). Mr. Cham-berlain’s response reflects dangerous and unexam-ined views White teachers hold about Black youth that lead to higher rates of disciplinary action taken against Black students (Morris).
I can see someone leveling the charge that this is teacher-bashing, but it’s no. These teachers should be critiqued. We wouldn’t like a doctor who refused to wash their hands.
Miles attends Brooklyn Visions Academy, which he describes as a “bougie boarding school” with “a lot of rich kids acting like rich kids” (Reynolds 92). He relies on a scholarship for tuition
This setting may appeal to suburban schools with growing diversity. While often under-represented due to the current segregation of communities of color from historic enclaves of whiteness, students of color in suburban schools could use a life-line of representation. This setting offers what a text like A Separate Peace did, offer something relatable. But we need mirrors AND windows.
The canon submerges knowledge in an unnamed White-ness that masquerades under labels such as “univer-sal” and “timeless.”
I have moved away from the idea “universal themes.” Curricula are littered with these problematic notions guiding the essential questions of units.
o Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckle-berry Finn, are centered on White characters’ expe-riences learning about racism and/or take place in the past: Invisible Man and Black Boy are examples. While texts associated with the canon certainly have a place in English classrooms, we worry that neglect-ing contemporary texts that address racism results in students associating racism with the past
This is such an important realization for teachers to make. Teachers sometimes don’t consider the unintentional problems of these texts.
orlds and Cody Miller argue that to disrupt racial hierarchies we must purposefully disrupt the canon
Yes. All of this!
The stan-dards era has nearly driven context out of the curriculum.
A few weeks ago a colleague said "context matters." Yes! That's so much of what education in the 21st c. USA is missing.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
In this text, so much of the "place" is a house. There is something hyper local and hyper important about tying the events and stories of homes to both local places, but also global and historic cultural events.
“glocal”
Ooh, I like the sound of this.
a meaningful, the-oretical lens
For our students, place is not only meaningful as a theoretical lens, it's also accessible, because we can not but exist and know places.
challenge educators
In our current educational climate that is standardized, and seeks decontextualization, the challenge is real.
“global understand-ings” may be place-dependent or, at the least, should not be devoidof place.
It's far easier to make a local place look fantastic than to critically examine it. It's easier to be critical of places from afar, where the relationships are opaque and less visible on a day-to-day basis.
local, critical, and place- based literacies examine the cul-tural and linguistic practices of a place.
Yes. This is what we are sharing during #WriteOut. I'm seeing distant places through the results of my peers' local inquiry. I'm also dressing a window into my own place, and in doing that, I'm enacting those cultural practices of text construction in our connected community of practice.
critically under-stand our local world.
I think it's really hard for people to be critical of their local world, the same as it's hard to be critical of family. There is a loyalty that might feel betrayed in being critical. But, we must be critical.
The need for critical global literacies
I think part of what drives my interest in place-based literacies is that I know they foster fulfillment of a need for critical global literacy. Now, unlike ever before, we as an animal need to reconnect to our places, and be critical of them and of what we see in the world.
English teacher and members of the church. Valerie also observed students on the garden’s Design Team, which was a racially diverse, 12-member, student-led group responsible for creating, maintain-ing, and nurturing the garden throughout the year.
There is something powerful about gardens.
and Valerie interviewed a total of 27 students and teachers for 30 to 90 minutes each on gentrification, place
I love the framimg of place here.
we push for more critical ways for teachers and researchers to level the educational playing field for Black adolescents by lovingly attending to their nonschool literacy engagements.
It’s so hard pushing the counter narratives that value students’ out of school literacies. Test scores are the only literacy truth dominating the discussion of literacy in schools. It’s like Plato’s cave.
whom?
I’ve become increasingly convinced that our education system has yet to act as if #BlackLivesMatter.