ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we describe and analyze ways that Lewis Woods Elementary fourth graders engaged in transformative critical whiteness pedagogy we designed and implemented. This was our first experimentation with the sort of teaching and learning we described in Chapter 1 and was inspired by our early discussions about what the castle means in childhood play. We created sessions to engage students with signs such as castles, forts, and walls through a three-day improvisational workshop aimed at fostering considerations of whiteness. We designed a teacher-researcher study and worked with students in veteran teacher Tommie Murry’s classroom. Tommie had worked with Sam previously in Sam’s role as a local teacher education faculty member. We offer the stories and interpretations in this chapter, then, as experiments in transformative critical whiteness pedagogies with white students.
