Essential Reading List to Get To....

teachers need to explore what this really means. What does it mean to make connections to and between students' cultural frames of reference?

engagement in authentic behaviors of the discipline (habits of thinking) not just the basics....dis lit is CRT....I'm seeing it.

often forgotten--perhaps the basis of our trajectory section?

Hammond might refer to this as independent learners--but I also think we have to be careful of considering what we are working for independence on--we need to make sure that the behaviors we're targeting are those worthy of mastering.

Not sure I agree with this at all. But I do wonder how to balance initial interactions and owning of our own racial existences.

A nice, succinct piece of the CRT puzzle....

And also how well do we know ourselves? As teachers? As cultural beings? How closely and deeply have we examined ourselves to know what we bring into our classrooms?

Such a clear definition--her elevator pitch...should be ours...

These are good, core questions that will "rock" the worlds of some teachers. The idea that these classes should be much more similar than they are different will be new. I'm curious what the differences should look like--or if there should be none at all.

Thank you for so eloquently and simply stating this. I think that your distillation of what teaching for social justice means to you might push others to identify the values that are important to them in relation to to SJE. And what a great job you have done at honoring those values in your teaching.

I love the community and the collaboration here. It is a brilliant way to leverage the collective while also encouraging the individual.

I am curious as to how this was navigated as a group. What if some students were ready to call it quits whereas others were wanting to go further.

I love this clear and simple means of introducing societal/system injustice--a concept our students are not often exposed to.

This story always led to very interesting discussions about the thin line between good and evil--or what makes good people do bad things...or even if people can be fully good or fully evil..

A common misbelief, I think. How do might we, as white educators, best educate our fellow white educators/administrator about this? Zaretta Hammond talks about the 3rd space when it comes to coaching (which I suppose this is), and asks us to consider what new information, research, experiences, etc. we might put in the 3rd space that will help those with whom we work to revise their understandings.

A great means of interrogating new texts for consideration--in what ways does this novel address white supremacy?

This is what white teachers need to acknowledge--even liberals who don't think they're doing harm. We have been so trained to see harm as overt and explicit. When, really, I cringe at the harm I have done simply through the texts I selected and the experiences I centered. A great wealth of resources for teachers starting to do this work is found here: https://www2.ncte.org/blog/2017/08/there-is-no-apolitical-classroom-resources-for-teaching-in-these-times/

While I fully see my own whiteness as my problem--how do we help white students see this. I think this is where my instruction broke down in a unit focused on The Hate U Give. Some of my white students walked away angry. I don't think I helped them navigate their whiteness in a way that helped them grow.

And what are books, if not, proxies for exploring our own worlds. This seems to be an ideal way to open students' eyes to a concept they may not have fully considered of named before.

This may just be a great jumping off place for our equity and justice team. It would be a nice inventory--How are we talking about race? Whose race are we talking about? How well do we understand our own whiteness? How well do we understand our student's races? We talk often about racial/cultural literacy--but that really means finding ways to study the cultures of our students--not our own cultures, races and practices and how those might influence our students' learning.

which, in turn, leads to the perpetuation of white supremacy whose existence is secured by the fact that it goes and has gone unnamed even as it shapes Western Civilization.

I'm curious about what this work looks like--as a classroom teacher--I have encountered what I would call the backfiring of teaching about whiteness through the lens of privilege. As I head back to the drawing board, this is an area I need to understand more.

This is a nice summary of the check-out that looking at race solely through a white privilege lens might create--and as noted in a story the author shared in the video--for high school students, specifically, I'm not sure the reaction is that clean--often the result is frustration and anger that often becomes misguided.

I love this to add to my list of authorial choices. We talk about character arcs and irony and diction and tone; we talk about theme development and figurative language and description; let's add racebending to that list and widen our scope of text analysis; this, I believe, will help teachers, specifically white teachers, see the need for a more inclusive canon.

I love this as a guideline for text selection. As we think about what texts we put in front of our students, can we accept that a majority of the texts that our students have seen in their educational careers are those that have centered whiteness. And given that, can we consider, when adopting and looking for new texts, how these new texts might work to offer that "alternative representations of both hero and villain." How refreshing would it be to see that as a question on a textbook adoption form?!

So many places to stop here in the reading and discuss with students ways in which they might experience these same things.

If you haven't started Watchmen yet, you're in for a treat (and a lesson in exactly this).

The question, for me, that arises here is what does this instruction look like in majority white institutions? As we continue to do this work, we are consistently running into the fact that the narrative we are telling about race in schools and students of color is counter to what our white students have been taught to believe. We are getting anger and resistance--so I wonder if it would be helpful to have students investigate some of these factors within in education in general--but even more specifically in their own communities and schools?

I love this idea of comparative literature--and here it works--Queen Latifah and Maya Angelou--but I think we also have to be careful when making comparisons to ensure that whiteness is not still be centered. In my classroom, my first attempt at "revolutionizing" the canon involved looking at modern versions of revolution (Emma Gonzalez, Christine Blasey Ford, and more) and comparing them to Patrick Henry's Speech in the Virginia Convention. I quickly realized that by centering the conversation around Henry's rhetoric--and showing that "nothing is new," I was also showing that our focus on whiteness as the standard had not changed either.

English Journal example of disrupting Gatsby.