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This conceptual article explores the use of threshold concepts to help pre-service teachers develop antiracist dispositions. Threshold concepts are "troublesome knowledge" within a discipline that serve as gateways to expanded modes of thinking about subject matter. Grappling with threshold concepts places learners in a liminal space as they confront new knowledge that connects them to transformative, irreversible, and integrative understandings. In response to a call for expanding pedagogical content knowledge of threshold concepts in teacher education, we propose the use of threshold concepts as a pedagogical tool to structure methods courses in order to facilitate the growth of PSTs' working racial knowledge. We provide the study of redlining as an exemplar of how to promote the threshold concept of structural racism toward developing PSTs' antiracist dispositions.

In this conceptual article we consider the pedagogical possibilities and pitfalls of incorporating White ally figures in history and social studies curricula. Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on race and the social studies and literature on alternative racial orientations, such as allies, antiracists, and abolitionists, we contend that educators can use White-ally pedagogy to offer White students, in particular, examples of an antiracist White racial identity. We close with guidelines to provide social studies educators and teacher educators with a starting point for effectively introducing White allies into the social studies.

Critical theory is one of the predominant schools of thought in the social sciences. Like all theory, it is a framework used for explaining--and examining--something about the world. Critical theory pays special attention to the social world, focusing on the hierarchical nature of social relations and examining how these unequal power relationships lead to privilege for some and oppression for others. In this article, the authors discuss that one must be purposeful when designing a critical inquiry. It is not quite as simple as examining a topic that could connect to social justice issues. To truly stay within the bounds of critical theory, there must be a focus on identifying unequal power relationships in society coupled with the goal of transforming those unjust social relations. To remain true to critical pedagogy, teachers should work to identify questions that are important to students' lives and that encourage them to reflect on the ways that they are either privileged or oppressed by social dynamics. And, finally, to enact these concepts in the context of the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), the inquiry must ask critical questions, analyze sources from the viewpoint of the oppressed, and encourage action that can make a tangible contribution toward justice.

Villainification is the process of creating single actors as the faces of systemic harm, with those hyperindividualized villains losing their ordinary characteristics. Like heroification, there is a simplified portrayal of historical actors, but villainification has particularly harmful consequences. We suggest that villainification obscures the way in which evil operates through everyday actions and unquestioned structures because of the focus on the whim of one person. Although it is unfortunate that we do not often see how we can inadvertently help others and make systemic change, it is very disturbing when we fail to see our own part in the suffering of others. This article critiques one-dimensional portrayals of evildoers in K-12 social studies and popular sentiment and offers a framework via the political theory of Hannah Arendt to educate for a sensibility of interconnected responsibility among members of a society instead of blaming one person for systemic harm or diffusing blame into an amorphous entity (e.g., "society").

The author utilized Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine the passage of the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in an effort to disrupt the simplistic, uncritical understandings of the US Civil Rights Movement common to school texts while also arguing for the ongoing importance of the VRA in a time when voting rights for people of color are under attack. The author identified four points of interest convergence in the passage of the VRA and contends that a critical revisionist narrative of the VRA--along with other events and individuals Civil Rights Movement--is necessary to help students and teachers understand the persistence of racism and the limitations of liberalism in addressing racial inequality.

In this conceptual article we consider the pedagogical possibilities and pitfalls of incorporating White ally figures in history and social studies curricula. Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on race and the social studies and literature on alternative racial orientations, such as allies, antiracists, and abolitionists, we contend that educators can use White-ally pedagogy to offer White students, in particular, examples of an antiracist White racial identity. We close with guidelines to provide social studies educators and teacher educators with a starting point for effectively introducing White allies into the social studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]