Constructing racial literacy through critical language awareness: A case study of a beginning literacy teacher

•Race is a discourse that works constitutively with social practice.•Racial literacy is constructed across time and contexts.•“Awareness” in terms of race is a social activity.•CLA supports talk about race, not just analysis of written texts.

This case study focuses on the relationship between critical language awareness and racial literacy. We explore how one White preservice teacher explored race and racism and engaged her young student, who identified as Black, in a discussion of “whiteness” and “blackness” in a literacy practicum. We focus on three literacy events (a journal entry about white privilege, a literacy lesson with her student, and a debriefing session with her colleagues) to answer our research questions: How does a literacy teacher bring a developing awareness of racism and white privilege to her literacy practices while learning to teach in a practicum? What tools and contexts support her work to analyze, critique and reconstruct her understandings? How might we understand the affordances and constraints of literacy practices? The findings of the study suggest the ways in which CLA works as a tool in breaking a silence about race, providing a diverse set of tools to do so. The case study we present has implications for researchers studying racial literacy through critical approaches to discourse as well as teacher educators and teachers developing practices of racial literacy.