These steps are really helpful in beginning to think about how to implement YPAR in the classroom. I remember reading about this method in the Hansfield book, but this article clarifies it for me.

This is a good example of a teacher changing what they are teaching based on meaningful conversations with students. Students often question school policies, but usually don't get an answer. This demonstrates how powerful a lesson can be when student voices are listened to.

One thing that I really liked about the unit that this teacher created was how students were able to directly see how their actions resulted in the name being changed. This is a good example of civics in action in the school environment. These students can take this lesson and use it in the future when there is a policy or name they disagree with.

I really like how this lesson connects local and global issues. It makes me think of how in Pose, Wobble, Flow, the authors challenge teachers to reflect on if their lessons allow students to engage critically with the world as they experience it. This unit is a good example of that.

This was demonstrated so well in the Christensen article. In the community that she taught in, she used examples of gentrification to teach critical literacy and show students how they can change the story that is told about their community. If more schools recognized that school is not enough, students would learn more and have more opportunities to explore areas that they might be interested in.

Some of the resources listed in the other articles for this week (the Reese and Young articles) could be a good place to start to begin create a counter-narrative in classrooms through books that students read.

This is a good reminder of how teachers need keep the way they define literacy and learning in mind when they plan lessons and curriculum. Most teachers would argue that literacy goes beyond decoding and simply understanding what a text says; learning is a socially constructed, active process. Curriculums don't always match this belief and this is one reason why many students are not able to demonstrate the full range of their literacy skills.

This connects well with the Haddix article because it shows how school curriculums often limit the talents that students can demonstrate. The combination of students being taught a limited view of what writing is with texts that don't include them, really shows me how classroom literacy practices are falling short.

This makes me think of Pose, Wobble, Flow and how the authors emphasized how teachers really need to be reflective of what texts they give attention to. Resources like this can help teachers create collections of books that affirm the identities of their black female students and help build classroom conversations around books with black, female protagonists.

I have bookmarked this site (and the books suggested in the article) to use as a first step in using books by Native writers all year round. I really appreciate having reviewed book lists to when adding books to my classroom library.

These suggestions are so helpful when curating texts to use in the classroom. It can be difficult to select texts that are valuable and representative from so many choices, and I will use this as a way to evaluate native stories used in the classroom. In situations where a classroom might have problematic texts, these ideas can be taught to students so they can see why that text is harmful.

These questions are so important because they provide a useful strategy in deciding if a narrative is accurate or harmful. I wrote these down to also use with my students in their readings about immigrant experiences.

I completely agree with this. I think in order to continue to have classrooms that address trauma, healing and politics, teachers need opportunities for ongoing professional development to prepare them. Students would have a much more positive school experience if they had a curriculum that encouraged healing.

This is so important. From my experience, SEL skills are often taught as an isolated concept. I think it would be so much more powerful if SEL skills were purposefully ingrained into the existing curriculum, across all content areas.

I can definitely see this as a way to add onto a curriculum and make it more personal for students. Students analyze language when reading novels and teachers can supplement curriculums with news clips and articles to show what language reveals in everyday life. I think if parts of these lessons appeared regularly in classroom lessons, students would continually be critical of media and engage regularly in responding to it.

This is so important. I think back to Haddix article and how she described school writing vs. out of school writing. Writing as a form of social activism can change what it means to be a writer for students while helping them challenge media narratives.

I kept thinking about Pose, Wobble, Flow as I was reading this piece too! This research and writing suggestion would really contribute to a participatory culture in the classroom where students are actively responding to what they read and see. I think an authentic example like this would really demonstrate media bias and how passively consuming media is not be an option.

When I reflect on when and why I write, it is usually to process emotions. In school, students don’t get many opportunities to write about personal topics, which could be another reason for the disconnect between writing for school and writing out of school. For students who have experienced violence and trauma, I can see how being able to write about, share their stories and raise awareness can help them heal.

Identifying as a writer is so important. I think expectations play a role in success so if a student begins to see themself as a writer, they are more likely to write more often, take risks with their writing and start to build connections with what they are learning in school. Since writing is such a complex process, test scores might not immediately go up, but will over time using her approach.

This example demonstrates how powerful a curriculum centered around the specific students it will be used for can be. I think the reason that there is such a low interest in writing in school is because schools show students that writing only consists of formulaic paragraphs and essays. She is giving students the opportunity to show who they are and what they believe in through writing, something that schools should be doing.

This really shows me the mismatch between what is taught in school and what skills are needed in everyday life. That fact that some of these students are blogging in their free-time (a realistic example of out-of-school writing) but struggling to write an essay in school, speaks to the poor writing curriculum schools usually have. I think one of the problems is that writing is taught as a separate subject when it goes along with any topic a student might learn about.

By including so many different types of texts in her classroom that focus on one theme that directly impacts her students, Christensen’s students are reading critically, engaging in different types of writing, and authentically sharing their individual stories. This shows me that teachers have to find a way to make their curriculum meaningful to their students and make student voice the priority. Christensen’s students learned the reading and writing skills that are found in language arts classrooms, but were able to go a step further in critically thinking about power dynamics, applying that to their own community and retaining the knowledge that they learned.

What really stands out to me in this example is how her students were so willing to be vulnerable with their writing. This shows me how powerful a classroom environment can be when students’ voices are genuinely valued.

Even though she describes the structure of her units as “big and messy,” I think the structure helps students organize and remember what they learned more than anything else I know of. Common Core curriculums require that students read more complex informational texts, and teachers have found that students struggle to read them. Christensen’s students are enthusiastically reading and understanding those texts because she structured her unit to give them the background knowledge they need, and her students are interested in the topic because it directly affects them.

I think it’s so important that Christensen centered her units around purposefully chosen themes that her students could directly relate to, rather than just including texts from the culture of her students. Students are often told to make connections between texts, but don’t always have a curriculum that allows them to do that in a meaningful way. Christensen’s approach makes learning more meaningful because all of her texts build off each other and encourage her students to apply the themes to their everyday lives.