Righting the Literacy Teacher Education Debt: A Matter of Justice

Abstract

The literacies of Black and other communities of Color have long been narrated pathologically in literacy teacher education. Literacy teacher educators have been complicit in upholding linguistic injustice and enacting linguistic violence in and through their practices, devaluing the practices, marginalizing the experiences, and interrogating the humanity of Black and other teachers of Color. In this article, extending Ladson-Billings's concept of the education debt, I assess the literacy teacher education debt, unveiling how white English and whiteness in general have been (over)valued and positioned as currency in literacy teacher education. After (re)examining and (re)assessing offenses and harms inflicted by literacy teacher education across historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral realms, composing the literacy teacher education debt, I take a restorative justice approach and offer an invitation to right literacy teacher education by addressing obligations and committing to healing as a matter of justice.

Keywords

Teacher preparation educational justice race and ethnicity social justice

Race matters in literacy teacher education (Baker-Bell, 2020; de los Ríos et al., 2019; Haddix, 2017; Picower, 2021). The pervasiveness of race is visible in “the dominant, (dis)embodied and normalized culture of Whiteness, White privilege and White hegemony” (Brown, 2014, p. 326) that pervades literacy teacher education (Haddix, 2016, 2017; Milner, 2017; Skerrett, 2020). In literacy teacher education, whiteness is the “invisibilized” norm against which difference is measured, constructed, and maintained (Daniels & Varghese, 2020; Ohito, 2020b; Wetzel, 2020). As such, researchers have poignantly explained how literacy teacher education has worked to inflict harm on those who do not approximate and seek to assimilate into a communicative context marked by the superiority of whiteness. While such problematics have been documented by researchers, they are often understood through the lens of the achievement gap, forwarding the dominant story that constructs the language and literacy practices of Black and other communities of Color pathologically.

Flipping the script, the concept of the education debt, coined by Ladson-Billings (2006), serves as a powerful lens to excavate our own complicity as literacy teacher educators in perpetrating harm by upholding linguistic injustice. The education debt conceptually accounts for injustices and helps map the harms and needs emanating from a long and entrenched history of racist communicative norms and ideologies in the United States. It affords a paradigmatic shift away from pathological portrayals of the rich language practices and communicative repertoires of Black and other children, families, and communities of Color, exposing and interrupting the harms inflicted by the historical reproduction of systemic racism.

Extending Ladson-Billings’s (2006) concept of the education debt, herein, I seek to (re)examine, understand, and interrupt the palpable consequences of the racism of dominant approaches to literacy teacher education, which sponsor norms, expectations, and values well aligned with linguistic racism—such as the imposition of white language practices and communicative norms as superior and desirable. The education debt can help us examine and understand the accumulation of racist ideologies and sedimentation of layers of systemic injustice over time in and by literacy teacher education.

The Literacy Teacher Education Debt

The education debt affords a critical rereading of literacy teacher education. Instead of focusing on pathologizing individuals and their (allegedly inadequate or inferior) communicative practices, the education debt helps us understand how Black and other communities of Color have been violated by dominant approaches to literacy teaching and teacher education. It helps us engage in the much-needed work of assessing the harms inflicted and needs unmet while simultaneously emphasizing the relationship between race and power in and by literacy teacher education. Unveiling how such violations create obligations, it urges literacy teacher educators to embrace the “central obligation to put right the wrongs” (Zehr, 2015, p. 17).

The literacy teacher education debt focuses on the needs of Black and other communities of Color and focuses the gaze of literacy teacher education on the obligations of literacy teacher education to redress its long history of linguistic injustice and violence (Baker-Bell, 2020; Baker-Bell et al., 2017; Haddix, 2017; Martinez, 2017) instead of focusing on who enacted violations. The long history is visible in the co-naturalization of race and language (Rosa & Flores, 2017) as well as race and literacy, that is, how race and language and race and literacy are conceptualized as being inextricably linked to the colonial concept of “Europeanness—and, by extension, whiteness” (p. 622). It is also visible in the dominant narrative of the “30 million word gap,” which, as Adair et al. (2017) noted, perpetuates negative stereotypes of Latinxs as lacking vocabulary and sponsors discriminatory literacy learning experiences. In both cases, the education debt helps us better apprehend the construction of pathological portrayals of Black and other students, families, and communities of Color. To better understand the debt incurred by the racialization of literacy teacher education, I plot the literacy teacher education debt across historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components (mirroring the components that comprise the education debt; Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Historical Component

