Reorienting curriculum materials as agents of restorative justice in early literacy classrooms

Abstract

Amidst numerous curricular reforms across the USA that censor reading materials and promote standardized literacy policies, the authors ask in this article: What rights do early childhood teachers and students have in curriculum-making, and to the very materiality of their own classrooms? More broadly, they wonder: How do material regulations in US schools impact the curricular work of restorative justice in early literacy classrooms? The authors examine one curriculum material used in classrooms across the USA, using theories of materiality to explain its orientation, disorientation, and reorientation within discourses around anti-critical race theory and pro-“science of reading” legislation. Moreover, they aim to explore the potentialities of curricula as agents of restorative justice and, consequently, the threats to justice from the disorientations expressed around specific curriculum materials.

The question of which texts can be used to teach reading in early childhood classrooms has grown increasingly contentious across parts of the USA in the last few years. Following 2020, which saw a proliferation of diverse book reading lists and antiracist teaching resources in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by police officers, many state governments—often responding to pressure from organized parent groups—enacted legislation to ban certain books and teaching materials. For instance, in our respective states (Virginia and Florida), laws were passed that prohibit instructional materials promoting “inherently divisive concepts” (Commonwealth of Virginia, 2022) or discussions that may cause anyone “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” (Florida Senate, 2022a) on the basis of race. These policies resulted in books being removed from school libraries that were deemed out of compliance with these laws (Rozsa, 2022), and even a short-lived “tip line” in Virginia where parents could report teachers sharing “divisive concepts” in schools (Vargas, 2022).

Additionally, because curriculum policy in the USA is typically made at the state level, both state legislatures have moved forward curriculum policies (Florida Senate, 2022b; Virginia General Assembly, 2022) that require mandated literacy programs and requisite teacher training and certification based on another contentious umbrella term: the “science of reading.” ¹ All the while, amidst these increased thresholds for teacher certification and pressure on what to teach in classrooms, both states experienced dire teacher shortages, specifically in elementary education (Rozsa, 2022; Virginia Department of Education, 2022), where many of these new policies weigh most heavily.

In light of this confluence of reforms, we ask in this article: What rights do early childhood teachers and students in US schools have in curriculum-making, and to the very materiality of their own classrooms? More broadly, we wonder: How do such material regulations impact the curricular work of restorative justice in literacy classrooms—that is, of addressing and undoing educational harm and injustice through literacy curriculum (Winn, 2018)? To explore these questions, we focus specifically on curriculum material, not as the curriculum in itself, but as agentive objects in dynamic relations with other curriculum actors.

In previous eras of heavily programmatic curriculum and regulation in the USA, teachers of young children have been shown to adapt (Parsons et al., 2018), translate (Yoon, 2013), and resist (Mahiri, 2005) prescribed curriculum mandates. Recent calls in the USA to return to prescriptive curricular programs are no different in how they promote a narrow conception of both literacy (e.g. as simply decoding and comprehension) and literacy curriculum, reducing the curriculum here to a passive object of knowledge or program, rather than a set of dynamic relations among students, teachers, materials, and outside actors (Ferguson, 2021). However, we view newly adopted curricular laws that embolden parental objection to curriculum materials—be it for their diversity or their alleged misalignment to “science”—as a disorienting force (Ahmed, 2006) among those relations, one that is capable of disenfranchising marginalized students and teachers by (re)orienting the curriculum around white comfort. In our view, there is a through-line between calls to remove diverse reading materials and those to return to prescriptive “science of reading” methods, in that both promote a narrow conception of reading that is antithetical to promoting diverse literacies and perspectives (Milner, 2012, 2020; Souto-Manning and Yoon, 2018). In an age of neoliberal accountability that systemically privileges scientism, standardization, and scripted curricula, such calls ignore not only the im/material processes at play to shape literacy curriculum/practices (e.g. how racialized forces materialize with/in/across texts to affect students of color), but also how literacy functions as an assemblage of more-than-human affective entanglements (Dernikos, 2018, 2020). ²

In order to contend with these competing frameworks for understanding the efficacy of curriculum materials for early literacy instruction, we propose that the turn in literacy research toward im/materiality (Brandt and Clinton, 2002; Burnett et al., 2014), alongside the methodological and theoretical possibilities of post-qualitative inquiry (St Pierre, 2014), has much to offer in terms of cultivating more equitable systems for early literacy education. Specifically, we examine one curriculum material in practice in early literacy classrooms across the USA (Great Minds, 2016), using theories of im/materiality to explain its orientation, disorientation, and reorientation within discourses around anti-critical race theory and pro-“science of reading” legislation.

