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KELSEY'S STORY My student Lucas was murdered during the summer of the COVID-19 shutdown. I was 8 months pregnant and, like so many others, quarantining with my husband. I was [...]

This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy pedagogy meant to locate and address issues of race and gender in a video game. This article calls for a broader view of textuality that affirms, supports, and celebrates emergent teacher decision making, as well as practices of urban literacy education that broaden the notion of what constitutes a text.

Improv theater has expanded beyond a popular American form of entertainment into an educational experience for students and teachers. It may be difficult to imagine that an interactive, joyful, and collaborative improv workshop might be harmful, but our own experiences as professional improvisers led us to observe that even well-intentioned, antiracist improv theater interventions tend to reflect Whiteness more than democratic values. We investigate this observation through a systematic review of education research articles. Our review of 30 studies reveals that, to varying degrees, researchers have regarded improvisation as an instrumental practice to improve some other activity or as metaphor for the activity of teaching. We found that Whiteness has been central to the use of improvisation in educational contexts. Finally, this study illustrates that a turn toward disciplined improvisation or an improvisational ethos offers one way to practice the ideals of democratic education.

In this manuscript, we argue that the increasing use of reductive tools born out of neoliberal reforms in education, such as "The Framework for Teaching," a tool for teacher evaluation credited to Charlotte Danielson, limits the possibilities for emergent, improvisational teaching. We consider the broader political landscape of the last 25 years to suggest that "The Framework for Teaching" illuminates a preoccupation in education with so-called measurable results in ways that hurt teachers while advancing political agendas and profiting private corporations. Next, we rely on storytelling methodology to critique the framework and offer alternative ways of thinking about teacher evaluation. Ultimately, our critique intends to prompt more humane understandings of teacher evaluation, thereby permitting and engendering improvisational pedagogies.

I use racial storytelling to tell and interpret two stories that offer insight about why I feel the need to continue studying whiteness. I frame this writing through a second-wave of critical whiteness studies, and return to my experiences as a white person to consider my ongoing work to teach, study, and write about whiteness and white supremacy in education.

This essay details what we, three White teacher-researchers, learned about how one class of fourth grade children interacted with signs such as castles, forts, and walls through a three-day improvisational workshop aimed at fostering critical literacy skills. Theories and methods of improvisational theatre offer a distinct way to approach critical literacy, especially the racialization of particular signs and symbols. Although we do not explicitly take up race with the children in our study, our work contributes to the broader field of critical Whiteness studies because we conceptualize forts, castles, and walls as symbols of racial power in the imagination. Castles, forts, and walls are pervasive signs for children in the United States and, subsequently, inform the ways children imagine themselves in social hierarchies prevalent in the U.S. Using qualitative methodologies, we collected and analyzed field notes, interviews, and audio/video recordings of the workshop to construct patterns in our data. We present findings of how the children interacted specifically to one symbol at length - the castle -- because of its salience in the data. Although our findings are only tentative due the short duration of the study, we believe they will generate new insights for future research in critical literacy.

The authors investigated improvisational theater and the possibilities that it presents for reconsidering reading pedagogy, with a focus on discussions of reading. The authors conducted empirical, qualitative studies of improvisational practice and instruction and analyzed improv through the construct of worlding. In this article, the authors explore different dimensions of worlding, a concept that generally describes how ensembles make present and create unique events in time. Next, the authors offer a vision of reading discussions that emerges from rethinking and refeeling such discussions through forms of worlding found in improvisation. The authors conclude by offering five improv-inspired teaching practices for discussions of reading: (1) teaching as invoking the text, (2) teaching as exchanging offers, (3) teaching as attuning, (4) teaching as following lines of flight, and (5) teaching as activating embodied energy.

This essay relies on methods of narrative research to both present and consider an example of a second-wave of critical whiteness pedagogy in K-12 contexts. The author focuses on his interactions with one high school student -- Adam -- to theorize how "The Whiteness Project" allowed students to "play with whiteness" in generative, disruptive, and often confounding ways that are not afforded by traditional anti-racism pedagogies with white students. This essay considers a potential move toward playfulness, openness, and radical engagement in anti-racist whiteness pedagogies in schools.

Using narrative research as a qualitative methodology, we (two white critical whiteness scholars) tell a story about how a dismantling and rebuilding of whiteness occurred in a fourth-grade classroom across three vignettes. Using a close read of Reverend Thandeka's primer on the ways white children are socialized, we wrestle with what pedagogy aimed to confront racism means when it "didn't" work as planned for a white child and his family. In our telling, we will attempt to wrestle with the question: What happens when white children are asked to engage in anti-racist pedagogy?