The overwhelming whiteness and Eurocentrism of “academic language” and “literacy” (Baker-Bell, 2020; Baker-Bell et al., 2017; Croom, 2020) need to be understood as a historical component of the literacy teacher education debt. Here I briefly discuss a parcel of this historical debt: the anti-Black racism of what counts as language and literacy. Cloaked by a veil of appropriateness, anti-Black linguistic racism serves as a compass to literacy teacher education; as such, it is important to understand its history (Baker-Bell, 2020; Souto-Manning & Rabadi-Raol, 2018). As Rosa and Flores (2017) underscored, “there is a longstanding history of challenging deficit views of linguistic and cultural practices associated with racialized” individuals and communities (p. 621). Throughout history, Black and other communities of Color have been framed pathologically—that is, with verbal deprivation and poor cultural and linguistic practices being linked to inadequate educational achievement. This historical debt includes the harms inflicted by the linguistic isolation of enslaved Africans as well as the U.S. history of anti-literacy laws (Cornelius, 1983), which can be traced to the present-day practice of misdiagnosing African American students’ speech and language (Baugh, 2015). As Baugh (2015) explained, diagnostic tools often fail to account for the unique linguistic heritage and literate legacies of descendants of enslaved African persons. Such misdiagnosis, combined with compensatory programs, (re)inscribes a long-standing legacy of racial discrimination and educational disparities in and by literacy education.

Racialized diagnostics and remedial literacy education are permanent fixtures in literacy teacher education programs. This is visible in the (re)new(ed) focus on phonics in the “science of reading,” now mandated in many literacy teacher education programs, and which has been shown to silence the voices of Black and other students of Color, positioning them as “struggling” (Hoffman et al., 2020; Wetzel et al., 2020). This focus gives continuation to a damaging legacy of “compensatory and remedial literacy education programs that failed to improve educational outcomes for Black students” (Baugh, 2015, p. 291) and other students of Color. A brief example can be glimpsed through the consideration of how graphophonemics are culturally and linguistically specific, yet the “correct” associations between symbols and sounds are those sponsored by the communicative norms of whiteness (Delpit, 1992). For example, whereas the letter “r” and the sound /r/ differ across named languages (e.g., English, Spanish, Portuguese) and within them (e.g., in Portuguese, /r/ is linked to its positionality in a word, indexing a different sound at the beginning from /r/ in the middle of a word), there is also intralinguistic variation: In English, /th/ is pronounced differently in Black Language and white English (Souto-Manning et al., 2021; Souto-Manning et al., in press). Overall, literate histories and the construction of literate lives in and by literacy teacher education are deeply entwined with the aims of white supremacy (Winn, 2009).

Economic Component

The economic component of the literacy teacher education debt paints a staggering picture. Literacy teacher education positions the language practices and literacies of Black teachers and of other teachers of Color as liabilities, constructing them pathologically. Black teachers and other teachers of Color are more likely to encounter obstacles to enter the profession—for example, having to pass certification exams that center white linguistic proxemics and being evaluated and retained as a “quality” teacher (Souto-Manning, 2019; Souto-Manning et al., 2020). Economically, literacy education and literacy teacher education have been constructed and perpetuated as white property (Mosley, 2010; Prendergast, 2002; Rogers, 2018), being entangled with the racial composition of the literacy teacher profession (Milner, 2017). As illustrated here, the economic governance of literacy teacher education continues to uphold racial injustice.

