Racial Formations and Educational Inequality

Catalog description

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this course examines how racial meanings are constructed, negotiated, and contested through educational policies and practices. It considers how racial discourses shape diverse students’ experiences in schools and how students engage with these processes in ways that can disrupt, reproduce, or reinterpret dominant racial ideologies and their own racial positions. We also analyze how race interacts with other systems of identity and power—such as class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship—to shape educational structures and everyday life in schools. This course invites students to critically investigate how racial discourses function in schools and to consider their implications for the broader purposes of education in the United States. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically analyze how racial formation processes shape educational systems and apply intersectional frameworks to understand and challenge educational inequality.