Milner, H. Richard. "Disrupting Racism and Whiteness in Researching a Science of Reading," Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0): pp 1-5, Summer 2020.

ABSTRACT

The author poses racialized questions and issues about the science of reading to address and disrupt implicit and overt racist practices in producing and disseminating knowledge. Roles, complexities, nuances, and challenges related to racial identity, special education lenses, and motivation are explored to reimagine how we conceptualize, construct, and build knowledge about the science of reading. Drawing from critical theories in education, the multicultural education movement, and a developing conceptual framework that the author calls disruptive movement to advance a racial justice agenda in the science of reading, the author questions who builds knowledge, what counts as knowledge, and why knowledge is constructed in the science of reading.

“I can’t believe what you say,” the song goes, “because I see what you do.” (Baldwin, 1966, para. 26)

Transformative novelist, poet, playwright, and activist James Baldwin’s quote above has profound implications for this moment in history. For me as a Black academic and many other Black people in the United States, White people’s chants of “Black Lives Matter” are received as empty, insincere words because we have observed and experienced so much dissonance between what they are saying and what we actually observe in their practices. Although we know language is a form of action, it is difficult for Black communities to trust or have any level of confidence that White people’s commitments to racial justice will ever manifest into any real actions that make a difference.

Over the years, I have heard White colleagues in higher education comment about weak writing skills (and capacity) of Black doctoral students, some of whom lived at some point below the poverty line. These doctoral students were matriculating at different phases of their graduate programs across a diversity of institution types in higher education. In my view, these professors’ assessment of skills and capacity of these Black students was more a reflection of these professors and the institutional structures of higher education than the doctoral students themselves. In other words, language and literacy skill sets are developed over time, place, and space. Yet, these graduate students were viewed as inferior, although we, as professors, have a moral and ethical obligation and responsibility to cocreate opportunities for students to develop within a writing ethos and genre necessary for them to succeed in a field they are entering. Although these Black students brought a level of analysis and insight to research projects that only they could, these students were critiqued for higher education’s inability, unwillingness, or perhaps disinterest in building, supporting, and cultivating Black students’ writing success. In this article, drawing from critical theories and theorists, such as Ladson-Billings and Apple, and multicultural education theories and theorists, such as Banks and Gay, I consider essential questions about knowledge construction and the science of reading. I focus mostly on Black students here in light of intensified discourse about “Black Lives Matter” in response to the recent murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rekia Boyd, and Antwon Rose Jr., to name only a few.

Building on scholarship that has questioned the state, status, and production of knowledge construction in the field of education more broadly (Banks, 1998; Gordon, 1990; Milner, 2007; Scheurich & Young, 1997; Tillman, 2002), I pose questions about the science of knowledge that I hope might serve as a moment to reflect on the racialized state of the science of reading, disrupt implicit and overt racist and White supremacist practices in producing and disseminating knowledge about the science of reading, and move (i.e., advance for racial justice) what we know about the science of reading.

Who Builds the Science of Reading in/About Pre-K–12?

Similar to higher education, some educators in pre-K–12 districts and schools across the United States vilify Black students for not already possessing a predetermined level of skill in reading and writing when these students enter school. Lyon and Chhabra (2004) stressed the need for teachers to understand the science of reading to support students in literacy development; these researchers maintained that teachers rely too much on anecdote to build a knowledge base and, consequently, practices to support student reading development. For them, “reading instruction [should be] grounded in the converging scientific evidence about how reading develops, why many students have difficulties, and how we can prevent reading failure (Lyon, 2002; Moats, 1999; Shaywitz, 2003)” (p. 12).

Yet, who builds this scientific evidence (i.e., the science of reading), and how might that evidence be enhanced by a more racially diverse cadre of researchers? What science is missed, ignored, overlooked, underexplored, misinterpreted, overgeneralized, and undernuanced about reading when knowledge construction is not diverse and representative of the varied racial identities of students under study? Moreover, it is essential to remember that we build knowledge and science from both quantitative and qualitative methods. Drawing from quantitative research, sorting, categorizing, and tracking students into reading and ability groups send a particular kind of message about what the science of reading is and what science of reading counts. In short, although quantitative studies build the science of reading, those studies only provide one layer of knowledge and knowing. Qualitative research tells the story behind the numbers and systematically contributes to what we know about reading comprehension and development.

How Might a Special Education Lens of the Science of Reading Complicate Knowledge Construction?