Conceptual framework

From the first laws prohibiting the teaching of reading to enslaved people, to literacy tests for voter registration and the first standardized tests being used to segregate the military, literacy and politics in the USA, as Willis and Harris (2000: 72) have argued, “remain inseparable.” Here, we wish to begin in affirmation of the work of Maisha Winn (2013, 2018), who has envisioned, beyond these oppressive historical legacies of literacy, the potential of literacy curriculum as a space for restorative justice. Doing so requires the enactment of four pedagogical stances, in short, which recognize—when it comes to the work of education—that history, justice, race, and language matter. In doing so, one may create, through literacy curriculum, pedagogical possibilities that honor multi- and more-than-human literacies (e.g. writing, literature, video, affect, spaces, histories) “to seek justice and restore peace that reaches beyond the classroom walls” (Winn, 2013: 126).

Beginning with these tenets is particularly useful because they have often been what has triggered such objections to racial-justice-oriented literacy materials and practices in US schools. For this reason, we will focus on one target of many restrictive curricular policies: books as objects that matter insofar as they affectively transmit histories into classrooms that may re/produce systems of racism and injustice (Dernikos, 2018). For us, the study of curriculum objects allows us to examine the force relations that work to enable and/or prohibit race, language, history, and justice from mattering. According to Ahmed (2006), “[t]he object is not just material, although it is material: the object is matter given some form or another where the form ‘intends’ toward something… And yet, objects do not only do what we intend them to do” (47). The curriculum in this sense is an “intimate co-dwelling of bodies and objects” (52), where their co-dwelling, their ability to work together, is a function of their orientation toward each other. Yet, when an object intends toward one thing and not another, the politics of such orientations arise. For instance, when curriculum policies are intent on regulating the curriculum, they reify the notion of curriculum as a neutral object, erasing the sociomaterial and racialized relations of curriculum-making, especially from teachers and students of marginalized groups.

Guided by Ahmed's (2006, 2014) notion of racism as a spatial orientation centering whiteness and disorienting marginalized inhabitants of that space, we view curriculum as more than an object to be prescribed, but rather as an endeavor to orient bodies and materials in space and time (e.g. see Dernikos, 2018). According to Ahmed (2006), bodies that do not “extend the whiteness” of spaces can be “stopped,” producing disorienting affects and effects. Ahmed (2006: 149) furthers that “whiteness gains currency by being unnoticed,” which allows particular bodies (e.g. students, books, curricular mandates) to comfortably blend into classroom spaces in order to extend white supremacist ways of knowing, being, and doing. Here, comfort, as an affect, becomes a relational encounter with/in more-than-human bodies:

To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one's environment that it is hard to distinguish where one's body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view … whiteness may function as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. (Ahmed, 2007: 158)

As such, whiteness, as an affective force relation, becomes synonymous with comfort. It is assumed as a natural state, “a given” (Ahmed, 2007), thus making it possible for whiteness—transmitted within curriculum materials, for example—to become invisible or undetected. As such, the objects of literacy curricula that diverse student and teaching bodies encounter daily have the power to affect or stick to each person differently (Dernikos, 2018).

Just as books can serve as both windows and mirrors (Bishop, 1990), they may carry orienting or disorienting effects. The disorienting effects of literacy curriculum for young children of color in early learning spaces have been well explored through critical sociocultural (Bishop, 1990; Nash et al., 2018; Souto-Manning and Yoon, 2018; Yoon and Templeton, 2022), im/material (Dernikos, 2018; Nxumalo, 2012), and decolonial perspectives (Nxumalo, 2016; Templeton and Cheruvu, 2020), as well as pedagogies to engage young children in “noticing” and “disrupting” whiteness through read-aloud discussions (Rogers and Mosley, 2006). Here, we wish to attend specifically to the ways in which white parents, disoriented by more diverse and inclusive curricula, have objected to its use, particularly in spaces of early childhood education.

