From Guide to Guerrilla: Teaching Anti-Racist ELA in Restrictive Times

by Dr. Michelle M. Falter

Five years ago, my co-authors, Chandra Alston, Crystal Lee, and I published Becoming Anti-Racist English Teachers in the spirit of national reckoning. The call was clear: Listen. Reflect. Read. Interrogate. Act. For a brief moment, anti-racism moved from the margins to the center. The language of justice was widely present in schools, teacher education programs, and professional learning communities. Educators were revising syllabi, building new book lists, and asking different questions. We believed the work had traction. That it might actually shift practice.

What we wrote in 2020 still holds. But how we carry it forward now looks very different.

Today, anti-racist teaching has not disappeared—but in many places, it has been driven underground. We are now teaching—and preparing teachers—in a landscape where terms like equity, diversity, and inclusion are now flagged, silenced, and banned, or have been recast as partisan or subversive. Policies limit how we talk about race, gender, language, and power. Teachers are being told to remove student artwork that affirms Black lives. Award-winning texts by BIPOC authors are being challenged or banned. The message is clear: avoid discomfort, avoid difference, avoid dissent. In this climate, fear can easily eclipse our pedagogical commitments.

And yet—educators persist. The work hasn’t ended; we’ve just been forced to adapt.

The five-step guide we published in 2020 still offers a way in, but it now operates more like an internal compass than a public roadmap. In many classrooms, this is now guerrilla pedagogy: quiet, strategic, and deeply intentional. Teachers are still doing the work. But they are doing it with more caution, and often without naming it.

Listening still happens—but often in the margins. Teachers listen to student writing more closely. They observe what is not said aloud. They gather in small, trusted groups to reflect, to recalibrate, to remind each other why they began.

Reflecting has shifted, too. Where we once asked, “What biases do I carry into my classroom?” we now ask, “How do I do this work without risking my livelihood?” “How do I protect my students and myself?” These are not signs of retreat—they reflect the complexity of doing ethical work within systems increasingly designed to suppress it.

Reading and interrogation remain central. But the process now demands precision. Teachers are choosing texts that open critical conversations—often without drawing attention to themselves. Instead of naming a unit “Power and Oppression,” they might call it “Conflict and Consequences.” Teachers frame units around terms like theme, voice, or perspective. They choose texts that open the door without setting off alarms. They rely on student inquiry to surface the deeper truths embedded in the stories.

A teacher I work with recently designed a unit centered around family photographs. The standard? Descriptive writing. But the students wrote about memory, migration, grief, resilience. She told me that one student wrote about a picture of their father—the last one taken before he was detained by ICE. It met the benchmark. And it made space for story. That, too, is anti-racist teaching—quiet, humanizing, and aligned.

And still, there are moments that feel like rupture.

This past March, Idaho teacher Sarah Inama was told to remove a classroom sign that read Everyone is Welcome Here (Portée, 2025). It had hung in her room for five years. Suddenly, it was deemed “political.” Inama has called the decision racist—and admits she doesn’t know how to explain it to her students. Because what do you say when the word everyone is the threat?  That question is both the lesson and the warning.

We are no longer working in a time of momentum. We are working in a time of resistance. The challenge is no longer whether the work matters. It’s how to do it—and keep doing it—when the very act of caring is framed as political.

Anti-racist teaching in 2025 doesn’t always look like protest. Sometimes it looks like a well-worded assignment prompt. Sometimes it looks like silence, held intentionally, to let a student’s truth take up space. Sometimes it looks like a conversation after class—the kind we no longer feel safe having in front of the whole room. We continue through assignments that invite voice even when voice is not named. Through libraries curated with care, even if only on our own shelves. Through questions crafted to guide students to the truth, even when we cannot speak it ourselves.

This is not the work I imagined in 2020. But it is still the work.

And perhaps the most important thing we can remember now is that this did not begin in 2020 and it will not end in 2025. Teachers have long navigated resistance. What has changed is not the necessity of anti-racist pedagogy, but the terms under which we practice it.

The truth is, we are teaching under conditions that demand strategy over slogans. And teachers—especially English teachers—know how to work with subtext. We know how to say what we mean, even when we’re not allowed to say it plainly. We know how to help students read between the lines—and how to write there, too.

We are still listening. Still learning. Still teaching.

And, in many ways, still acting—through the books we quietly pass on, the assignments we frame with intention, and the spaces we create where students can ask hard questions.

If we can’t name the work, we can still do it.

If we can’t hang the poster, we can still build the space.

And if our pedagogies are being watched,
then let our questions be the protest.

References

Falter, M. M., Alston, C. L., & Lee, C. C. (2020). Becoming anti-racist English teachers: Ways to actively move forward [White paper]. North Carolina State University. https://go.ncsu.edu/antiracist-ela

Portée, A. (2025, March 14). Teacher ordered to remove signs from classroom, including one saying ‘Everyone is welcome here’. TODAY. https://www.today.com/parents/teacher-remove-everyone-is-welcome-here-sign-rcna196282

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Michelle M. Falter is an Associate Professor and Director of Teacher Education at St. Norbert College in Green Bay, Wisconsin, emphasizing dialogic, affective, critical, and social justice pedagogies in ELA, literacy, and YA literature. She can be reached at michellefalter@gmail.com