The movie, The Great Debaters, is a excellent example of this.

In a connection to "Cultivating Urban Literacies on Chicago’s South Side through a Pedagogy of Spatial Justice," I never considered creating a unit based on the industries in a student's community. Chicago, yes, but never about the explicit context and setting of our neighborhood. This would be a great way to engage students and help foster a sense of agency.

I wonder if the administration ever looked at the data to see if their policy was working or not? Did tardies go down after they began to implement this policy? If not, what else did they do?

This is an example of critical literacy and also literacy across disciplines. I wish more curriculum included this stance.

This unit would coincide really well with Social Emotional Learning lessons!

I like this idea of counter narrating. Too often I feel like I am giving my students my narrative instead of fostering their sense of agency. Journaling could used much more purposefully in this way.

I love that we have a nonfiction text as well as a multimedia component. I found this to be a very engaging teaching strategy that also aligns to the standards. Just ordered this book!

I wonder what the specifics of quality food is? Are we taking into account cultural foods? Does this unit touch on the emotional connections we have to food or cross examine mental health with obesity trends? I love the range and endless possibility this unit has.

Adding this to my list of resources!

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has an exhibit that challenges how Native Americans were represented in paintings by placing them along side historical documents and pointing out errors to rectify misrepresentations.

I never thought about how libraries, in their organizational patterns, could contribute to misrepresentations and promote a dominant culture in this way.

I wish there was a professional development called "What I Do You Really Want To Teach." I would spend days looking for text, visuals, and artifacts, then align them to standards and making them accessible to my students' diverse range of reading levels. I would teach about the indigenous people I met in Honduras - the Garifunas, the women of Peru, and the Cholitas of Bolivia. If anyone has any middle school resources, please share. Thanks!

I love this phrase and will continue to research and apply this. This also reminds me of a text to media connection, these boys who challenge the school to prison pipeline in the Netflix show Grand Army.

In reflecting on my own experiences, I don't think school was enough for me even as a middle class white person. By the time I was a junior in high school, all I wanted to do was get out and be in the "real" world. The extra curriculars, the sense of community and leadership, the exposure to cultures outside my bubble is what kept me going. My cohesive family unit also kept me on the straight and narrow, for the most part, along with white privilege. More than ever schools need to focus on creating an inclusive community with partnerships and programs, leaders and options.

My students just read articles about this case and speeches from Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1954. He stated education was, "a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment." That lesson turned into a teachable moment about pronouns. Then looking at a photograph of the Little Rock Nine, my students referred to the screaming white women in the background as Karens. If we really want to disrupt the school to prison pipeline and liberate our students, they need to know the history in order to confront our situation today.

I feel like I could talk for days about access to quality education as a teacher in a Chicago Public School, who nannies and tutors children from the private school of Parker, and who worked at a private international school in Honduras. I have seen education across a spectrum, so I agree, this is the civil rights question of our time and it frustrates me to no end.

Currently, we are focused on bringing in student culture by studying Black and Latinx authors, scientists, mathematicians, and influential figures that are “breaking barriers” in our society. However, we do not spend a lot of time focusing on communication, or language barriers rather, that we have traversed. Maybe now more than ever, teachers are presented with either a burden, as some would see it, or an opportunity, as we should take it, to address students’ written language as well as the oral tradition of story telling.

I was wondering if the CFT model would be relevant in middle school for 7th or 8th graders. This strategy reminded me that we used venn diagrams to compare and contrast the book to movie of The Outsiders, which is an all white male cast. Although my students related to these characters' socio-economic status, I was aware of the lack of representation in race. This reminded me that we could do re-writes with this model, even if it's not a fairy tale, it's still a classic. We could even add a research component to find out how minoritized groups were played a role in the culture of 1960s Oklahoma.

Today we read an article about how Black Women were not allowed to contribute to the Civil Rights Movement to the extent that men were. In addition, we also study speeches by Black women about the intersectionality of race and gender, which I think both need to be discussed and read about in the classroom.

https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/women-in-the-civil-rights-movement#line-2

I think Starr from The Hate U Give is a great example of changing the narrative here, while still allowing Black girls to connect with her pain and restoration.

I never realized this, but it makes sense. This type of metacognition is what I hope to teach my students, but I'm worried that I don't practice this analysis skill enough.

Are we including social media in the distinction of "mainstream?"

To further understand this sentiment, I recommend reading Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, or watching the movie Just Mercy.

Currently, mainstream media is approximately 77% white in Chicago, and that is is the audience they are playing to. I think "reinforce white supremacy" is a hyperbole, and "have a white bias" would be more accurate.

The instant access we have to information globally, allows students to not only be concerned with domestic natural disasters but hurricanes in other countries as well. Whereas the media can choose to exclude other narratives from places like Ghana and Honduras, young people through social media can be informed of global disasters and contribute to the relief efforts.

At what point should one students trauma not impede others in the classroom?

So often teachers feel the pressure to teach the standards, but in critical literacy theory, we should be focusing on bringing out our students identity through our teaching. Taking the time to acknowledge real world events and our reaction to them makes our learning experiences authentic.

Acknowledging bias - text to self connection - my students talked about the candidates for this years election in my virtual classroom yesterday. It was a difficult conversation being virtually in the homes of families through Google Meet, and having to acknowledge family beliefs instead of students forming their own within a physical classroom space outside of the home.

I have been thinking about this a lot, and while I agree with bringing students' experiences to the forefront, sometimes I wonder if school can be a moment to escape thinking about the violence they face?

This is an effort to decolonize the education of writing.

This word caught my attention because I think more white teachers need to realize their experiences and history is not their students experiences and history.

How do we get these writers to engage in the classes they need to pass? Is this just choice making? Often adults have to write things in life because we have to, not because we want to, and it may not be particularly engaging. How do we teach students about writing as an act of necessity, that their thoughts matter in everything they write?

Joshua Block also writes about how this is a messy process, but how important it is for students to have authentic experiences and learn how to move through struggle.

This aligns with critical literacy theories to question cultural dominance and to lead with students' background knowledge first.

This goes along with Joshua Block's Teaching for a Living Democracy, creating a student-centered classroom, and putting students voice at the center of focus.

I have also had this term used about my students and the demographic of the Chicago Public Schools students, along with the term at-risk. You have to know that it plays into the psychie of these student self-esteem as learners. What can we do to change this public appearance?