The point, as Ahmed (2006: 158) explains, is how such disorienting moments affect us and what they make im/possible—whether they can offer us the hope of new directions, and whether new directions are reason enough for hope. Guided by Winn (2013, 2018), we aim to explore the potentialities of curricular objects as agents of restorative justice and, consequently, threats to justice from the disorientations expressed around specific curriculum objects, such as through discriminatory book bans and the regulation of speech in school.

Thinking and acting with theory: orientations of restorative curricular justice

Using the post-qualitative approach of thinking (Jackson and Mazzei, 2011) and acting with theory (Dernikos et al., 2020a), we “think↔act with” Winn's pedagogies of restorative justice and Ahmed's theoretical notion of orientation as methodological and analytical tools. Thinking with theory is an embodied engagement that invites researchers to read data through particular theoretical lenses. Methodology does not preexist here, as thinking with theory does not involve predetermined practices that aim to capture and interpret social phenomena (Jackson and Mazzei, 2011). Rather, it involves “poring over the data, annotating, describing, linking, bringing theory to bear, recalling what others have written and seeing things from different angles” (MacLure, 2013: 174).

Building on the work of Jackson and Mazzei (2011), we do not view data here as an inanimate object that we plan to code, dissect, and examine for “saturation” or conclusive patterns. We instead see it as agential matter that acts upon and moves us. In this way, data is not only alive, but also has an afterlife, which calls on researchers to revisit moments in order to “‘see’ anew—even as humanism's forces [e.g. race, gender] threaten to obstruct our view” (Dernikos et al., 2020a: 445). Acting with theory, then, involves an ongoing commitment to both “plug” different theories into data (Jackson and Mazzei, 2011) and act in ethical ways that ground us in an orientation, not of charting new paths, but of “bridgework” (Rodríguez-Muñiz, 2016) toward scholarship (e.g. Indigenous, critical, and decolonial) that has long challenged onto-epistemologies privileging the “objective,” systematic coding of “brute data” (e.g. see MacLure, 2013; St Pierre and Jackson, 2014). According to Rodríguez-Muñiz (2016: 215), bridgework helps us to recognize “the often taken-for-granted, occluded and yet powerful ways that ‘race’ matters in contemporary societies,” and, we would add, within qualitative research. As Paris and Winn (2013) have urged, researchers who are concerned with equity and social justice must seek to grapple with the colonizing culture of power within academic research, which potentially dehumanizes participants while devaluing those “revelations” that often do not make their way into research articles and instead end up on “the cutting-room floor.”

In this article, we take up these concepts through the analysis of one specific curriculum material: a teaching guide for Wit & Wisdom (Great Minds, 2016), a commercial reading program that promotes itself as being aligned to one aspect of the “science of reading” by infusing content knowledge into reading instruction (e.g. following the strands of “Background Knowledge” and “Literacy Knowledge” in Scarborough's Rope). In what follows, we think↔act with theory to read multiple texts with/in and across each other—namely, a book by American civil rights leader Ruby Bridges, the Wit & Wisdom teaching guide for Bridges’ book, videos and reporting on parents’ objections to the curriculum, and Wit & Wisdom's response to these objections.

Contextualizing Wit & Wisdom

Great Minds, a company that has been producing elementary literacy instructional materials since 2007, is the developer of the curriculum program Wit & Wisdom (Great Minds, 2022c). Within the Wit & Wisdom curriculum, sets of modules are centered around “content-rich” texts, designed for students to “build their knowledge of important topics as they master literacy skills” (Great Minds, 2022c). For instance, Module 3 for Grade 2 is themed “Civil Rights Heroes,” (Great Minds, 2016) using the book Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story as an exemplar text. This book, authored by Ruby Bridges herself, is described by its publisher, Scholastic, as “the extraordinary true story of Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate a New Orleans school—now with simple text for young readers!” (Bridges, 2016).

In the following sections, we examine how the Wit & Wisdom teaching guide works to orient both the Ruby Bridges text and its readers toward whiteness. More specifically, we examine the ways that race and issues of racism are glossed over, as the teaching guide instead orients bodies toward decontextualized language use/vocabulary. Second, we examine various parental objections to the curriculum and the Ruby Bridges text, most notably in Tennessee where parents made national headlines by objecting to its use in their children's schools, and Great Minds’ subsequent response to the parents’ objections and new state curriculum laws across the country.

