Schools are essential sites for nurturing critical consciousness about race and racism with youth of color. Yet, limited research has taken up how critical race consciousness development can be carried out with a primarily white teaching force or about the classroom practices of white teachers who are motivated to do this work. Drawing on observational data collected over four years, this chapter describes and analyzes lessons taught by three white educators as they earnestly attempt to teach about race and racism. Ultimately, we conclude that these white teachers used meaningful, thoughtful, and rigorous curricula resources to support their students’ developing critical consciousness about race and racism, yet they encountered several pedagogical challenges that may be rooted in their socialization into whiteness. Our findings have implications for white teacher preparation and support and offer practical insights for white teachers who are actively seeking to foster critical race consciousness with their students.

Despite growing interest in antiracism efforts, a dearth of theoretical and empirical work that examines how youth develop beliefs and actions that challenge racism, or develop a critical race consciousness (CRC), remains. In this chapter, we propose an integrative model that articulates the nature and dynamics of youth CRC, which includes racism analysis, racial reflexivity, and antiracism action. First, we describe the nature of racism in the United States and explain how this system serves as a developmental context for youth CRC. Second, we integrate several bodies of research across diverse fields of study (e.g., liberation psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, social work) that ground our model, followed by an in-depth discussion of the model. Then we discuss psychological processes and social contexts that may facilitate or hinder CRC praxis and development. We conclude with recommendations for future CRC research and practice that may stimulate this developmental process.

Dismantling systems of racial oppression requires that people from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds become critically conscious in challenging racial injustices. Youth’s pathways to critical consciousness may be very different depending on youth’s experiences with racial oppression and privilege. This chapter brings together relational developmental systems and critical race and intersectionality theories and existing research that can offer insights into different underpinnings and processes related to youth of color and white youth’s critical consciousness development. We also show how mapping complex variations in critical reflection, motivation, and action and situating these processes within contexts of oppression and privilege can advance understanding of critical consciousness development. We conclude by summarizing promising future directions for theory and research.

The concluding chapter highlights the contributions of this edited volume’s chapters in terms of advancing and expanding critical consciousness theory and measurement. We recap the two parts of the volume – one focused on issues relevant to theory and the other focused on issues relevant to measurement – and briefly review the ways in which each chapter appearing in the volume addresses key issues related to theory and measurement.

This introduction chapter provides an introduction to critical consciousness and articulates the rationale for why an edited volume on critical consciousness theory and measurement is needed. We highlight the structure of the book, which has two parts: one focused on issues relevant to theory and the other focused on issues relevant to measurement. A brief review of each of the chapters appearing in the volume’s two sections is provided. This chapter concludes with the presentation of a "schema" we provide to support navigating the contents of this volume – and other critical consciousness scholarship– and explicate how this schema represents some of the most complex and challenging issues faced by scholars working in critical consciousness theory and measurement today.

Critical consciousness, or the process of coming to understand and combat oppression, is an integral aspect of adolescents’ sociopolitical development and is necessary for collective liberation. Although adolescents interface with oppression daily, little is known about how they engage in critical consciousness or how this process manifests across different situations and contexts. In this chapter, we propose a conceptual model and research agenda aimed at capturing this complexity. Specifically, we argue that daily diary studies would be well positioned to examine the finer-grained temporal nature of critical consciousness and intraindividual variability. We provide an overview of how daily diaries might be applied to the study of critical consciousness. Additionally, we discuss implications for research, practice, and policy.