Disparities in educational opportunity based on the conceptualization of literacy as white property are not new; they are visible in legal cases such <CE: Please check reference Citations>as Mendez et al., v. Westminster (1946), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and Herminca Hernandez et al., v. Driscoll CISD (1957). Historically, prior to Brown v. Board of Education, Black segregated schools were predominantly staffed by Black teachers who had “middle-class status; their enhanced levels of educational attainment made them living refutations of the inherent inferiority White supremacy demanded” (Fultz, 2004, p. 16). Post-Brown, the National Teacher Examination, which “has never been shown to be a valid measure of teacher competence,” was employed to justify and “maintain racial salary differentials,” ultimately decimating the “ranks of African American teachers” (Baker, 1995, p. 50). This displacement meant that African American teachers “either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching” (Thompson, 2019, p. 1). In 1970 and 1971, there was a $240 million “loss in salary income to the African-American communities” (Fultz, 2004, p. 37).

Literacy curricula continue to forward an overinflated representation of whiteness; the curriculum of literacy teacher education “is Eurocentric and White dominated, to the exclusion or marginalization of people of color” (Milner et al., 2013, p. 346). Its majoritarian story centers white experiences, practices, values, and voices. Demographically, literacy teachers and literacy teacher educators are overwhelmingly white, a reality that stands in stark contrast to racial shifts in the student population in U.S. schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). In an analysis of three literacy curricula adopted by the New York City Department of Education—Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Pearson ReadyGen, and Scholastic—Hester (2018) found that (a) white authors were overrepresented and authors of Color virtually absent, and (b) those authoring curriculum materials are overwhelmingly white. Therefore, the purchase and adoption of such curricula (an economic investment) continues to further the interests of whiteness and results in the further accumulation of the economic debt owed to Black and other communities of Color.

The economic debt continues to mount today as teacher competence and quality continue to be racialized; for example, edTPA as a certification exam continues to position “academic language” as a key ingredient in the construction of the “successful literacy teacher” (Lewis & Morse, 2013, p. 65). Recently, Black and other teachers of Color were demoted and experienced salary cuts as a result of newly established teacher certification requirements. In a research study I conducted, two first-generation Dominican immigrants in their 50 s, Yolanda and Yesenia, talked about their professional demotions and lower salaries resulting from shifts in licensure requirements aligned with “academic language.” In spite of having “held Head Start lead teacher positions” and having “pursued and completed graduate degrees at reputable and selective institutions of higher education,” accruing significant debt, not completing or passing the edTPA resulted in their reassignment to “assistant” positions (Souto-Manning, 2019, pp. 16–17). The resulting racial demographics of the literacy teacher profession, compounded by the racial disproportionality between literacy teachers and students, have real economic consequences for literacy teacher education.

Sociopolitical Component

Black and other educators, students, and communities of Color have been excluded from any “formative anticipation of a possible future” and from sociopolitical participation in “designing educational practices that contribute to the social good, as well as have transformative and enduring consequences” (Gutiérrez, 2018, p. 103). Seeking to uphold traditional racialized notions of literacy teacher education, efforts to (re)imagine literacy teaching and teacher education expansively were replaced with a laser-like focus on high-stakes assessments, which became part of how teachers were evaluated, making the production of inequities in and by literacy teacher education more efficient. This (re)focusing upheld narrow conceptualizations of literacy education and existing structures in literacy teacher education while seeking to remediate Black and other students of Color whose practices are routinely excluded, devalued, and pathologized (Gutiérrez et al., 2009).

The sociopolitical exclusion of Black and other persons of Color in literacy teacher education is not new; “desegregation was legally and politically structured in a manner which allowed deeply rooted White racial ideologies and practices virtual free reign in determining critical educational policy” (Fultz, 2004, p. 39). Prior to Brown, Black teacher preparation sponsored a merged “social justice and curricular focus” (Walker, 2008, p. 120), thereby being sociopolitically conscious. Black teachers were sociopolitically included; their voices were heard and their perspectives considered. Historically white literacy teacher education programs continue to exclude Black teachers and other teachers of Color from decision-making processes (Clarke et al., 2014).

