“There’s something wrong in society”: Teaching for racial civic literacy using young adult fiction

ABSTRACT

This multiple case study traced how secondary preservice social studies teachers grappled with understanding race/racism in their reading of the novel, All American Boys. Participants, all self-identified as white, consisted of two cohorts of students who attended a large midwestern university and were enrolled in an advanced social studies methods course. Drawing on notions of racial civic literacy, we analyzed participants’ responses to the novel, especially as it related to the police officer character who committed racial violence on an unarmed Black youth. We asked whether the officer’s actions were racist. Findings showed that participants reacted to the officer’s actions in three ways: calling-out race/ism, justifying his actions, and distancing from making judgments. Participants who called out Officer Galluzzo’s actions as racism saw this character as symbolic of larger systemic issues in society, whereas those who sought to justify Galluzzo’s actions demonstrated faith in public institutions, such as policing and the court system. Finally, those who distanced themselves claimed to be in a space of neutrality. Results of the study suggest that faith in public institutions, often considered a hallmark of the civic mission of schooling, may be at odds with fostering racial civic literacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• literacy
• race
• racial literacy
• teacher education

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank LaGarrett King for feedback on the research study and F. Colley for editorial suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this article, we capitalize “Black” but not “white.” We follow the example of Bohan et al. (2022), who wrote that “to [only] capitalize ‘Black’ in American in 2022 is to recognize a people who have struggled historically for recognition as a people in a society with a troubled history and legacy of white supremacy” (pp. 7–8, emphasis in original).

2. ROTC stands for Reserve Officer Training Corp, which is a college program offered on over 1,700 colleges and universities across the United States that prepares students to become officers in the U.S. military.

3. Michael Brown was an 18-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.