Racialized School Climate and Adolescents’ Critical Consciousness: A Multi-Informant, Multi-Level Study

While schools can perpetuate societal inequities, they can also provide opportunities for students' critical consciousness (CC) development. To gain a comprehensive understanding of CC development in schools and address the potential conflation of individual student perceptions of school climates with their CC, we examined associations between students' and teachers' perceptions of racialized school climates—specifically assimilationism, color-evasion, multiculturalism, and CC —and students' CC of racialized inequities, including critical reflection, motivation, and interpersonal and structural action. Our sample comprised 832 students (M = 15.05 years, SD = 0.75, 44.5% female, 4.2% non-binary) and 198 teachers in 23 secondary schools in Thuringia, Germany, with data collected in 2022. Multilevel path analyses and school-level bivariate correlations revealed that student and teacher reports of CC climate were related to more, and teacher-reported assimilationism to less critical reflection. Effects for color-evasive and multiculturalist climates on various CC facets were mixed, including positive and negative effects across student and teacher reports. To cultivate youth CC as resource and tool for driving transformative change, measures fostering a CC climate should be taken, including social-justice oriented training programs for educators.