The science of reading also seems to be complicated by how the field situates challenges in learning to read through a special education lens (Robinson & Thompson, 2020). Although a special education lens provides important insights about language and literacy, an enduring focus on deficits of Black (and other) students may create a paradigm—a worldview—that does more harm than good. Acknowledging the importance of students’ language and literacy skill development in their very early years of life, educators may set Black students up for failure when they refuse to recognize or do not have the frames to identify language and literacy assets, strengths, skills, dispositions, mindsets, and practices that these students already possess and bring into a classroom. With an empirical and analytic framework that only sees what is missing, what is “wrong” with these students, Black students’ experiences in schools become dehumanizing from the very start of school. Because the majority-White (80%) teachers in U.S. schools (see Figure 1), as well as those who study them, only or mostly see how these students are not like them or their own children,1 Black students may be immediately and consistently tracked into a clinical cycle of failure exacerbated by schooling structures and systems.

Special education framing is further challenging based on labels such as “dyslexia” and “at risk”, which may be especially troubling for some Black families because these and related labels can pathologize students and be interpreted by parents, families, and communities that something is inherently wrong with their labeled children. This labeling can become more complicated when educators poorly communicate with families about their children, discussing diagnosis of reading challenges, such as processing speed or reading comprehension challenges, infinite, fixed ways. Rather than helping families understand that reading skills (e.g., processing speed) can be and usually are enhanced over time, Black families may get the message that something is innately wrong with their children because they do not fall within a “normal” reading/ testing distribution. It is important to note that Black families’ interpretation of such labels may be qualitatively different from that of White families because (covertly and overtly) Black people receive the message that their chil- dren are inferior and must catch up or keep up with their White counterparts (Ladson-Billings, 2006) without any interrogation of the ways in which racism and other forms of structural oppression maintain an inequitable status quo in the policies and practices of schooling.

FIGURE 1

Racial/Ethnic Demography of U.S. Classroom Teachers

Why Might Motivation Be So Important in the Science of Reading?

Drawing from hundreds of hours of observational studies that I have conducted in middle and high schools over the last 20 years, I have observed that Black students become motivated to read when they are introduced, encouraged, and/or allowed to read texts that are meaningful to them, resonate with their experiences and worldview, and get them excited about finding meaning from and through the storylines. Thus, it can be argued that reading, building meaning, and motivation are deeply interconnected. According to Guthrie and Wigfield (1999), “constructing meaning during reading is a motivated act. An individual interacting with a text for the purpose of understanding is behaving intentionally....Reading motivation...influences the individual’s activities, interactions, and learning with text” (p. 199). As Kirkland (2011) declared, books should fit young people like clothes; texts should connect and motivate young people to build and draw meaning (see also Milner, 2020b; Noguera, 2008). However, for too many young people, they have “refused to read for school because they couldn’t see themselves in school texts (Noguera, 2008)” (Kirkland, 2011, p. 199). This relevance and motivation dissonance can result in students’ refusal to engage in reading and writing tasks in the classroom (Kirkland, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2002), which can have unfortunate outcomes for students who operate within and through an oppressive system and structure that does not allow teachers to learn from their struggles and disinterest in reading practices.

My point is certainly not that Black students only want to read about issues, characters, plots, themes, experiences, or storylines that are familiar to them. To the contrary, Black students, similar to other racialized groups of students, develop complex and intricate motivations and interests in narratives as they emerge in literature. Bishop (1990) profoundly declared that literature has the potential to reflect the reader (mirrors), provide a view into other people’s lifeworlds (windows), and concurrently allow readers to walk into narratives of texts (sliding glass doors). A problem is that the folks who decide what books are included on lists for young people to read rarely are Black students or people who appropriately understand what piques the interests and motivation of Black students. Myopic, White, racist pedagogical, ideological, and curricular practices may result in troubling cycles that blame Black students for being unmotivated. What role might educators and researchers play in advocating for, accepting, and supporting the teaching, engagement, and reading of traditional canonical texts that reinforce whiteness and are deeply disconnected from Black students?

Permanence of Racism

Critical race theorists have argued that race and racism are everywhere, operating at all times, and that, perhaps most importantly, racism is a permanent dimension of the fabric of U.S. society (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). To be clear, a critical race theory perspective would suggest that due to the continual, deeply rooted nature of racism, our most promising potential outcome is to improve racism, not end it. Although hopeful, I realize that it is unlikely that we will end racism in the United States in the foreseeable future, if ever. Thus, I argue that we pursue and work toward a more racially just society and field while simultaneously recognizing the ways in which white supremacy are powerfully and interconnectedly woven within and through the policies, institutions, systems, and practices of education and society. The degree to which journals such as Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ) and others are committed to dismantling white supremacy depends on our systematic, conscientious, and deliberate analyses to disrupt racial injustice and work to move practices forward that give Black students a fighting chance at educational and life success.

