Interpretive frames for responding to racially stressful moments in history discussions

A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that many history teachers avoid or minimize conversations about race for fear they will trigger “racialized conflict.” This silence should raise alarms, as we know that race and racism permeate the lived experiences of teachers and students and inevitably surface in historical discussions. In this article we use a racially charged moment from a middle school discussion of the New Deal to propose three interpretive frames that might support teachers in navigating moments of racial stress in history discussions. We understand interpretive frames to be schematic lenses that guide teacher perception, interpretation, and action in classrooms, and we propose three frames—disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and racial literacy—that respectively address the historical, structural, and psychosocial dimensions of race and racism. We apply each frame to the classroom incident to illustrate how each might help teachers respond to moments of racial stress. Ultimately, we argue that these interpretive frames represent a suite of mutually reinforcing tools that might be leveraged by teacher educators to help teachers anticipate racial stress and turn paralysis to pedagogy.