Classroom Discussions as Distortions: Examining Discriminatory Teacher Practices

Ms. Mendez, English Department chair in a large urban high school, has noticed a persistent pattern in the practices of her colleagues. These practices tend to be racially insensitive and emphasize a noncritical view that does not attend to students’ experiences and positions students from a deficit perspective. Realizing that such practices serve as social reproductions of racist and classist orientations that reproduce the existing social order, Ms. Mendez decided school leadership should be informed. However, she worries that the school’s leadership will not work to enact change and instead will take her concerns lightly

How Students Use Their Cultural and Linguistic Knowledge to Transform Literacy Goals

Black and Latinx youth frequently are asked to complete school tasks and activities without much focus on the knowledge and experiences they draw from to make sense of what they are being asked to do. Using culturally sustaining pedagogy as a framework, this work provides a clear example of the interactions, engagement, and learning that unfolded in a 9th grade English Language Arts classroom as broader goals of one lesson emerged through students sharing their lived experiences and concomitant understandings of the social world. This work provides a clear case for how to support the fullness of youths' identities as dynamic beings and provides evidence for how this does not detract from the goals of school activities, In fact, it enriches them and makes them meaningful