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

Many young adolescents already possess these abilities; however, as with other urban literacies, this knowledge is not typically cultivated in schools.

Tardy Sweep (see Figure 1). The students’ concern stemmed from the connota-tion to refuse and trash.

I began to learn about how systems worked against working communities.

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.

I don’t be feelin’ confident in school. I wonder if I’m stupid or if school be makin’ me think I’m stupid.

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on the chopping block when it comes to receiving adequate funding to renovate facilities, modernize technology, replace outdated books, hire teachers early, and ensure that all students have access to a full-time staff of nurses, therapists, and counselors.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?

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.

, a critical literacies perspective gives voice to how sto-ries are presented and told about people and their history

Use books by Native writers all year round.

Choose books by Native writers.

One group of creation stories is categorized and treated as fiction while the other group of creation stories is accepted as truth.

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.

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.

Exposure to these narratives is at the heart of educational equity.

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.

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.

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.

e.g., critical media pedagogy, urban debate, critical language pedagogy, hip-hop based pedagogy, critical race pedagogy

youth-produced media have always contributed to social change and making young people aware of injustice

shared vulnerability is crucial in building humane and anti-oppressive classrooms

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.

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.

we call for more expansive conversations among English educators across perspectives concerned with creating safe, relational, anti-oppressive classrooms

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.

Over the years, I have been asked to articulate the “impact” of Writing Our Lives.

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.

achers as a disengaged learner and a “struggling” writer, created and maintained three websites and blogs each day.

And then there was the graduate who returned and chided me for not preparing her with any “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.

Their test scores guided our work.

But the worst part came later when my photo appeared in the local paper stating that I taught “disadvantaged” students.