Despite demographic shifts (students of Color are now the numeric majority in U.S. schools), literacy teaching and teacher education have remained largely stagnant (Haddix, 2016; Rubinstein-Ávila, 2007)—upholding long-standing, exclusionary definitions of what counts as literacy and who determines it. Literacy teacher education programs not only exclude, silence, and ignore Black teachers and other teachers of Color, but Black students and other students of Color often “are silenced while otherwise progressive, and even radical, ideologies and practices become normalized in ways that maintain the status quo…fail[ing] to uncover issues of racism, power, and Whiteness, particularly when diverse teacher identities are unseen and unheard” (Haddix, 2016, pp. 113–114). Under the guise of progressivism, literacy teacher educators silence Black teachers and other teachers of Color, whether they are preservice or in-service, normalizing whiteness and reifying racism in literacy teacher education. This is visible in the (over)privileging of the language development of white children in literacy teacher education—via theorists such as Lev Vygotsky and M. A. K. Halliday, who tend to be favored, while linguists such as John Baugh and Geneva Smitherman tend to be marginalized or silenced altogether. Another example is the push for Black Language speakers to learn “academic language” and to become proficient code-switchers, which, Baker-Bell (2020) explained, is an act of linguistic violence. These examples show that while literacy teacher education courses may sponsor literacy as sociocultural, they continue to center whiteness. Further, even when including or focusing on Black students, the focus is remediatory. Black and other communities of Color are marginalized and silenced as literacy teacher education continues to center whiteness and maintain structures of institutional racism.

Moral Component

The literacy teacher education “moral debt reflects the disparity between what we know is right and what we actually do” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 8). This moral debt is captured by how Black teachers and other teachers of Color who “come into a system that has historically failed them as students” without support or needful transformations, are unreasonably expected to “address the achievement gap for students of color” (Haddix, 2017, p. 145). Not only is this wrong, but instead of supporting their development as teachers, the dominant narrative instead casts such teachers as being solely responsible for the achievement of their Black and other students of Color (Cheruvu et al., 2015).

When Black students and other students of Color taught by Black teachers and other teachers of Color do not experience success in literacy (after being taught an overwhelmingly white curriculum and assessed by diagnostic tools that prioritize whiteness), the teachers are blamed and faulted. The consequences of such immoral actions, and the accumulation of the moral component of this debt, are visible in racial battle fatigue, lack of sleep, and other effects (Pizarro & Kohli, 2020). Such close and harsh examinations of Black teachers and other teachers of Color are paradoxically positioned against the rare examinations of the white superhero teacher (Aronson, 2017), leaving inequities unexamined and failing to adequately do what we know is right—to better support the preparation and development of Black and other teachers of Color while holding white teachers to higher expectations.

Historically, white literacy teacher education programs sponsored morality as assimilation into Eurocentricity, dehumanizing Black individuals and communities as well as other individuals and communities of Color. Under the guise of morality, literacy teacher education defined concepts such as quality and rigor in ways that align with and further racist ideas and aims (Ohito, 2020a), thereby firmly and continuously (re)committing to protecting the interests of whiteness. In doing so, teacher education has upheld white supremacy and subjugated literacies sponsored by Black and other communities of Color—even when these coincide with practices enacted by white persons (e.g., Black Language vs. Southern English).

Literacy scholar Carol Lee (1992) has long affirmed the need for literacy teacher education to center “the belief that each child is capable of learning complex bodies of knowledge and problem-solving strategies” (p. 166) and to act accordingly. The field needs to attend to the preparation of literacy teachers so that they can understand that all Black children and other children of Color “have a spark of the divine within them and thus represent the possibility of perfectibility” (p. 166). Positioning moral social practice as essential to literacy teaching and teacher education entails a transformation of literacy teaching and teacher education, (re)centering commitments to honoring, cultivating, and sustaining the full repertoire of language and literacy practices of Black and other students of Color. Nevertheless, the reality of literacy teacher education has not reflected this need.

