Kindel Nash

Grounded in critical and emancipatory theories, five critical ethnographies about the lives of children, grandchildren, colleagues, students, and teachers are analyzed and synthesized to illuminate the ways in which individuals are racially socialized over their lifespans. Three propositions for early childhood contexts were apparent across the studies: (1) racial identity and dysconsciousness are learned over time and across multiple spaces; (2) critical racial literacy is a complex, cyclical, and sometimes contradictory process; and (3) critical racial literacy demands acknowledging and confronting blind spots. Building on these propositions, the authors present

This article explores parallel findings from two critical ethnographies (Miller in Whiteness, discourse, and early childhood: an ethnographic study of three young children's understandings about race in home and community settings. University of South Carolina, Columbia, 2012; Nash in Blinded by the white: foregrounding race and racism in a literacy course for preservice teachers. University of South Carolina, Columbia, 2012) of white early childhood teacher educators using a critical race stance as they researched race and racism in two contexts: an early childhood education course and home and community settings with the author's own three young children. In each context, the researchers/authors found that participants used discourse to both resist and reify racism. The authors share these findings, offering implications and questions for critical reframing of the socially and historically located meanings of race and racism in early childhood education and teacher education. The teacher education field is rife with promises and commitments to challenging inequities and promoting teaching excellence in diverse, urban settings. Current accreditation and licensure policies mandating attention to issues of diversity have resulted in a sprinkling of courses in urban education, culturally relevant pedagogy, revisions of mission statements, and increased attention to diverse field placements

This research note offers a critique of high leverage practices, refuting previous claims from a 2016 Teachers College Record commentary based on the authors' study, which initially sought to investigate high leverage practices. It includes discussion about the evolution of the authors' understanding of high leverage practices and eventual decision to abandon that concept based on findings from their study.

Moving away from best and evidence-based literacy practices, this commentary offers a conceptualization of high leverage literacy practices (HLLP) based on ongoing critical ethnographic research in high performing urban schools across the nation (Madison, 2011). We define urban schools as social and geographic contexts characterized by human resilience, agency, and racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity (Hollins, 2011). Best and evidence-based practices in literacy have been consistently critiqued for their lack of reliability and validity in urban schools and inconsistency in accounting for the role of students’ and schools’ social and cultural contexts (Davies, 1999; Hlas & Hlas, 2012). However, the research base surrounding these types of practices has been slow to respond (Al Otaiba, & Fuchs, 2006; Hollins, 2015a; Nash, 2013; Piña, Nash, Boardman, Polson, & Panther, 2015; Troia & Olinghouse, 2013; U.S. Department of Education, 2009). In 2015, only 36% of fourth grade students attending urban schools scored at or above proficient in reading compared to 41% of their suburban peers (National Council of Education Statistics, 2015).

In this article, four critical ethnographers reflect on dilemmas that arose during individual research projects. We grappled with the question: What does critical ethnography require from us as we work to represent stories that emerge in contexts where students and/or teachers have been marginalized? After engaging in a three-year process of diffractive analysis, we arrived at the notion of missing stories, as stories that involve messy processes , multifaceted risks and multiple roles in the telling and hearing of people's stories in research. There are not many people in this world who value the stories of those who struggle with what to most seems simple. The honor of sharing those stories ties you to the one speaking. Like a book the heart can open and close, unlike a book the heart bleeds: be mindful of the hearts you open. –Haver Jim, Yakama Nation The opening epigraph by Haver Jim, a former student who worked with Joy in an equity-centered project, grounds our thinking about what happens when we hear, tell, and elicit personal stories from vulnerable populations. It requires that we take seriously questions about who/how we are as researchers and what counts as good scholarship. In this article, we respond to critical race and feminist scholars who have urged us to think with theory (Jackson and Mazzei 2012) and move toward representing and doing critical qualitative research that centers on justice for marginalized communities—not merely as a means for promoting our social capital within the academy (Pillow 2003; Villenas 2012). As four early career scholars, we often reflected upon and discussed " stuck " places, dilemmas of belonging, and representation in our critical ethnographic work. Our ongoing dialogue and diffractive readings (Jackson and Mazzei 2012) yielded the concept of missing stories. We conceptualize missing stories as encompassing the processes, risks, and roles of the stories we hear and tell in our scholarly work toward justice. By attending to missing stories, we open ourselves