In asynchronous courses, it is a challenge to create community, dialogue authentically, build trust, be vulnerable, and critically reflect. We drew from Kondo’s (2024) humanizing and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Freire, 1970/2000; Ladson-Billings, 1995) to examine the extent to which pre-service teachers engaging with reflection protocols developed students’ critical consciousness and understanding of their own identity, biases, and positionality—which are critical to inclusive education (Golloher & Middaugh, 2021).

The focus of this analysis is predominantly one reflective presentation assignment. Students were tasked with choosing three of six possibilities: two questionnaires (Stansberry Brusnahan et al., 2023) and four activities (Kondo, 2024). The following disclaimer was included:

Please approach these reflections with candor and a willingness to sit in some momentary discomfort. While we expect you will challenge yourself, the extent to which you engage with these reflections is entirely up to you, as is what you are willing to share in your presentation and reflection.

The pre-service students created individualized presentations that they posted to a discussion board on an online learning platform along with a 300 word reflection responding to the following prompts:

• What did you learn about yourself by engaging in reflective activities?

• Would you consider yourself a reflective person by nature, or was this a new experience for you?

• What emotions did you experience as you reflected?

• Which experiences, questions, emotions, or reactions were the most challenging for you, and why?

• What will you take away from this experience?

Besides the reflection presentations, we draw data from the discussion board posts, replies to peers, and anonymous responses from the course evaluations. While the depth of students’ engagement in critically conscious reflections varied, most students reported being challenged, having new and revelatory understandings of themselves and their future students, new and renewed commitments to equitable teaching.

Historically, the U.S. education system has been inconsistent in addressing issues of injustice and inequity (Adams & Bell, 2016). Educators, community members, and researchers are facing obstacles in addressing these issues in their classrooms. Researchers emphasize that fundamental education goals should be to allow students to understand the difference between equality and equity, address inequitable structures, and build their awareness of self, others, and social systems (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012; & Gay 2018).

In the journey of addressing social justice inequities, uncertainties in how students respond arise because of inexperience with topics, conflict between the social relationships of what is taught in schools to what may be discussed at home, and the impact of social and political pressures (Flores-Koulish & Shiller, 2020). Therefore, this teacher research focused on understanding how students responded to a unit that investigated systemic racial oppression in society and the environments educators must create to engage in critical conversations. Hence, the research questions that guided the author’s work were:

• What happens when sixth-grade students engage with a social studies unit that explicitly centers the history and influence of racial oppression?

• How do students respond to classroom experiences that encourage the critical analysis of racial oppression?

The author of this study designed a five-week unit on oppression taught and engaged in reflective journaling to capture her thoughts and reflect on how her positionalities intersected with the teaching and learning throughout the unit.

Findings revealed that students recognized the impact of hidden societal messages and how society devalues particular identities of minoritized groups. Students also demonstrated an in-depth understanding of the erasure of human experiences and histories. Further, educator lessons learned included the importance of creating brave spaces and the impact of brave spaces on student emotion, the development of critical consciousness, and the humanization of marginalized groups.