Kara cultivated her students’ urban literacies by encouraging them to draw from their local knowledge of self, culture, and place; to critically situate their local knowledge in broader sociopolitical contexts; and to craft counter narratives
Building from their own funds of knowledge!
Many young adolescents already possess these abilities; however, as with other urban literacies, this knowledge is not typically cultivated in schools.
This reminds me of the article "when school is not enough" and also Gholdy Muhammad's idea of teaching the 'whole child'
Tardy Sweep (see Figure 1). The students’ concern stemmed from the connota-tion to refuse and trash.
This is interesting. The high school I went to did something similar, and so does the high school I work at now. They call it 'hall sweeps'. If a student is tardy / caught in the hall after the bell rings, they have to go downstairs for a 'tardy pass' and detention. This is meant to hold students accountable and improve tardies. However, going through that process they continue to loose out on class instruction. I also don't know if I see a decrease in tardies as a result of hall sweeps.
I began to learn about how systems worked against working communities.
This is sad. A lot of the systems put in place are not allowing any type of growth or equity for everyone.
Because recognition is not enough, we must also determine tangible ways to transform schools and communities into humanizing, loving places and spaces that nurture and support, encourage and honor the lives and literacies of Black youth.
Most of the PDs I attend, and sometimes school / staff meetings, always focus on such great ideas, but no concrete plan with how to follow through. We cannot continue to be all talk, no action.
I don’t be feelin’ confident in school. I wonder if I’m stupid or if school be makin’ me think I’m stupid.
This is powerful. Khaleeq continued to say that he should feel the way he feels in the community, in school. Schools should cultivate and embrace the 'whole child'.
Urban public schools that serve a large demographic of low-income students of color are often on the chopping block when it comes to receiving adequate funding to renovate facilities, modernize technology, replace outdated books, hire teachers early, and ensure that all students have access to a full-time staff of nurses, therapists, and counselors. 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: Education as a great equalizer for what? And, when they are discouraged from relying on their family and community histories, intellectual traditions, and cultural practices to make sense of academic require-ments, we must ask: Education as a great equalizer where and how?
Wow.. this really spoke to me. Education as a great equalizer for whom? It can be hard for students to prioritize their learning, or assignments or quizzes when they have an extreme lack of resources available to them. For example, we see many schools with 2-3 police officers in the building every day, yet they may have a nurse that comes in once a week. Where are the priorities?
As a result, we focus on how they cultivated their literacies, nurtured their spirits, and charted their own trajectories within community spaces when school was not enough.
From this first paragraph, I am completely hooked on what the rest of this paper will be about. I think about this all the time. Our Black and Brown students are brilliant and have so many different ways of showing their learning and skills, many of those ways are outside of what is considered "traditional" in a school setting
, a critical literacies perspective gives voice to how sto-ries are presented and told about people and their history
Although a story may be told, it is also important to dissect how they are being told and by who.
Use books by Native writers all year round.
Creating a diverse learning environment / material is not only sometimes, during specific times, or holidays. Creating a diverse classroom is something that should be actively worked at every day.
Choose books by Native writers.
Being critical of the authors of our chosen texts is important in order to assure that our students are reading culturally accurate stories.
One group of creation stories is categorized and treated as fiction while the other group of creation stories is accepted as truth.
This is why critical literacy is important. We can and should question why only certain narratives are considered 'dominant'
We propose the inclusion of counter fairy tales as an instructional tool to capture these funds of knowledge to leverage and increase their oppor-tunities to receive relevant literacy instruction.
Before this I had never heard of CFT. I think this is a great and valuable tool to use in the classroom and I can see myself using this in the future.
Like Marley and countless other Black girls who are “missing” from literature or are not the main characters, young adolescents can see who is valued in the class-room and how that value is assessed based on race and gender classification.
Incorporating texts that are by BIPOC, about BIPOC is a way of conveying the message to students that their lives, experiences and ideas matter and are important.
Exposure to these narratives is at the heart of educational equity.
Yes, yes, yes. I completely agree with this. Curriculums, 'cannonical literature', etc. need to be updated if we truly want to have equity in the classroom.
However, this is impossible if the texts used to ed-ucate Black women and girls are void of their lived experiences, beliefs, and cultural norms.
