I see firsthand how important it is to engagestudents in creating news and making historicalpolicy change with the accessible critical thinkingand rhetorical literacies in our communities.
I think it's important to create space like this within a school and not just outsource it to community spaces. Students should know their voice matters in every space they exist in especially when they send so much at school. Youth is not excuse to stop listening.
Literacy, well at least critical lit-eracy, is fundamentally tied to the realization of ourfull humanit
Part of developing literacy in young people needs to be rooted in dismantling white supremacy. All students deserve have their humanity see and honored. Otherwise the oppression Freire wrote about will continue.
If you treat students more professionally,then they are likely to act more professionally.
I think this is so important at the high school level. Students need to understand the why behind rules like being on time. If the only thing they hear is being on time is important you don't get a tardy pass, what are we really teaching?
These responses allowed students to position themselvesas agentive actors in the complex network of local andglobal dynamics contributing to food quality, obesity,and equity in their neighborhoods.
An extension idea is to interview current grocers who are provided quality food.
I won’t eat McDonald’s anymore,’ but I want them tobe able to challenge social structures, I want them tounderstand systemic racism, and I want them to be ableto see themselves as change agents.
Also avoids fat shaming. We can only control how we look so much. The issue is not are you skinny or fat, but what does access look like and what can you do about it?
Thisassignment positioned students as experts with insiderknowledge about their local environment
Also positions middle school students as smart and capable of handing multiple truths. Raising the bar and helping students achieve.
Use books by Native writers all year round.
In the same way we would not want to limit Black literature to only February, we should be inclusive of Native stories all year round.
Each year the market is flooded with prob-lematic books that publishers market to classroomteachers
One positive recent change is Teachers Pay Teachers is now enforcing more strict guidelines about Thanksgiving activities to avoid further perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
Therefore, focusing on the local context empowerstribal nationhood within the states of origin ratherthan focusing on politically constructed holidayslike Thanksgiving
It's important to support the counternarrative that all tribes are a monolith and the same. This was something I myself did not understand for a long time simply because I wasn't exposed to this idea. Diversity for diversity's sake is not helpful. Intentional diversity that is relevant to students should be the goal.
Secondly, in the design of learning spaces and opportunities, educators mustrecognize the power and potential of student achievement in their communities
This is what we should mean when we are told to build relationships with students and get to them as whole people. Educators should be trying to learn with students about the students are capable of beyond the classroom
when they experience school as a place where they are regularly bombarded withstandardized tests, we have to wonder:
It can feel like a never ending cycle. Students face various factors that make learning difficult. They perform poorly on a test. Schools demand more testing in a doomed effort to "support" learning, and students care even less about these tests. Schools opt for testing instead of supports like SEL activities and staff that could help students cope with external factors that make learning difficult.
For 20 minutes, my students were deeplyengaged in changing Goldilocks into someonethey could culturally relate to, as well as in fulfill-ing the academic objectives of the lesson, beforesharing their CFTs with the class.
I think another way of engaging students in the process would be having them generate some visuals either before or after writing the text. Then they can also practice supporting details with evidence and students can use more of their skill sets.
Ap-proaches including restorative English education“employ literature and writing to seek justice andrestore (and, in some cases, create) peace that reachesbeyond the classroom walls” (Winn, “Toward”126). Likewise, Black girls have used methods in-cluding writing institutes focused on telling “her-story,” sister circles, and theater to challenge Whitefemininity supremacy in texts (Muhammad)
It's important to recenter Black girls in literary texts and also larger movements. Black women were leaders of the #MeToo movement and were at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Making connections between fiction and real life can further empower young Black girls.
. These stories oftendepict a white male or female protagonist or reflectcultural traditions representative of the dominantgroup.
Even stories and movies that feature characters of color do not feature them as entirely human. Disney is especially guilty of this. Read more:
Black Twitter,
This podcast episode discusses how the hosts came to find and use Black Twitter to both meet people, and some of the pitfalls reporters fell into by only using Twitter as sources. It also discusses some of the anxiety around Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter.
These same adjectives and verbal markersare not typically coupled with White people who engage in riots followingsporting events and festivities
This was extremely telling when the BLM and the George Floyd protests and the capitol riots to overturn the 2020 elections happened in within 6 months of each other. It wasn't just limited to Fox News.
George Zimmermanand Trayvon Martin in 2012; Darren Wilson and Mike Brown in 2014; andBrian Encinia and Sandra Bland in 2015.
Similar to how police hold the power in this interactions and their word is defaulted to the truth, teacher's words against a student's holds more weight. Statistically, more teachers are white, and the cycle persists in the classroom.
If teachers are to take up the taskof collective healing in classrooms, such work must begin by establishingtrusting relationships “within which the wounded of divided communitiescan engage in critical and productive dialogue” (
Building trusting relationships also mean that students can trust you to push back and say this is what I need or I can't talk about this right now. Similar to Dutro describes in the book *The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy * students need the opportunity to engage in this practice, but teachers need to mindful if students aren't ready or willing. Otherwise it might not feel like productive dialogue.
recognition that teachersare generally not prepared to address the intersections of healing, politics,and emotion in today’s classrooms
This has only been amplified since covid. Teachers across the board were under prepared to reengage and reenter the class after the year of remote learning and the many losses students faced.
Teachers must be writers.
Teachers have also have to show students the process of writing. Students need to see older people and "professionals" struggle with writing. Sometimes students disengage because they think they can't write because it's difficult. Normalizing the struggle can reengage some
ome writing practices that areexpected, valued, and legitimized in schoolcontexts, while there are others that remaininvisible and are deemed less important.
This is not limited to practices of writing, but also styles, vocabulary that not validated by schools.
During this time, every student readstheir piece. As students read, we laugh, cry, and createcommunity, but we also teach and learn from each other.If I had to choose one strategy as the centerpiece of myteaching, it would be the read-around. It provides boththe writing text for my classroom and the social textwhere our lives intersect and we deepen our connectionsand understandings across lines of race, class, gender,nationality, and sexual orientation.
This is such an important skill that students can carry throughout their lives. This is as important as reading "on grade level" or spelling correctly
I want my students to be able to “talk back”when they encounter anything that glorifies one race, oneculture, one social class, one gender, one language overanother: texts, museums, commercials, classes, rules thathide or disguise domination
Especially important to help students be able to do this with a variety of texts in this digital word
When I stopped attending to test scores and startedlistening to the music of my students’ voices and seeingthem as “more than a score,” I increased my capacity toengage them. I knew what didn’t work, but I still didn’tknow what did work
My department is currently trying to advocate for this, but our admin is demanding we focus on the data that shows low scores. Even we say kids also can score low because of a variety of reasons...