Orienting injustice in Wit & Wisdom's teaching guide

In the Wit & Wisdom teaching guide (Great Minds, 2016), Lesson 1 in the “Civil Rights Heroes” module begins by introducing an “essential question” before the book Ruby Bridges Goes to School is read aloud to children. This essential question, or what students are to reflect on throughout the entire module, is: “How can people respond to injustice?” The guide proposes students to first think-pair-share about “when have you used the word unfair?,” with suggested responses listed as: “I wanted to stay up late, but my dad wouldn’t let me”; “My brother started a fight, but I was blamed”; and “I wanted to hang out with my friend, but I had to clean my room.” Next, the teaching guide asks teachers to explain that while unfair and injustice are often thought of as synonyms, “injustice is a stronger word [that] goes beyond some of the moments we might think about as unfair” (25). Then, the teacher is instructed to read the text while students reflect on what they notice and learn in the text and pictures. The text is read aloud once and then revisited in Lesson 14 after reading other texts about “civil rights heroes” such as Martin Luther King Jr.

At one level, the intent of this module to incorporate history and justice into a literacy lesson has much to offer. For instance, in this and subsequent lessons in the module, teachers (1) “invite students into this moment in history” (Great Minds, 2016: 28); (2) ask them to consider injustices faced during the US civil rights period while pointing out that injustices still exist today; and (3) attend to and name the feelings (e.g. sadness) of African Americans during this historical moment (e.g. How did Ruby feel when she went to her new school?). However, to what extent do race, history, justice, and language matter in this module?

In thinking with a restorative justice framework for curriculum (Winn, 2018), we find that Wit & Wisdom ultimately evades an explicit discussion of race, rather than, as Winn (2018: 221) advocates, “walk[ing] boldly into meaningful discussions of race by naming and defining themselves and determining their futures.” For example, in Lesson 1, the teaching guide frames the concept of injustice as a “vocabulary deep dive,” whereby the prefix “in” is used to aid comprehension of word meaning. By associating the word injustice with the word unfair, the guide positions these words within a semantic gradient, thus employing a cognitive strategy to distinguish between shades of meaning. Yet describing injustice as a vocabulary word (e.g. made up of a prefix and base word), which requires only cognitive reading skills to understand it, is one way in which this lesson orients not toward restorative justice, but actually toward whiteness. According to Dernikos (2020), white supremacist forces subtly move with/in early childhood educational spaces to reinforce processes of affective assimilation—or demands to “feel white” (see Matias, 2016). “Feeling white” here refers to using one's mind to control one's body, feeling in the “right way” by performing a flat affect, and, above all, privileging rational thought (Dernikos, 2020). This Wit & Wisdom lesson encourages children to “feel white” by rationally approaching injustice—that is, by using their minds to employ cognitive strategies in order to actively think about word meaning, and attend to the prefix and base word of injustice to decipher what it means.

There is, then, no consideration of the impact of this word on Black children or the way it may elicit impassioned, embodied feelings that are not aligned with white affect (e.g. coded as “appropriate” responses, such as stillness or silence; Dernikos, 2020). In other words, by reinforcing rationality, Wit & Wisdom produces the comfortable white illusion that injustice is something that all students can distance themselves from (or orient away from), rather than a lived reality that many children of color experience (DiAngelo, 2018).

The second, related way this curriculum orients toward whiteness is by choosing to center discussions of injustice—a structural and systemic inequity—as a universal feeling. For example, while the teaching guide presents examples to contextualize the word injustice—such as staying up late or hanging out with a friend—the examples connect to universal experiences that all children can, in one way or another, most likely relate to. As Wynter (2003) reminds us, the universality of feeling—that is, not accounting for the ways feelings are racialized—is linked to whiteness. Here, Wit & Wisdom assumes that white children and children of color have the same lived realities, experiences, and responses to injustice. Furthermore, there is no acknowledgment that racism is “a system of privilege conferred on whites” (DiAngelo, 2018: 59), which would challenge such claims to universal feelings. Overall, by focusing the content on vocabulary, Wit & Wisdom keeps the lesson “comfortable and palatable for whites” (DiAngelo, 2018: 55).