Disruptive Movement

Relying on an emerging conceptual framework that I am developing called disruptive movement (Milner, 2008a), I stress the necessity to disrupt (Milner, 2008a, 2008b), counter (Milner & Howard, 2013), nuance, and expose (Milner, 2020a, 2020b) storylines, policies, and practices that center and maintain whiteness, racism, white supremacy, and hegemony in all forms and at every level (micro, meso, and macro). I argue that the issue in disruption is not so much about people being White as much as it is about how they use their whiteness to maintain hierarchies of injustice (Alvarez & Milner, 2018). Drawing from critical theories of race and political science, several features of disruption and movement are essential as we interrogate the science of reading. Foundationally, disruptive movement framing provides an analytic tool to examine and explain the necessity to expose (i.e., point out) and disrupt racist, inequitable, homophobic, xenophobic, and sexist worldviews, policies, and actions that maintain master narratives, or storylines, that perpetuate whiteness. More than simply exposing, disruptive movement advances organizing and organization among justice-minded people to actually do something through the practical and/or the intellectual: to transform systems, policies, and practices to improve the human condition, disruptive movement relies on actors from different walks of life from a diversity of professions committed to racial and other dimensions of justice. Disruptive movement framing has at its core the illumination of inequity and collective efforts to change existing norms to those that are emancipatory and just. Similar to social movements, disruptive movements emerge purposefully (Cornfield & Fletcher, 1998), and people organize themselves around an idea in movements to bring about change (Morris, 1984). Next, I describe three sites of disruptive movement that I believe help us move closer to a more racially just, robust knowledge base of the science of reading.

Three Sites of Disruptive Movement

In light of the framing questions that I pose in this article for a more diverse and rich body of knowledge about reading (and a more racially just field), I argue that we as a literacy and education community must reimage how we think about the who, the what, and the why of knowledge construction in reading.

Disruptive Movement 1: Who Builds Knowledge?

For far too many years, journals exclusively published White men’s research. This historical precedence set a significant disadvantage for women, Black, and other scholars of color. The very foundation of what people even investigate as germane to knowing in and about reading had been shaped by White men, many of whom were historically eugenicists (Black, 2003). To be clear, similar to other fields of study, whiteness and maleness are at the very foundation of our understanding of the science of reading. The questions we pose, the literature from which we draw, the conversations we join, the conceptual and analytic tools we employ, the data collection tools we use, the analyses and interpretation lenses we adopt, and what we advance as implications for new/ expanded knowledge from our research are deeply shaped by the (gendered and racial) identity and politics of the researcher (Milner, 2007). If we want to know more about the science of reading, we must carefully examine the who, the racial and ethnic identities and perspectives of those building the knowledge. Disrupting sexism, whiteness, and white supremacy requires that the pages of the journals about reading are as diverse as the communities we study to build the knowledge.

Disruptive Movement 2: What Counts as Knowledge?

Disruptive movement also requires diverse and broadened worldviews about what counts as methodological tools to build knowledge. What knowledge counts regarding the science of reading? The knowledge and expertise of women, Black people, and other minoritized communities have been consistently viewed as marginal, inconsequential, and part of an additive, not central, dimension of what really matters in education science (Banks, 1998). Promotion and tenure committees in education schools have viewed journals such as RRQ and quantitative research methods as superior to others. These historical and contemporary biases may force Black researchers to follow colonized, White-centric ways of knowing that dissuade them from pushing against a grain that has not necessarily advanced what we know about reading, particularly for Black and other minoritized communities. In other words, we have the potential to know more about the science of reading when we expand the tools we use to construct knowledge and when we see the value of a broader range of journal outlets as capable of producing useful, transferable, and relevant knowledge.

Disruptive Movement 3: Why Is Knowledge Constructed?

Perhaps most importantly, we have a chance to transform and improve the science of reading when the people who conduct research actually care about what knowledge is produced because they view their research participants as more than simply subjects. Clearly, communities that have been oppressed tend to understand that their scholarship has the potential to help people (Milner, 2007). In short, they understand and embrace their why in what they study. Producing knowledge about the science of reading then becomes more than an exercise in routinized procedures, methods, and practices of research in search of some mystic objectivity. Rather, studies are designed with the goal of knowing more to actually humanize the research process (Paris & Winn, 2014) and to aid in improving not only science but also the communities researched. Indeed, as a Black academic, I do my work with Black and other marginalized communities because I have an ethical and moral responsibility to build knowledge that makes a difference for and with the communities I study. As we, as a research community, contemplate what this moment might mean for Black lives, I am hopeful that we concurrently reimagine what a science of reading might look like that disrupts racism, white supremacy, and whiteness.

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NOTE

1 In this sense, it is essential to understand the role of teacher–student racial identity connections (Milner, 2020b) and the emic (insider) perspectives that researchers are able to build when they share racial/ethnic identities of their research participants (Milner, 2007).