula. As a result, when Black children attempt to share prior knowledge and contest such anti-intellectual approaches, they are misperceived as problem children (Boutte, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref108">5</reflink>]). For these reasons and more, Black children are disproportionately suspended and expelled from schools as early as preschool.</p> <p>As such, while co-constructing knowledge and curriculum with teachers is essential to the teaching and learning process, I also ask how we know Black children want to co-construct curriculum with teachers who do so much harm toward Black children, who are unacknowledgeable about Black life, and who do not value Black children's brilliance, genius, and intellectual insights and possibilities? Black children may believe that it is not worthwhile constructing curriculum with teachers. Centering anti-Blackness in the threshold concept could help preservice teachers to recognize this. Given their opposition to schooling and teachers who do not value their cultural ways of knowing and being (Warren, [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref109">64</reflink>]), Black children's potential unwillingness to co-construct curriculum with white teachers could be their way of contesting the anti-Black, neoliberal, multiculturalist approach to co-constructing curriculum with teachers. They may be engaging in Black liberatory fantasy, seeking to empower themselves to see Black educational possibilities beyond co-constructing curriculum with white teachers.</p> <p>The department's threshold concepts themselves were not co-constructed with Black TCE faculty, K-12 teachers, schools, communities, or families. This exclusion is another way to silence Black voices and perspectives and ignore Black people as knowledge holders who know what is best for Black children. It also, as an act of white saviorism, encourages white preservice teachers to engage in white savior approaches in K-12 classrooms. This is neither transformative nor integrative, but can lead to irreversibility in far more damaging than humanizing ways. Rather than leading to troublesome knowledge, this way of existing and being in K-12 schools and classrooms becomes troublesome.</p> <p>TCE needs to know that Black people, including children, do not need to be saved, but need to be part of the conversation regarding what is best for their education. White education faculty as role models for white preservice teachers (Picower, [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref110">52</reflink>]) must hold space for Black TCE faculty, K-12 teachers, students, schools, communities, and families to model how preservice teachers can co-construct curriculum with Black children. To include Black TCE faculty, K-12 teachers, students, schools, communities, and families also can lead to their empowerment and agency.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-23">Both teachers and students have empowerment/agency</hd> <p>Black teachers and students have always been empowered and demonstrated agency in schools, such as when Black teachers, who taught in segregated schools between the end of the Civil War and <emph>Brown vs. Board of Education</emph> (1954), demonstrated their agency by participating in national efforts to fight against anti-Black schooling conditions (Siddle-Walker, [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref111">59</reflink>]). As such, fighting against anti-Blackness requires resilience, agency, and empowerment.</p> <p>Most Black teachers today pursue teaching because teaching Black children offers them agency and a sense of empowerment (Lewis, [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref112">41</reflink>]), and the presence and pedagogies of Black teachers empower Black children, who demonstrate their agency as they work with Black teachers to display their brilliance and joy in K-12 classrooms. My own scholarship was co-constructed with Black boys and Black male teachers in early childhood education classrooms in the South. The boys were empowered, motivated to come to school, and demonstrated their agency by engaging with Black male teachers who they knew deeply cared about their academic and social well-being (Bryan, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref113">8</reflink>]). However, when Black male (and female) teachers are absent from classrooms, it minimizes Black children's agentic power.</p> <p>On one hand, I applaud TCE's leadership in instituting a grow-your-own pipeline program, Miami T.E.A.C.h., in partnership with a predominantly Black high school to recruit more Black teachers to the teaching profession, and Cincinnati Public School District. Such efforts have potential to restore the empowerment and agency Black teachers and students bring to K-12 schools. TCE should continue to create conducive spaces to empower and encourage Black teacher agency, which will lead to inspiring, empowering, and cultivating the agency of Black students. On the other hand, although it is noteworthy, I frown upon the pipeline initiative. I believe it is disempowering when Black families and community members are not a part of Miami T.E.A.C.h.'s decision-making body.</p> <p>It is equally disempowering when I – a Black faculty member who investigates teacher pipeline initiatives and the experiences of Black teachers– was consistently undermined and disrespected (e.g., holding meetings with the white female high school principal to disparage me, questioning national awards I received, engaging inderogatory name-calling and jokes, and disregarding insights and perspectives during meetings). Similarly, I believe it isdisempowering when White colleagues participate in interviews and photo opportunities to highlight Miami T.E.A.C.H. without including Black faculty members who were intimately involved in theday-to-day operations of the pipeline initiative.</p> <p>White preservice teachers should be learning from the empowerment and agency of Black teachers and students through exposure to our stories. This will empower and transform them as well, encouraging them to enact personal and collective agency against anti-Blackness in and beyond schools, and inspire them to know that teaching can be an intellectual engagement.