During an interview, Rendell recalled how some teachers talked negatively about his familial circumstances and academic potential. He shared:I did school OK, but you start thinkin’ on what they said. Like, “You know where you from, don’t hope for too much,” or “It’s alright you don’t know that,” or “Don’t worry about doing well,” or, like, “College? No, just get ah trade.”

(p. 210). Examples like Bledsoe contest essentializing mischaracterizations of Black adolescents as uneducable, irresponsible, and inclined to criminality. As we argue, this contestation is important because it demonstrates the valuable role of Black adolescents producing counternarratives to negative perceptions about who they are and what they allegedly can or cannot do.Counternarratives, or counterstories, represent one tenet of critical race theory. While they take a variety of forms (e.g., personal stories, others’ stories, compos-ite stories), Solórzano and Yosso (2002) define them as a “method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told” in order to “shatter complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on race, and further the struggle for racial reform” (p. 32).

In addition to viewing literacy as cultural, as critical, and as a social practice, Neuman and Rao (2004) contend that “literacy also involves engaging with and creating a range of texts, building on the languages, experiences, cultures, and other assets of students, and communicating and expressing understanding in multiple ways” (p. 7). This type of communication happens individually and with other people.

When students are sitting in classes hungry, when they cannot see the words on the board or on the page, and when they experience school as a place where they are regularly bombarded with standardized tests, we have to wonder: Education as a great equalizer for whom?When they are forced to learn under conditions that rely on English Only and zero-tolerance policies, we have to inquire:

After they reached a consensus on identifying the problem, I asked the students, “What do you think can be done to change the name?” Silence. Wait time. Heads shook from side to side. I ob-served subdued bodies and even slumping at desks. As if in a chorus from an Aztec or Greek drama, the students raised their voices and spoke:

As a result, I sought a way to intro-duce them to critical praxis as a “reflection and ac-tion directed at the structures to be transformed” (Freire 126). This was largely driven in my belief in changing conditions through nonviolence, civil discourse, and— if necessary— civic disobedience to change conditions. Change can unfold through models from Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Lu-ther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta, among others.

My awareness of students’ love of literature and writing, ranging from poetry and short stories to young adult literature, guided me to select texts that could extend the conversation to texts about humane treatment. We had previously read two literary works that presented the words sweep and dirt in separate connotations in the poem “How I Learned to Sweep” by Julia Alvarez and in the chap-ter titled “When I Was Dirt” from the novel Car-amelo by Sandra Cisneros.

Tardy Sweep (see Figure 1). The students’ concern stemmed from the connota-tion to refuse and trash.

Equally as important, these teachers offer urban middle school students opportunities and tools to counter narrate—simultaneously critiquing and reimagining the places they inhabit and the often-negative stories told about them

nalyzing graphs of obesity trends and informational articles.nCollecting and analyzing neighborhood data to determine whether they live in a food desert

Urban spaces, for example, are dense ecologies with complex networks of materials (both “natural” and human-made) and histories of race, class, and power dynamics (e.g., changing neighborhood demographics, systemic housing discrimination). Acknowledging these dimensions of urban environments disrupts notions of place as “external to the social world” (p. 2) and suggests the importance of attending explicitly to space and place in justice-oriented pedagogies.

For instance, social jus-tice–driven hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #AmINext, #ShutItDown, and #ICantBreathe illustrate how “Black Twitter is successfully harnessing the power of its collective identity in order to express the views and beliefs of a group that is marginalized by dominant ideas in mainstream media” (Williams & Domoszlai, 2013).

Though Wafer was eventually found guilty of second-degree murder, many mainstream media outlets initially focused on whether McBride was drunk or high as opposed to focusing on why Wafer shot and killed McBride before

For example, phrases such as “he was bullied,” “she had a troubled past,” “he had a hard home life,” or even “he suffered from mental illness” are frequently used to justify the crimes committed by White suspects. In cases where empathy is not shown, White suspects get characterized as a “lone wolf.” The lone wolf narrative attempts to shift our attention away from how these acts are part of a legacy of terrorist attacks committed by White supremacists. This pattern was demonstrated in the case of Dylan Roof, who brutally murdered nine Black people at Emanuel African Meth-odist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Many media outlets described Roof as a “white supremacist lone wolf” and commented, “we don’t know why he did this.” Conversely, the media’s framing of crimes committed by Black people and other people of color tend to perpetuate stereotypes about the entire community they represent. T

rarely posit Black people in positive ways. Even when Black people are victims of violence, it is rare that their accomplishments are named in the media. Conversely, the media are careful about how they represent White criminals, usually portraying them sympathetically.