This is why it is so important to be extremely intentional and critical about the texts we choose to include in our classroom learning. There is so much value in students being able to directly connect and relate to a text.
For educators who struggle with finding pragmatic ways of working toward racial justice in their classrooms, this article offers hope, tools, and possibilities that are the beginning steps toward racial justice.
A lot of the times these ideas are thrown out but there is not a direct clear way to incorporate into our practice. I appreciate the concrete, detailed lesson plans that demonstrated how we can work toward racial justice in the classroom. I will definitely be using these with my students.
In other words, if we only prepare Black youth to be critical of the ways that mainstream media outlets uphold white supremacy and negatively characterize them, we miss an opportunity to il-lustrate the role that youth-produced media can play in working toward social change.
Now more than ever, social media is such a big part of the daily lives of the youth, which is why incorporating critical consumption in the classroom can be so important. I also agree that bringing up the idea of creating youth-produced media is equally if not, more, important.
e.g., critical media pedagogy, urban debate, critical language pedagogy, hip-hop based pedagogy, critical race pedagogy
I would be so interested to learn more about these, especially hip-hop based pedagogy
youth-produced media have always contributed to social change and making young people aware of injustice
I think we have started to see this a lot within the last couple of years, especially with social medias like twitter, youtube, instagram, etc.
shared vulnerability is crucial in building humane and anti-oppressive classrooms
Reciprocating that vulnerability is extremely important, as well as always providing that invitation for students to share. I see so many connections in this paragraph to the Vulnerable Heart of Literacy
In this way, it was a shared traumatic event that, we might hope, prompted widespread empathy and despair. However, each affected child carried his or her highly personal experience into whatever post-hurricane classroom he or she entered. Personal traumas, in turn, are felt individually, but students and teachers carry those losses and disruptions into classrooms in ways that must then be viewed as a collective imperative, not only for the particular classroom community but also for the ways individual challenges are often connected to political systems and shared oppressions such as local, state, and governments’ responses.
Although this is very different, I think that we can connect this to how it is returning to the classroom in person after being remote. A lot of students and teachers have experienced so much trauma since the pandemic began
many colleagues in schools were struggling to help students of all ages unpack the questions and uncertainties they had learned in the hours since the election was called for Trump.
I was in undergrad during this time and I remember professors sending emails addressing this and some even cancelled class
we call for more expansive conversations among English educators across perspectives concerned with creating safe, relational, anti-oppressive classrooms
This should be a priority when it comes to creating professional development for teachers
Through Writing Our Lives, we aim to offer opportunities for students to write about their experiences, to tell their stories, and to participate in the global conversation.
This reminds me of the idea of consistently providing students with invitations to voice their trauma and experiences, as seen in *The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy
Over the years, I have been asked to articulate the “impact” of Writing Our Lives.
Writing for Our Lives reminds me of Louder than a Bomb because it allows students to see the power in writing and using your own voice
Writing Our Lives began as a part of my involvement with parent and community groups concerned with the educational experiences of African American children in an urban school community.
Parent and community involvement can make such a huge difference in the school culture
achers as a disengaged learner and a “struggling” writer, created and maintained three websites and blogs each day.
I think this is a prime example of how beneficial it can be to allow students to present their writing and skills through different mediums
And then there was the graduate who returned and chided me for not preparing her with any “traditional” literature.
I can relate to this. My high school experience was completely filled with literature by BIPOC but not necessarily "traditional" literature.
My error—and the error of the department that hired me—was to see these students as “disadvantaged” instead of seeing their brilliance.
This!! A lot of the times it can be so easy to focus on the flaws and not all the assets. Focusing on the 'brilliance' of the student, I think is similar to focusing on the 'whole child'
Their test scores guided our work.
I wonder what test scores she is referring to, whether it is standardized or just coming from the school. If it is standardized, I wonder how accurate the scores aligned to the students' skills.
But the worst part came later when my photo appeared in the local paper stating that I taught “disadvantaged” students.
Reading this, I was super surprised. To start off, I can't believe a title such as the "US West Outstanding Teacher of the Western United States" was given solely off a resume and answered questions, and not even an observation. I wonder if this award still exists? I also wonder what exactly they meant by disadvantaged, and if this was communicated to the teacher before the local paper published it.