While never explicitly defining racism, the guide does acknowledge that injustice is “a stronger word” than the feeling of unfairness. Yet the curriculum does very little, in subsequent lessons, to elaborate on this difference. Rather, in later discussions of Ruby Bridges Goes to School, the guide's suggested student comments still remain connected to cognitive processes (i.e. students must closely read the text for the right response) that attune to universal feelings, such as “the signs in the photographs seem very mean” and “Ruby feels happy when the other kids come back” (Great Minds, 2016: 206). Again, while feelings are referenced, it is in a rational way that assumes no emotionality. Children are to instead “take it back to the text” to find the right responses, where the acts of injustices mentioned are “constructed as residing in individual white people other than themselves” (DiAngelo, 2018: 61). Additionally, the Wit & Wisdom comments presume that the student is a white child who has not experienced injustice in their own lives. Children who may have very well experienced racism in their own lives, and who may be listening to this lesson within a segregated school, are presented with a view of injustice as a decontextualized cognitive concept (again, a universal feeling all children can relate to) whose meaning “within the four corners of the text” is privileged over their own lived experiences (Ferguson, 2013). Moreover, all children are presented with a view of Ruby Bridges less as a lifelong advocate of civil rights, but rather, as someone who “thinks everyone should be nice to each other” (Great Minds, 2016: 206). So, while the claim in Wit & Wisdom is to invite students into history so that they can learn about historical perspectives and injustices related to race, these lessons do not provide much opportunity for children to critically reflect on, challenge, be part of, feel, and transform the “larger human experience” (Bishop, 1990).

Orienting white discomfort in parental objections

This same curriculum material made national headlines in 2022 after parents in, first, Williamson County, Tennessee, and then other places flooded school board meetings with objections to its use in their child's school. Having only adopted the program months before, the Tennessee curriculum director cited low test scores in reading as justification for incorporating more content-rich texts into instruction (Aldrich, 2022). While the Williamson County board ultimately overruled the objections to the Ruby Bridges book, other books were removed, and similar grievances in other school systems spread. For instance, a mother in another US state, Pennsylvania, claimed that this text and the discussion prompts in its teaching guide “inflict the psychological distress of Ruby Bridges onto young children” (Take Back Our Schools, 2022). These objections, and repeated associations with Wit & Wisdom book choices and anti-critical-race-theory misinformation campaigns across several states, led Great Minds (2022c) to publish 14 information sheets for each state that had passed new curriculum laws, each arguing that its curriculum does not promote instruction in any of the prohibited divisive concepts and is thus “in full compliance with all federal and state laws.” Here, we examine the ways in which parental objections to this particular curriculum oriented policies in many states to reform toward whiteness.

In January 2022, the Williamson County Schools Committee for the Reconsideration of Instructional Materials issued an outcomes report after reviewing and assessing the system's curriculum materials and complaints by parents. In this document, the committee reported the following complaints with regard to Ruby Bridges Goes to School, and the related Wit & Wisdom lessons supporting this text, made at one of its hearings:

“topic of segregation is not age appropriate,” the modules “plant the seeds of hate,” that there is “not a focus on how we have progressed,” that the “imagery is inflammatory and divisive,” that the book “characterizes whites as mean when 100% of white people weren't like that,” that the book is “negative, hateful, divisive,” that the module “does not feel like we are teaching—feels like we are driving a point,” that “Ruby Bridges is a profile in courage,” that teaching the book is “teaching an agenda” and that “middle school and high school are the time to teach this,” and that “shame brings on anxiety and depression that leads to suicide.” (Williamson County Schools, 2022: 50)

A common refrain from many parents was that the story of Ruby Bridges, who was six years old when she traversed through mobs to integrate Frantz Elementary, was not age-appropriate for their children (aged seven to eight). Additionally, the parents’ statements linked exposure to this text to emotional distress. One parent was quoted as follows: “I have pictures of my son crying when school was virtual, in adamant opposition to review this material,” as well as “it [the text] instills fear, paranoia, shame, and resentment for children of color, and instills shame in white children” (Williamson County Schools, 2022: 50).