Furthermore, the Spring Valley incident reminds us that schools and classrooms are not exempt from assault against Black bodies. In other words, the same racist brutality toward Black citizens that we see happening on the streets across the United States mirrors the violence toward Black students that is happening in our nation’s academic streets. As Black women, moth-ers of Black children,2 educators, critical scholars, and spiritual beings,3 we are devastated by the ubiquitous assault against Black people, and we know that Black children are suffering too.

ill (2015) emphatically asserted in a tweet following the incident that “NOBODY would be asking what that little girl did to deserve a police assault if she were white.”

ppro-priately, multiple approaches are warranted, given the numerous instructional and institutional chal-lenges facing Black girls in public schools.

Collaboratives and non-profit organizations including the Black Girl Lit-eracy Collective, BlackGirlsRock!, and 12- year- old Black girl Marley Dias’s #1000BlackGirlBooks have worked to decriminalize lit-eracy for Black girls.

En-glish education teachers expose Black students, and Black girls in particular, to mostly Western European thought and tradition that mutes the racial, ethnic, and gendered experiences of individuals who look like the students whom they are teaching (Willis et al.).

Black girls are still experiencing slav-ery through more modernized weaponry that has advanced beyond shackles and chains.

Persistent societal images that negatively por-tray Black women and girls have contributed to normalcy and the mosaic of Whiteness as pure and innocent while Blackness is seen as inhumane or representing death. Black girls are often character-ized as Jezebels, Sapphires, aggressive, or sexualized to the point that they are deprived of having any in-tellectual currency and curiosity

School is a racially violent space that has caused Black girls to be physically assaulted for perceived classroom defiance. These acts of state- sanctioned violence and state- sanctioned incarcer-ation have been historically predicated on Black bodies, and they are simply reemerging within

Let’s turn, now, to Native American Heritage Month and its intersection with Thanksgiving. Many teachers read aloud children’s books about the “First Thanksgiving.” Some classrooms take part in reenactments, with kids dressing up like Pilgrims and Indians or, perhaps, Wampanoags. Most of these books and activities default to stereo-types where Native people are shown in feathered headdresses and fringed clothing— items worn by Plains Indians rather than anything the Wampa-noag people would have worn.

In contrast, Peter Spier’s (1992) Noah’s Ark is not labeled “folklore,” but “Bible stories— O.T.” In fact, all three are creation stories, but the Christian story is treated differently. This difference in how Native and Christian creation stories are treated privileges Christianity, perpetuating institutional-ized racism that keeps in place the ideologies of a society that is predominantly Christian.

There are more than 500 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States today, each with distinct systems of governance, languages, locations, material cultures, religions, and, of course, stories! Some people are taken aback at the word “nation” as applied to Native nations because of the tendency to group Native peoples with other minority groups in the United States.

Historically, “Indian” was commonly used, but over time, more people began using “Native” instead. Most recently, “Indigenous” is emerg-ing as an alternative, as seen in the movements to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

In the context of the recent presidential election, teachers have verbal-ized their fear about speaking to the origins of the harm persistent in their classrooms: comments of xenophobia, racism, religious intolerance, and misogyny all regularly issued by Trump. If teachers are to take up the task of collective healing in classrooms, such work must begin by establishing trusting relationships “within which the wounded of divided communities can engage in critical and productive dialogue” (

One area of this work that is particularly resonant with our concerns here is the exploration of the intersections between shared, collective traumas and more intimate, personal traumas; witnessing of and testimony to life stories as pedagogy; and classrooms as sites of vulnerability and embodied experience

Listening to teachers and students that day and in the weeks leading up to and following the 2016 election provided striking and poignant reminders that students of all ages carry with them into school the myriad worries, ideas, and oft-repeated phrases of indoctrination spouted on television, websites, and in neighborhoods.

even as we also recognize that some readers did and, perhaps, still do support President Trump.

I am struggling with how to teach today and the next few days.

As students read, I ask them to take notes on each person’s narrative and to think how their classmates felt about their homes.

t’s big and it’s messy. It combines the reading and writing of poetry, fiction, essay, historical documents and statistics, lots of discussions, read-arounds, days of writing, responding, and revising of student work.

“sancocho of English and Spanish,” the poet Denice Frohman says,

I prayed that none of my students or colleagues would see the article. This wasn’t how I framed my students or my work. Yes, many of my students qualified for free and reduced lunch.

They see and experience violence on multiple levels—physical, verbal, emotional, intellectual, through media, through bullying. They are aware of violence against immigrant youth, against Black and Brown youth, and against transgender youth.

I knew that the commonly held view of Black children as nonwriters and nonreaders who were disengaged from learning was false.

I do not ascribe the word radicalto suggest that youth writing is somehow atypical, unique, or extraordinary. In fact, I use it to point to the opposite—

A student who was participating in the Writing Our Lives after-school program shared this with me, explaining the difference in her writing experiences in and for school versus outside of school and in her personal life. As she expressed being underwhelmed and under-challenged by the school’s writing curriculum at the time,

In school you kinda contradict yourself and you kinda like, you know, cover up some stuff, like you kind of hide yourself in school but when you’re outside of school, it’s like you open yourself up. You unfold everything.”