This paper seeks to integrate a scholarship of "ritual" with a scholarship of "improvisation" and relate the intersection thereof with mathematics teaching and learning and with mathematics education research. Drawing on their experiences as classroom teachers, as practicing improvisers, and as current education researchers, the authors draw from scholarship about "ritual," "improvisation," and related concepts from sociocultural and mathematics education literature. They propose ways that mathematics teachers and mathematics education researchers might find "ritual" and "improvisation" to be illuminating concepts for their work.

In this manuscript, we rely on practices of thinking with and through theory to situate and analyze the discourses of three neoliberal educational reform initiatives. We researched public-facing material from these initiatives to surface how commonsense language and colorblindness is often used to disguise agendas that reaffirm the racial status quo in urban schools and society. We offer strategies for educators, teacher-educators, and administrators to critically respond when they encounter such neoliberal reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on what three white critical whiteness scholars learned about the ways white supremacy was affirmed and resisted during a two-day improvisational, critical whiteness workshop. The authors relied on critical literacy to theorise the castle as a sign or text with implicit, racial meaning. Furthermore, the authors use improvisational theatre to design and make sense of critical pedagogy intended to disrupt the ongoing production of white supremacy. They consider how theatrical improvisation, as a pedagogical tool, might be used in critical whiteness pedagogy to disrupt the affirmation of white supremacy through signs and symbols.

This article considers the pedagogical nature of an intra-action involving the author, his high school student's final project in an English class (a golem), and his school administrators. The author relies on narrative scholarship to both tell and interpret a story of his experience as a high school English and drama teacher, to illustrate the process, the product, and the result of an intra-action that emerged from his nontraditional literacy teaching practices concerning the plays "Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," and "No Exit." Ultimately, he argues that educators--both teachers and administrators--should be more receptive of emergent, improvisational literacy teaching and learning, and careful in their participation with co-constituted intra-actions that come from such approaches to literacy pedagogy.

This article considers second wave critical Whiteness pedagogy by examining the author's teacher-researcher implementation of teaching project about Whiteness in a large, suburban high school near a major city in the Midwest. The author relies on narrative scholarship in order to both tell and interpret stories about a yearlong project that used Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and playbuilding to guide a group of mostly white 9th-12th graders through a consideration of Whiteness. This article especially focuses on the way one white student described her participation in the project.

The article discusses the importance of embracing and preserving our "wildness" in education and research. It highlights the resistance to taming our natural state and the forces that attempt to control and limit our wildness. The authors of the article explore various topics, such as anti-colonialism, speculative civic literacies, and playfully studious teaching, to challenge traditional approaches and promote a more equitable and diverse perspective in teaching and learning. The authors emphasize the need to be aware of the forces that try to steal our wildness and to strive for a better way of living and learning. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, I consider evidence of how students of colour enact whiteness by being violent towards depictions of Black people even in spaces without Black people. I argue that people who engage in anti-racist pedagogy have to be vigilant – aware that anti-Black spaces will be created and ready to respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Analyses of external bone shape using geometric morphometrics (GM) and cross‐sectional geometry (CSG) are frequently employed to investigate bone structural variation and reconstruct activity in the past. However, the association between these methods has not been thoroughly investigated. Here, we analyze whole bone shape and CSG variation of metacarpals 1–5 and test covariation between them. Materials and Methods: We analyzed external metacarpal shape using GM and CSG of the diaphysis at three locations in metacarpals 1–5. The study sample includes three modern human groups: crew from the shipwrecked Mary Rose (n = 35 metacarpals), a Pre‐industrial group (n = 50), and a Post‐industrial group (n = 31). We tested group differences in metacarpal shape and CSG, as well as correlations between these two aspects of metacarpal bone structure. Results: GM analysis demonstrated metacarpus external shape variation is predominately related to changes in diaphyseal width and articular surface size. Differences in external shape were found between the non‐pollical metacarpals of the Mary Rose and Pre‐industrial groups and between the third metacarpals of the Pre‐ and Post‐industrial groups. CSG results suggest the Mary Rose and Post‐industrial groups have stronger metacarpals than the Pre‐industrial group. Correlating CSG and external shape showed significant relationships between increasing external robusticity and biomechanical strength across non‐pollical metacarpals (r: 0.815–0.535; p ≤ 0.05). Discussion: Differences in metacarpal cortical structure and external shape between human groups suggest differences in the type and frequency of manual activities. Combining these results with studies of entheses and kinematics of the hand will improve reconstructions of manual behavior in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]