Immoral undertakings marked by restrictive and restricted literacy learning opportunities for Black and other communities and students of Color have been present in literacy teaching and teacher education in pernicious ways. According to Skerrett (2020), literacy teaching and teacher education have framed Black students’ and other students of Color's “racial, cultural, linguistic, immigrant, and transnational identities and competencies as deficits and barriers to learning,” having failed to “prioritize curricula that reflect students’ diverse sociocultural community experiences and capacity for knowledge production” (p. 328).

Despite decades of literacy research offering plenty of empirical evidence that shows social and cultural factors as significant to literacy learning (Lee, 1992; Skerrett, 2020), literacy teacher education programs have not changed to honor racialized social and cultural variations in literacy practices and language repertoires, having excluded the languages and literacies of Black and other communities of Color by design. As such, literacy teacher education is morally indebted to Black communities and other communities of Color.

Assessing Harms and Needs

By exploring the literacy teacher education debt, I sought to assess the harms inflicted, elucidating the impact of our actions as literacy teacher educators across time and space in hopes of sponsoring “the process of transforming the consciousness into a public form” to be “inspected, edited, and shared with others” (Eisner, 1993, p. 6). In doing so, I hope that we can undertake a serious and concerted effort as a profession “to make right the harm, even if only partially” (Zehr, 2015, p. 14).

As discussed in this article, the literacy teacher education debt is presented and represented in the demographics of the teaching and the teacher education profession (over 70% white), in the whiteness of the teacher education curriculum, and in dominant conceptualizations of “good” literacy teaching (which tend to be predominantly white and monolingual), to name a few. It is also re-presented in the exclusion of Black and other communities of Color from decision-making processes and policies pertaining to literacy teacher education and in the “unmarked” nature of white literacy. Taken together, these re-presentations communicate the supremacy of whiteness, overinflated within and across literacy teaching and teacher education. As such, I invite you to extend the representations offered, so that you can construct your own set of images to illustrate the debt. There are myriad representations of the literacy teacher education debt.

To suspend the harms literacy teacher education has caused children, families, and communities who are Black and of Color across time and space, we must embrace the obligation to repair literacy teacher education as a matter of justice. This means suspending the violence and harm inflicted onto Black literacy teachers and students as well as literacy teachers and students of Color whose language practices and literacies are not deemed to sufficiently approximate whiteness.

After assessing the racialized harms inflicted in and by literacy teacher education through the lenses of the education debt, embracing a definition of justice that is not primordially “about forgiveness or reconciliation” (Zehr, 2015, p. 6), but “is concerned about needs and roles” (p. 11), I turn to the need for us to assess our obligations, seeking to provide restitution to those harmed in and by literacy teacher education. Committed to restorative justice in and by literacy teacher education, I employ Zehr; (2015) three pillars of restorative justice: harms and needs (here, the literacy teacher education debt), obligations (to put things right), and engagement (what we will do). Therefore, in the section that follows, I assess a key obligation of literacy teacher education and offer an invitation for the literacy teacher education profession to engage in the construction of more just literacies and more expansive conceptualization of literacy practices and lives (Winn, 2009) as a matter of justice, adopting restorative justice as a compass.

Assessing Obligations and Righting Literacy Teacher Education

Literacy teacher education tends to “ignore or at best minimize race, racism, and discrimination as explanatory rationales for…[s]tructural and systemic barriers,” justifying and fueling literacy teacher “educators’ inabilities to address them” (Milner, 2017, p. 80). In terms of obligations, it is important to engage in a careful assessment of the roles of race, racism, and discrimination and how these have harmed and continue to harm Black and other students of Color. This is particularly pertinent in a context whereby the literacy teacher education debt cautions us about the paramount importance of race and the debt accumulated over time resultant from race and racism in U.S. schooling and society. This is seen in how, curricularly, literacy teacher education's majoritarian story centers white experiences, practices, values, and voices. Demographically, literacy teachers and literacy teacher educators are overwhelmingly white, a reality that stands in stark contrast to racial shifts in the student population in U.S. schools. This persistent compass orienting to whiteness has detrimental and harmful consequences; as such, it must be abolished. For this to happen, literacy teacher educators must recognize our complicity and work together to cultivate and sustain the rich legacies, sophisticated practices, ingenuity, and brilliance of Black and other students of Color as a matter of justice.

