36 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2020
  2. Mar 2020
    1. rigorous instruction at learning level that makes connections between students’ cultural frames of reference

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

    2. rigor

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

    3. students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order

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

    4. reflective thought, analysis and problem solving

      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.

    5. The perspective of “I don’t see color” is a great way to approach African American male students in an unbiased fashion initially

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

    6. Educators serve students best when they can see the world through their students’ eyes or worldview (Hardy, 2005)

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

    1. How well do we know students? How well do any of us know all of our students?

      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?

    2. "An educator's ability to recognize students' cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and and content in order to promote effective informational processing. All the while, the educator understands the importance of being in relationship and having a socio-emotional connection to the student in order to create a safe space for learning" (15)

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

    3. how can I become more aware of my mindset in both my general education and advanced education classrooms? And what kind of work needs to be done so that the gap of skill level between general and advanced transcend common institutional boundaries?

      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.

  3. Jan 2020
    1. Te a c h i n g for social justice, however, aims to create spaces of inquiry that embody the progress we desire in society.

      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.

    2. Once a group was ready to film, the entire class would convene to help them record and produce their video

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

    3. Furthermore, the students had the power to conclude a unit once they felt that they had sufficiently addressed their inquiries

      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.

    4. investigate systemic injustice, asking, “Can society make mistakes?”

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

    5. “The White Circle.”

      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..

  4. Dec 2019
    1. Still, like my mentor, my principal assumed that any investigation of race required people of color in order to be legitimate

      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.

    2. leave white supremacy undisturbed.

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

    3. But the expressions can be subtle too. My mentor, intending to be racially conscious, reacted to race by compulsively turning to his students of color. His whiteness, perhaps, was made invisible to him in this way. Instead of grappling with his own race, my mentor, through his teaching in an English classroom, served to affirm that race is always and only about people of color

      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/

    4. whiteness as my problem

      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.

    5. We discussed conditions of white supremacy in the book and in our daily lives as well.

      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.

    6. ace always seemed to be about students of color, not about the white supremacist structuring of school.

      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.

    7. whites learn to avoid thinking about whiteness, thereby making it extremely difficult for us to consider white supremacy without first confronting the conditional nature of this racial identity.

      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.

    8. 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.

    9. White people affirm a conception of people of color, identify as antiracist, and no longer have to work to understand white identity in relationship with a white supremacist reality.

      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.

    1. racebending

      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.

    2. By offering alternative represen-tations of both the hero and the villain, Reynolds’s text actively works to dismantle racial hierarchies

      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?!

    3. Miles is aware that his race and eco-nomic status mark him as an outsider within Brook-lyn Visions Academy, noting that he is from the “part of Brooklyn that Brooklyn Visions Academy didn’t have much vision for at all” (259). Like its real- life counterparts in many urban areas, Brooklyn Visions Academy relies on a dress code that makes White, upper- middle- class culture, attitude, and beliefs aspi-rational (Hatt- Echeverria and Jo).

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

    4. Racebending is also important because (re)casting characters using alternative race and ethnicities cre-ates possibilities for popular comics and other “clas-sics” to be told from underrepresented perspectives

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

    5. The multiple and interconnected factors of underfunded schools, police presence, centering of White norms, and harsh punishment result in Black and Latinx stu-dents being forced out of schools and into prison sys-tems, whether directly or indirectly

      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?

    6. To be young. To be old. To have like, poetry, poetry should be, Shakespeare’s sonnets and it should be by Queen Latifah. Teach comparative literature where you take Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” and Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” and you show young people that nothing is new. This is all a continuum. We are working with tradition. Then they can start to see their place in the things that they’re reading.

      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.

  5. Nov 2019
  6. Oct 2019
  7. May 2019