While the committee in this instance ultimately “did not share the concerns of the complainants” (Williamson County Schools, 2022: 50) and recommended that the text continue to be used, it is clear in these complaints how parents had mobilized a narrative of this curriculum as not age-appropriate and distress-inducing. While, according to our own assessment, the curriculum does more to water down actual discussions of racism and injustice, the complainants produced an emotionally charged appeal that race- and justice-centered curricula are a threat.

As Ahmed (2007, 2014) reminds us, emotions do not simply reside within an individual. They affectively move across all kinds of bodies, orienting and attaching humans to particular things—here, the parents to whiteness/white comfort. Ahmed furthers that white subjectivities are constituted through certain modes of affectivity and embodiment, where white bodies extend into environments in ways that enable not only whiteness to go unnoticed, but also white bodies to feel comfortable. As such, the parents’ attachment to whiteness (which they have grown accustomed to not noticing) and the subsequent loss of that attachment moves them to act in various ways: complaining to media outlets, filing grievances with local school boards, and publicly displaying their disgust for the Wit & Wisdom curriculum (i.e. the way it makes them feel), which affectively resonates in their strong language use (“shame,” “hate,” “inflammatory,” “divisive”). Taken together, their movements, words, and emotions suggest that Wit & Wisdom is much more than an inanimate curricular object; it has the agentive capacity to disorient and “threaten”—namely, by disorienting white bodies from the comfort and privilege they feel entitled to.

As a way to counter this disorientation, these parents not only insist that the Wit & Wisdom curriculum be removed but are also vying for a certain “structure of feeling” (Williams, 2010) to reemerge. This “structure of feeling,” which privileges white feelings/affects, is intended to shield white children from the perceived discomfort of being associated with historical injustices. There seems to be little concern, however—in both the parents’ objections and in the curriculum itself—for the (potential) discomfort of Black children and other children of color, who are impacted by the lingering legacies of those historical injustices. As the Pennsylvania mother so aptly put it, what is “distressing” is that white children must face/be oriented toward a young Black girl's racialized trauma, and not the fact that Ruby Bridges, an innocent child, was “inflicted” with “psychological distress” in the first place. It would seem, then, that—for these parents—the “right to feel” is implicitly something only white people can have and express (Yao, 2021).

In juxtaposing these two orientations of the same curriculum—the first being one that flattens racial injustice to a universal feeling and the second one that responds to parents’ feelings with political action—we see that, in accordance with Leonardo (2016: xiv), white feelings ultimately matter more: “seen this way, emotions are not just expressions of feeling, but of politics. Or, to imitate that useful Radical Feminist saying, ‘the personal is political,’ we may argue that ‘the emotional is political.’” More specifically, the parents’ white emotions here reflect “a process of attaching affective reactions to social situations which protect white racial advantage” (Leonardo, 2016: xiv)—for example, redirecting sympathy away from a young Black girl, as if Ruby Bridges, aged 67 at the time of writing, is not an actual human being who experienced the psychological “distress” noted. Berlant (2016) reminds us that when historically marginalized groups of people do not accommodate white feelings, white folks who were once considered “iconic citizens” may suddenly “freak the f**k out” (Sutton, 2022), often by taking “justice” into their own hands. While Lessons 1 and 14 in Module 3 of Wit & Wisdom minimize discussions of race/racism by associating injustice with both rational thought and universal feelings, the parents’ objections to the harm and hurt feelings this curriculum may cause were presented as the actual injustice, with several states responding through official legislation to assuage such concerns.

Discussion and conclusion

This article does not serve as a review of this particular curriculum or any others. Rather, our hope is to recognize the ways in which “curriculum as object” narratives function as a facade, eliding the relational dynamics of curriculum-making, and how, in both subtle and overt ways, this elision orients curriculum enactments toward whiteness and away from restorative pedagogies that serve to make the literacy curriculum more equitable and just for all. We contend that such orientations are inextricably entangled with the proposed bodies of law in Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and elsewhere, which seek to prohibit teaching materials that cause perceived “discomfort” in young children on the basis of one's race. In the case of this particular curriculum module, the teaching guide minimizes the concept of injustice to a universally understood feeling, while, incongruously, parents’ feelings are treated as real injustices, leading to the passing of actual legislation around the curriculum in many states.