As we orient to restorative justice, it is important to understand that any actions we undertake seeking to foster reparations must address historical harms, confront existing hegemonies, and contest “all dominant forms and structures, whether they be linguistic, discursive, or ideological” (Nehrez, as cited in hooks, 1992), in and by literacy teacher education. As such, the overwhelming whiteness of literacy teacher education must be carefully attended to. That is, our obligation as literacy teacher educators committed to justice is to upend literacy teacher education's demographic and curricular allegiance to whiteness. Instead, literacy teacher education must learn from the rich literacies and languaging of Black and other children, youth, and communities of Color. Transforming literacy teacher education in the pursuit of justice entails simultaneously rejecting racist myths and employing theories that capture the brilliance and ingenuity of Black individuals and communities—as well as individuals and communities of Color—as a North Star to freedom in and through literacy teacher education (Love, 2019).

Transformation in literacy teacher education must be rooted in a firm commitment to preparing teachers for a kind of education and society that do not yet exist. This ongoing movement for liberation requires demolishing the durable structures of white supremacy while simultaneously (re)affirming a collective commitment to an abolitionist literacy teacher education. This does not mean abandoning literacy teacher education, but intentionally and purposefully disavowing literacy teacher education that centers whiteness. This requires “a North Star logic that guides fugitive Black feminists across disciplines” (Shange, 2019, p. 101). This North Star logic requires upending the whiteness that has historically been sedimented in literacy teacher education—rereading teacher education's axiologies and epistemologies and interrupting how these (can) interrupt its current priorities to uphold literacy teacher education framed by whiteness (Feagin, 2020).

Although literacy teacher education still has much to learn from Black literate lives (Winn, 2009), there are examples of abolitionist literacy teacher education, which serve as invitations to imagine a future that may appear utopic as it does not exist in many settings. Examples of this kind of literacy teacher education can be seen in the work of April Baker-Bell (2020), who devised a framework for Black linguistic justice. It can also be seen in the work of Gholdy Muhammad, who developed a framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. While these models are not all-encompassing, these literacy teacher educators offer insights into how we might go about suspending the violence and harm enacted in the name of literacy teacher education. Importantly, the literacy teacher education they propose at once combats the erasure and dispossession of Black communities and communities of Color while recognizing the political nature of literacy/ies, literacy education, and literacy teacher education, ethically and modally attending to the interrupting of the anti-Blackness of literacy teacher education.

Toward an Abolitionist Literacy Teacher Education

Moving toward an abolitionist literacy teacher education is predicated on fugitive literacy practices that can move us toward literacy teacher education “as the practice of liberation” (Ohito, 2020a, p. 186). Literacy teacher educators may benefit from employing the following question as a compass: How can we interrupt the trauma and harm inflicted in and by literacy education, paying the literacy teacher education debt, and moving toward an abolitionist literacy teacher education that can lead Black teachers and other teachers of Color to write themselves into being and becoming literacy teachers—centering their languaging and literacy practices? Questions such as this one may foster literacy teacher educators’ critical awareness of literacy teacher education as a site of Black suffering and lead us “to reflect on the fugitive orientations that are necessary for justice, for freedom, and for survival,” which ultimately can lead us to engage in “breaking free from dominant frames of literacy” teacher education (Lyiscott, 2020, p. 256).

Ultimately, moving toward an abolitionist literacy teacher education requires abolishing the anti-Black racism of historically white teacher education programs—what many regard as teacher education—for example, the ways in which policies exclude, content silences, and structures harm Black and other persons and communities of Color. Interrupting injustice and fostering justice in literacy teacher education entails the abolition of its racist politics of exclusion, which denies belonging to Black and other students of Color and inflicts multiple forms of harm, while centrally and unapologetically (re)positioning the values, voices, communicative practices, linguistic repertoires, literacies, lives, and priorities of Black and other communities of Color.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mariana Souto-Manning

Supplemental Material

The abstracts in languages other than English are available at:

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