UC San Diego

In this dissertation I explored how two equity-minded African-American teachers cultivate a sense of belonging in their high-school classrooms through their pedagogical choices and how African-American students perceive these efforts as affecting their overall class engagement and academic motivation. Using a qualitative case study, I focused on equity minded African-American teachers, and African-American students in their classrooms, to capture the impact of the sociocultural-political-institutional context on African American students’ sense of belonging. I employed critical race theory (CRT) and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in tandem with qualitative racial identity development theory (RIT) measures (Boston & Warren, 2017) to reconstitute sense of belonging into a sense of critical belonging for African-American students. Critical belonging entails looking at systemic, institutional, and/or interpersonal factors that impact belonging based on what African-American students need in order to thrive and feel respected. Overall, this study found that employing criticality through racial realism, challenging dominant ideology (for example anti-Blackness and race neutrality within curriculum and teacher training), the cultivation of counter spaces, employing intersectionality, disrupting property of whiteness, and creating institutional forms of support that is intentional in centering and supporting critical and intersectional understandings of race, anti-Blackness, and African American identity were found to support belonging for African American students.