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-24">Teaching is an intellectual engagement</hd> <p>The intellectual engagement and knowledge production of Black teachers and students has often been disregarded in mainstream educational spaces (Grant et al., [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref114">28</reflink>]). Black educators such as Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke have always engaged in knowledge production and critical reflection and have used such production and reflections to inspire their curricular and pedagogical insights and practices–––traditions and counternarratives that are often missing from teacher education scholarship, and by extension TCE's threshold concepts (Grant et al., [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref115">28</reflink>]).</p> <p>Givens ([<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref116">25</reflink>]) highlighted the ways Black educators engaged in fugitive knowledge production and educational practices because of their commitment to teaching Black children as an intellectual engagement. In so doing, they overhauled whitecentric intellectual engagements to center Black intellectual thought in their curricular and teaching practices. By centering these counternarratives as they reflect on the threshold concept, TCE faculty can inspire preservice teachers to see the joy, happiness, and possibilities of teaching Black children. Counternarratives of Black educators can serve as "mentors on paper" (Thompson, [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref117">62</reflink>], p. 21) that inspire transformation, irreversibility, integration, and commitment to troublesome knowledge for preservice teachers who may struggle to see teaching Black children as an intellectual engagement. Preservice teachers will begin to see themselves and their Black students engaging in teaching as an intellectual engagement to build on their students' and their own Black critical consciousness.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-25">Teachers and students engage in critical-consciousness</hd> <p>Much as CRT is a general critique of race, critical consciousness is a general awareness of systems of oppression. As such, understanding Black suffering or the ways systems oppress Black people becomes subsumed in the general awareness of systems of oppression. To avoid this, TCE must focus on Black critical consciousness or a critical consciousness of anti-Black racism that centers on the anti-Black violence Black children face in and beyond K-12 schools (Mosley et al., [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref118">47</reflink>]). This can help preservice teachers see, understand, and acknowledge how schooling is a project that is against Black children (Dumas, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref119">18</reflink>]).</p> <p>King ([<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref120">38</reflink>]) introduced the notion of dysconscious racism to the field of education: the tacit acceptance of the people's consciousness of white cultural ways of knowing and being. Furthering this idea, I propose that preservice teachers can understand how they tacitly accept anti-Blackness or <emph>dysconscious anti-Black racism</emph>. This will allow them to build on the Black critical consciousness of Black children and overhaul the dysconscious anti-Black racism of white students they teach as a way to develop and grow the mindsets of a new generation who fight anti-Black racism. This is vital for white children, as many may grow up to work in jobs that can either alleviate or exacerbate Black suffering, including politicians and lawyers but also teachers (Bryan et al., [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref121">9</reflink>]).</p> <p>When preservice teachers develop Black critical consciousness and work to undo dysconscious anti-Black racism, they wrangle with troublesome knowledge, move toward irreversibility, understand the importance of integrating Black cultural ways of knowing and being, and transform schools and classroom practices that are situated against Black children by collaborating with Black children to implement practical models to prevent anti-Black violence in schools. This is vital to honoring Black people's full humanity.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-26">Teaching and learning honors people's full humanity</hd> <p>A BlackCrit examination reveals persistent tensions and antagonisms, including white people themselves, between Blackness and the human (Dumas & Ross, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref122">20</reflink>]; Gordon, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref123">27</reflink>]) because humanity and the human have been and are always understood to be white. As such, Black people, including children, are not seen as human beings, and have had to endure the <emph>intergenerational anti-Black legacies of the Human</emph> (Hartman, [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref124">29</reflink>]). That is, the denial of humanity that is passed on from one generation to the next. Drawing on the words of Dumas and Ross ([<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref125">20</reflink>]), I call on my colleagues to meditate on the fact that "Black people exist in the social imagination as (still) Slave, a thing to be possessed as property, and therefore with little right to live for [ourselves], to move and breathe for [ourselves]" (p. 429).</p> <p>With such antagonism in mind, TCE can help its preservice teachers understand the long arc of how society has denied, and continues to deny, Black people humanity. Historical accounts of how Black people have asserted their humanity can facilitate such understanding. For example, Sojourner Truth's <emph>Ain't I woman</emph>, and Dred Scott's <emph>Am I not a man?</emph> reveal Black people's pursuit for the acknowledgement of their humanity (Shurtleff, [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref126">58</reflink>]). When these stories are central to the threshold concept––teaching and learning should honor people's full humanity—white preservice teachers can think deeply about the ways in which they can ensure that teaching and learning begins and ends with Black humanity by centering Black cultural ways of knowing and being in curricular and pedagogical practices. To that end, TCE faculty can help its preservice teachers move toward transformation, irreversibility, troublesome knowledge, and integration as preservice teachers and recognize their own humanity as they honor Black people's full humanity.