Race-Positive Career and Technical Education: Techno-Social Agency Beyond the Vocational-Liberal Divide

In the United States, the history of African American education has long referenced the Booker T. Washington-W.E.B. DuBois debate that put vocational or technical education and liberal education in opposition to each other in the goals for racial uplift. Today there is good reason to be skeptical of centering vocational training in African American education given that racially marginalized students are often regulated to vocational settings that reinforce class stratification. However, our research on broadening the participation of African American children in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) illuminates a much more dynamic image of career and technical education (CTE) than is sometimes assumed. Using a race-positive framework, we show how CTE can be a generative site for moving beyond the liberal-technical dichotomy. We find that race-positive CTE is feasible when teachers seek to flatten hierarchies between the vocational and the liberal in education.