Kara built on her students’ knowledge of larger sociopolitical contexts in order to counter prevailing notions about place, food, and obesity—

“I think this helps them with their critical consciousness. I don’t think they’ll walk away saying ‘I won’t eat McDonald’s anymore,’ but I want them to be able to challenge social structures, I want them to understand systemic racism, and I want them to be able to see themselves as change agents.”

Throughout this unit, Kara asked her students to make use of their knowledge of their own neighborhoods, positioning them as experts about the places they inhabit.

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.

“If you treat students more professionally, then they are likely to act more professionally.”

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).

When teachers use Thanksgiving as the vehicle for their instruction about Native peoples, they are inadvertently locat-ing Native lives in the past.

#OwnVoices stories— a hashtag created by Corinne Duyvis to describe a book that is written by someone who is of the particular culture being depicted. The idea is that the quality of a story is improved when the person creating that story is an insider who knows what to share and how to share it with outsiders.

When the plot diagram was completed, I asked the students to think of Goldilocks as a young Black girl. “How would the story change? And in what ways would the character’s traits, the setting, or the author’s point of view become different if the Goldilocks was an 11- year- old Black girl from your neighborhood?”

literacy instruction should be re-sponsive to students’ identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender expression, age, appearance, ability, spiri-tual belief, sexual orientation, socioeconomic sta-tus, and community environment) and languages/dialects as they affect students’ opportunities to learn

Finally, it is important for educators to implement these same tools with White students who benefit from white supremacy and the damaging narratives that mainstream media produce about Black youth and other youth of color

invite

2) provides youth with opportunities to in-vestigate, dismantle, and rewrite the damaging narratives that mainstream media and other social institutions use to construct and oppress Black youth. A pedagogy of healing is increas-ingly necessary and important in a time when Black youth are feeling wounded, weary, and dispirited by the ubiquitous as-sault against Black bodies and a burgeoning media culture that works to stigmatize, criminalize, demonize, and objectify them.

case of 12-year-old shooting victim Tamir Rice, who was killed by police in Cleveland, Ohio. Unfortunately, Rice was not viewed as “a boy playing with a toy in the park, but a Black male with a gun” (O’Malley, 2014). Many me-dia outlets characterized Rice as “big for his age,” as if this was a sufficient reason for the cause of his death.

he newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

attending to tensions that may exist in how English teachers and teacher educators address issues of trauma and healing in our classrooms.

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.

acknowledging our personal dismay with the outcome of the election, even as we also recognize that some readers did and, perhaps, still do support President Trump.

Teachers must cultivate spaces for students to write.

“I am a [blank] writer.” This exercise presumes their writing competence and assumes that all youth are writers.

I wanted to create spaces where youth writers define, understand, challenge, and use writing in and out of school and where they are critical ethnographers of their own writing lives.

Parents and community members understood writing to be the timed writing tasks for standardized exams or the demonstration of the conventions of writing on school assignments,

I finish this chapter of class by asking students to write a piece of historical fiction.

I bring in students’ lives in two ways. First, the unit itself is about their lives and the unfolding narrative of how racial inequality, displacement, economic disparity, as well as resistance and resilience are currently playing out in their neighborhood. And second, I ask them to write a narrative about a time their homes were lost, stolen, or restored.

When I started paying attention to the larger themes that brought the world into our classroom, my students (mostly) stopped rebelling. Dirk—and others—taught me that teaching language arts means plumbing my students’ lives to bring their stories and voices into the classroom as we examine racial injustice, class exploitation, gender expectations, sexual identity, gentrification, solidarity, and more.

My students’ voices and lives didn’t need “housekeeping”; they didn’t need to be told to “hush.” They needed a teacher who could unleash their beauty on the page and their capacity to discuss and argue in the classroom. When I stopped attending to test scores and started listening to the music of my students’ voices and seeing them as “more than a score,” I increased my capacity to engage them. I knew what didn’t work, but I still didn’t know what did work.