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-27">Recommendations for teacher education and TCE</hd> <p>I hope the recommendations herein will spark spirited conversations about the importance of centering the specificity of Blackness and anti-Blackness in institutional statements that aim to prepare teachers to become critically conscious curriculum-makers who work and stand in solidarity with Black children, families, and communities.</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> TCE should work to revise its threshold concepts to explicitly name and address anti-Blackness. Efforts to work toward justice must consider Black suffering and possibility, recognizing that anti-Blackness has rendered Black children the most vulnerable and marginalized in K-12 schools. Teacher education programs that desire to implement guideposts like threshold concepts should enter the process having a deep understanding of BlackCrit so that they can begin and end their effort with Blackness to achieve justice for Black children.</item> <p></p> <item> TCE should work to hire a critical mass of Black faculty who can assist in developing and implementing threshold concepts that make explicit anti-Blackness. The absence of Black faculty contributes to failure of conceptualization and theorization of anti-Blackness. Historical and contemporary narratives of and insights and perspectives from Black educators who understand education and teaching as anti-Black, the importance of seeing curriculum as more than textbooks, standards, and courses of study, and co-constructing curriculum with children, seeing teaching as an intellectual engagement, and so forth, should be foregrounded to encourage transformation, irreversibility, integration, and a commitment to troublesome knowledge. Furthermore, TCE should partner with Black communities, students and families, and school districts to co-construct threshold concepts that center anti-Blackness. It is impossible that preservice teachers will co-construct threshold concepts with students based on concepts not themselves co-constructed with the Black students, families, and communities they supposedly will serve. This also is an important point of departure for teacher education programs that desire to develop threshold concepts and mission statements that center on justice, and especially justice for Black lives.</item> <p></p> <item> Considering some faculty are not supportive of the departmental threshold concepts, TCE, specifically, and teacher education, broadly, should put measures in place to hold faculty members who resist accountable for addressing threshold concepts in teaching, research, and service. Furthermore, teacher education and TCE can incentivize (monetarily and otherwise) Black and other faculty who are intentional about developing and foregrounding the threshold concepts in their teaching, scholarship, and service. This might minimize the burden of the Black tax (Jay et al., [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref127">31</reflink>]) that many Black faculty members pay as they engage in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.</item> <p></p> <item> TCE must move beyond simply theorizing and conceptualizing threshold concepts. It is necessary to work in solidarity with Black communities and school districts to dismantle anti-Blackness. This will require white and other faculty to leave the ivory tower and work alongside Black people in communities to overhaul the dismal academic and social outcomes of Black children due to anti-Black violence in K-12 schools.</item> <p></p> <item> Finally, preservice teachers nationwide should be required to take Black history courses to deepen their understanding of Black history and particularly the history of Black education. This would have a secondary benefit of increasing support for the departments that offer these courses.</item> </ulist> <hd id="AN0179220880-28">Conclusion</hd> <p>We need decisive and unapologetic commitments to Black lives and ongoing commitments to anti-Blackness in and beyond K-12 schools. Such commitments must start in our teacher education, curriculum studies, and educational leadership departments. Yet, well-meaning neoliberal multiculturalism projects such as TCE's threshold concepts in and beyond teacher education ignore Black suffering. If universities, colleges, and departments of education like TCE are serious about changing the anti-Black conditions of schooling for Black children, they must move beyond trite statements that do not begin and end with Blackness and anti-Blackness. When departments like TCE take courageous efforts to explicitly and unapologetically name anti-Blackness in their threshold concepts, they will at last move toward justice for Black children in K-12 schools. In that way, we would not have to ask the question: Toward what justice and justice for whom? We would clearly know that justice belongs to Black children in K-12 schools.</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-29">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <hd id="AN0179220880-30">Appendix</hd> <ref id="AN0179220880-31"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref18" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Anderson, C. (2016). White rage: The unspoken truth of our racial divide. Bloomsbury.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref19" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Anderson, J. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. University of North Carolina Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref20" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315147383</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref57" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Baldwin, J. (1985). The price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction 1948-1985. St. Marteen Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref77" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Boutte, G. S. (2015). Educating African American students: And how are the children? (1st.). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315709239</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref32" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Boutte, G. S., & Bryan, N. (2021). When will black children be well? Interrupting anti-black violence in early childhood classrooms and schools, contemporary issues in early. 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His research addresses the teaching styles of Black male teachers in early childhood education and the lived schooling and play experiences of Black boys in early childhood education.