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Leadership plays a critical role in promoting equitable and high-quality early care and education (ECE) environments. Within this context, leaders of color bring unique perspectives and experiences that support ECE teachers, children, and families with diverse backgrounds. Despite their importance, there is limited research focusing on the professional experiences and well-being of ECE leaders of color. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), the current study aims to fill the gap by exploring the well-being, challenges, and strengths of ECE leaders of color. Using applied thematic analysis, we analyzed interview data from 17 leaders of color working in center-based ECE settings. Five themes were identified: (1) Multidimensional and interconnected well-being, (2) structural and racialized challenges in leadership roles and career pathways, (3) strengths and assets drawn from leaders of color’s identities and experiences, (4) interconnections between strengths and burdens, and (5) suggestions for well-being and work conditions improvement. The findings suggest that improving the well-being and work conditions of ECE leaders of color requires both individual and structural support, including more targeted well-being resources, culturally sustaining organizational practices and climate, leadership preparation and development support, and more stable policy environments.

Johnson illustrates how Ujamaa Elementary School centers Black history to amplify children's role in curricular development and as liberatory literacy pedagogy and practice. She details the ways that Black history, specifically the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement, provided pedagogical guidance and framing for active learning and cultivating activist-oriented thinking with the young children at Ujamaa. Ujamaa's principal and teachers make it clear that Eurocentric white histories and narratives are what get privileged in many schools as well as in the media. They emphasize that Black history is foundational to US society and that to learn it and embrace it can be a consequential endeavor. In this way, Ujamaa's children not only learn about inequality and stratification but also resistance and community-building, which create paths to envisioning liberation and justice.

In this column, we expand the concept of Black Livingness as a lens to evaluate and select African American children’s literature.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to present two case studies of bilingual, culturally sustaining elementary educators engaging students in daily interactive read-alouds with justice-oriented picturebooks. Design/methodology/approach Using qualitative multi-case study and ethnographic approaches, along with constant comparative methods, the authors analyzed two case studies to explore how educators work toward disruption and transformation through literacy instruction in dual language contexts. Data included interviews, classroom observations of interactive read-alouds and classroom artifacts. Findings The authors found that the teachers prepared for teaching with justice-oriented picturebooks by developing Humanizing Critical Sociocultural Knowledge (HCSK), growing critical content knowledge and enacting culturally sustaining pedagogical knowledge. The authors argue that culturally sustaining literacy instruction requires that teachers not only curate justice-oriented texts but also cultivate their own HCSK through lived experience, activism and pedagogical preparation to create student-centered interactive read-aloud spaces. Research limitations/implications This article underscores the consequential development of educators’ HCSK and culturally sustaining pedagogies as foundational to justice-oriented literacy instruction, which should be emphasized in teacher education research and programs. Practical implications This article demonstrates that critical interactive read-alouds are most effective when teachers intentionally prepare through ongoing self-reflection, activism and purposeful text curation that centers students’ lived experiences. Originality/value This article offers an original contribution by shifting the focus from text selection to the critical preparation and humanizing sociocultural knowledge teachers must cultivate to meaningfully enact culturally sustaining interactive read-alouds with justice-oriented texts.

Black authors of African American children's literature in the US are creating narratives that resist anti-Blackness and depict the thriving lives of African American children. This article explores the concept of Black Livingness as an analytic lens for reading children's literature and provides educators with four questions and criteria for selecting books that illustrate Black Livingness. The article examines three recent African American children's literature and highlights their cultural authenticity, vibrant illustrations, and depictions of joy, creativity, and playfulness. It emphasizes the importance of diverse literature in enhancing children's literate lives and expanding their understanding of Black life. The article calls for elementary educators to include more expansive stories that depict happiness and playfulness, providing Black children with mirrors that affirm their existence and nourish their racial consciousness and imaginations. By privileging the creative works and stories produced by Black authors and illustrators, educators can create spaces for diverse and nuanced representations of Black communities and people.

The issues associated with students' civic knowledge, engagement, and participation have been heightened in intellectual debates and public discussions. However, these discussions have not focused heavily on urban youths' civic identities or the locations of these identities within the youths' personal narratives of ethnicity, race, class, and gender. This article presents the narratives of four urban high school youths of color, selected from a larger study about youths' experiences in school and society and the ways in which classroom learning encouraged their inquiry, assessment of their social worlds and personal goals, and emerging personal and civic identities. Our purpose was to gain insights regarding the youths' sociopolitical perspectives on local educational and social issues affecting them and to understand their multiple literacies in the context of their civic engagement, increasing youth advocacy, and larger political tensions. The theoretical framing of this investigation is grounded in democratic education and sociopolitical consciousness and draws upon research that focuses on civic participation and democratic society. Four dominant themes emerged from the analysis: educational inequality, social media, schooling, and race and mass incarceration. This article contributes to an expansive framing for civic education by examining the civic knowledge of urban youths of color and offers implications for research, practice, and policy.

Books showing Black children spending time with family, or playing at home, help Black kids see themselves in literature and give all kids a window into others’ experiences.