Here, we argue that the attempt to regulate the curriculum as a measure of comfort is actually the effort of (re)orienting the curriculum toward whiteness. The argument against “racialized” texts (i.e. which purport to teach critical race theory) is framed around the distress and disorientation they may produce, given the perceived learning needs of (white) children and their “community belief systems” (Take Back Our Schools, 2022). As Ahmed (2006: 158) notes: “Bodies that experience disorientation can be defensive, as they reach out for support or as they search for a place to reground and reorientate their relation to the world.” Despite the fact that Great Minds (2022a) has positioned itself as not teaching critical race theory or violating any new state curriculum laws, parents have claimed that the books themselves are capable of producing distress. And yet, both the teaching guide and the anti-critical-race-theory parent objections show little concern for how curriculum materials have been, or may still be, disorienting for Black students and other students of color.

We also note that while Great Minds has sought to denounce any perceived alignment with “critical race theory,” as it has been described in these new curriculum laws, it has also explicitly sought to align itself with the “science of reading” (see Great Minds, 2022b). Just as literacy teaching has long been entangled with politics, so too have specific rationales of literacy, in the name of science, been used to privilege certain political orientations over others (Luke, 1988; Milner, 2020). Considering this legacy, we see a through-line between policy efforts to censor a curriculum sharing diverse perspectives and efforts to censor a curriculum that does not align with one's version of the “science of reading”—both as potentially orienting forces toward whiteness. As already noted, the term “science of reading” has often been interpreted far more narrowly by policymakers than the more expansive conceptions identified by literacy scholars (Goodwin and Jiménez, 2020). Similar to anti-critical-race-theory-curriculum laws, then, policies that mandate a narrow “curriculum as object” framework for literacy instruction disorient the active relations that both teachers and students produce with various curriculum materials. Moreover, just as the concept of injustice in the Wit & Wisdom module is framed as a rational vocabulary term rather than a lived experience for some children, we view the rationalization of literacy development and instruction in the name of the “science of reading”—by categorizing it into universal discrete skills—as another way in which literacy curriculum elides diverse perspectives and the racializing forces that produce diverse approaches to literacy. In other words, the invocation of a seemingly neutral rationale of cognitive “science” (i.e. scientism) orients reading instruction toward white heteronormative values.

Again, the point here is not to critique any particular curriculum, Rather, it is our hope that, in presenting this analysis, threats to equitable literacy pedagogies are interrogated and discussed, and, in doing so, possibilities for hopeful orientations toward restorative justice in literacy education can be envisioned. What might that look like? For teachers who may be required to follow a prescriptive literacy program, we ask:

How does the curriculum treat literacy as neutral, discrete, and rational? How might it then be opened up and reoriented toward multi- and more-than-human literacy enactments?

What dis/orienting forces (e.g. policy mandates, parent objections, trauma, race) travel through classroom spaces via the curriculum? For instance, as Baldwin (1998: 321) notes, “history is literally present in all that we do,” what racialized histories, then, are in the curriculum that may be dis/orienting or dis/comforting?

After identifying disorienting forces, how can you and/or your students employ agency to reorient the curriculum? As Bennett (2010) reminds us, agency is distributed along a network of human/nonhuman bodies—that is, various forces act on bodies to increase↔decrease our capacity to act and affect. Even in highly restrictive educational spaces, where can you locate cracks where, openly or subversively, you can reorient spaces toward more expansive and/or just literacy enactments?

Ultimately, while teachers and students should have the right to curricular spaces for restorative justice, this work is not theirs alone. Of critical importance to note is that behind a seemingly neutral, prescriptive curriculum program are countless human and nonhuman actors (parents, school boards, corporations, etc.) whose work affects, and may also infringe on, the rights of teachers and students to engage in “purposeful literate identities and trajectories” (Winn, 2018: 219). Thus, empowering today's early childhood teachers to reorient the literacy curriculum away from white comfort and toward justice requires a collective effort. Recognizing how these outside forces are impeding this work is necessary to “illuminate the processes by which diversity and inequity in literacy are actually sustained” (Brandt and Clinton, 2002: 354). We advocate for collective action from all curriculum actors in restoring teachers’ and students’ rights to orient curriculum materials and practices toward more equitable futures, as the stakes for doing so have only become greater in our current times.