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib43" firstref="ref9"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib52" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib45" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref24"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib65" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib54" firstref="ref27"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref41"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib40" firstref="ref43"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref44"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref46"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib50" firstref="ref47"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref50"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib56" firstref="ref52"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib55" firstref="ref54"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref55"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref58"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref59"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref60"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib64" firstref="ref64"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib67" firstref="ref65"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref69"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib61" firstref="ref70"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref71"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib63" firstref="ref72"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref74"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl38" bibid="bib66" firstref="ref75"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl39" bibid="bib51" firstref="ref76"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl40" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref78"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl41" bibid="bib46" firstref="ref80"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl42" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref81"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl43" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref82"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl44" bibid="bib53" firstref="ref87"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl45" bibid="bib60" firstref="ref92"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl46" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref95"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl47" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref96"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl48" bibid="bib48" firstref="ref100"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl49" bibid="bib57" firstref="ref106"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl50" bibid="bib59" firstref="ref111"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl51" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref112"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl52" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref116"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl53" bibid="bib62" firstref="ref117"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl54" bibid="bib47" firstref="ref118"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl55" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref119"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl56" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref120"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl57" bibid="bib58" firstref="ref126"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl58" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref127"></nolink>
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  Data: Toward What Justice and Justice for Whom? A BlackCrit Meditation on and against Miami University's Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry's Threshold Concepts
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Nathaniel+Bryan%22">Nathaniel Bryan</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3275-5830">0000-0003-3275-5830</externalLink>)
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Equity+%26+Excellence+in+Education%22"><i>Equity & Excellence in Education</i></searchLink>. 2024 57(2):210-225.
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Data: This article is my personal and decidedly unapologetic Black meditation on and against the threshold concepts the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry, where I formerly taught has embraced as a means of addressing issues of social justice. Threshold concepts are a set of guide posts to enact change. Drawing on Black critical theory, this article argues that the concepts ignore Black suffering in and beyond K-12 schools and, thus, are anti-Black in nature. In so doing, I ask, "When anti-Blackness is deafeningly silent and visibly missing from the threshold concepts, toward what justice and justice for whom is the department aiming?" "If threshold concepts are irreversible, transformative, integrative, troublesome, and bounded, what do they mean when the theorization of anti-Blackness is foregrounded within them?" Recommendations are provided for teacher education broadly and the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry in the College of Education, Health, and Society at Miami University (Ohio).
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      – SubjectFull: Preservice Teacher Education
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      – SubjectFull: Teacher Education Curriculum
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      – SubjectFull: Ohio
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: Toward What Justice and Justice for Whom? A BlackCrit Meditation on and against Miami University's Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry's Threshold Concepts
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Nathaniel Bryan
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 01
              Type: published
              Y: 2024
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 1066-5684
            – Type: issn-electronic
              Value: 1547-3457
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 57
            – Type: issue
              Value: 2
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: Equity & Excellence in Education
              Type: main
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