Cynthia H. Brock

Excavating Whiteness: How White Teachers’ Histories, Communities, and Relationships Frame Their Understandings about Race follows a group of sixteen teachers, fourteen White, one African American, and one Native American teacher as they participated in a university summer course centered on examining the role of race in education. The voices and experiences of the teachers powerfully demonstrate their various views and stages of racial identity development. The teachers’ interactions illustrate the difficulties they encountered, how they engaged with each other, and how and why they retreated from learning opportunities due their past, their relationships within previous learning communities, and within the newly created learning community of the course. Excavating Whiteness follows the story of a group of teachers working together to understand why race matters in their lives as educators. Their individual journeys through the course are representative of the myriad of ways White teachers respond to race and can provide others with insights into the nuanced ways race and identity are bound by personal history, experiences, and beliefs.

This accessible book will help elementary school teachers improve literacy instruction inside or outside the Common Core environment. The authors address teachers’ instructional needs by introducing key concepts from current trends in literacy education - from high-level standards to the use of 21st-century literacies. Readers then follow teachers as they successfully implement the curriculum they developed to promote high-level thinking and engagement with disciplinary content. The text focuses on three disciplinary literacy units of instruction: a science unit in a 2nd-grade classroom, a social studies (history) unit in a 4th-grade classroom, and a mathematics unit in a 6th-grade classroom. Each unit revolves around a central inquiry question and includes research-based strategies for using reading, writing, and classroom talk as tools to foster disciplinary understandings. This unique, insider’s look at how real teachers build and implement a Common Core–aligned curriculum will be an invaluable resource for teachers, schools, and districts as they move forward to align their own curricula.