Short description:

This text offers pre-service and in-service teachers pragmatic strategies for teaching middle grades literacy in culturally proactive and sustaining ways.

Long description:

This text offers pre-service and in-service teachers pragmatic strategies for teaching middle-grades literacy in culturally proactive and sustaining ways. By demystifying big ideas and complex concepts, Domínguez and Seglem provide clear pathways and lessons for illuminating and engaging with race, ethnicity, culture, and identity in the middle-grade English Language Arts classroom. While addressing social justice, equity, diversity, and liberation can seem intimidating or unrelated to classroom practice, the authors demonstrate how weaving such questions into instruction benefits students? development.?

The guidance, strategies, and lessons in this book provide an answer to the question: What does decolonial literacy teaching look like? Concrete but not prescriptive, the authors encourage us to reconsider accepted logics of schooling, so that we can better support adolescents as they navigate complex identity landscapes. Bringing together disparate conversations around reading, writing, identity, and decolonial thinking, and specifically tailored to the middle grades, this book serves as a comprehensive toolkit for praxis and covers such topics as cultural change, community connections, and racial literacy. Each chapter features tips on reading and writing instruction, Teacher Spotlights, Planning Questions, and Additional Resources to make it easy for educators to apply the strategies to their own contexts.

An accessible entry to addressing challenging questions around identity in the classroom, this book is essential reading in courses and professional development on ELA and literacy methods as well as teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students. For teachers looking to push toward equity and reshape literacy education so that it serves all middle-grade students, Domínguez and Seglem offer plenty of accessible and motivating places to start.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Coloniality and Decoloniality: A Primer

Colonization v. Coloniality

Thinking Differently as Decoloniality

Questions to Consider in Reflecting on Coloniality

Resources to Explore

References

Chapter 2: What Is Racial Literacy?

Introduction

What Is Race? A Quick Primer for Decolonial Educators

Race and Middle Grades

Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Identity Development for BIPOC Youth

Building Racial Literacies as Decolonial Praxis

Making Decolonization Normal

Questions to Consider While Planning for Racially Literate Praxis

Resources to Explore

References

Part II: In Praxis / Travesias

Introduction

Complicated Racial Landscapes

Reading Instruction to Trace Community Histories

Writing Instruction to Practice Our Self-Narration

Pushing Past Racial Discomfort

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Planning for Introspection

Resources to Explore

Assessment Alternatives

Technology Spotlight

References

Introduction

Abolishing Zero-Point Thinking

Reading Instruction to Nurture Interconnection

Writing Instruction to Foster Empathy

Building a Holistic Ecology in the Classroom

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Planning for Human Connections

Resources to Explore

Assessment Alternatives

Technology Spotlight

References

Instruction

Disrupting Colonial Expertise

Reading Instruction to Validate Youth Expertise

Writing Instruction to Sustain Community Literacies

Closing the Cultural Gaps Between Ourselves and Our Students

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Planning to Position Everyone as Experts

Resources to Explore

Assessment Alternatives

Technology Spotlight

References

Introduction

Challenging Reductive Knowledge

Reading Instruction to Get at Big Ideas

Writing Instruction to Engage with the World

Making Classroom Literacy Consequential

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Planning for Challenging Questions

Resources to Explore

Assessment Alternatives

Technology Spotlight

References

Introduction

A New Way to Think of the Banking Method

Reading and Speaking Instruction to Build Radical Consensus

Disrupting the Activity System of Normalized Schooling

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Planning to Disrupt Normal

Resources to Explore

Assessment Alternatives

Technology Spotlight

References

Introduction

Linguistic Hegemony and Coloniality

Reading Instruction to Master Language Use

Writing Instruction to Encourage Code-Meshing

Language, Identity, and Decoloniality

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Planning for a Multilingual World

Resources to Explore

Assessment Alternatives

Technology Spotlight

References

Introduction

Reacting to Cultural Change

Reading Instruction to Remix Futures

Writing Instruction to Sustain Youth Creativity

Honoring Middle-School Youth as the Creators of New Worlds

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Planning for Nurturing Cultural Change

Resources to Explore

Assessment Alternatives

Technology Spotlight

References

Introduction

Teaching in a Neocolonial Climate of Fear

Cultural Artifacts in Education

Discourse in Education

Identity in Education

Challenge in Practice

Questions to Consider While Navigating Tight Spaces

Resources to Explore

References

Introduction

Sustaining our Commitments to Decolonization through Interconnection

Sustaining our Connections to Students and Community

Learning about Student Practices: Community Ethnographies

Learning about Community Dynamics: Power Analysis and Mapping

Building Peer Networks to Sustain Decolonial Practice

Challenge(s) in Practice

Questions to Consider for Sustaining our Practice

Resources to Explore

References

Introduction

Make Maps, Not Tracings

Epistemic Disobedience and Sustainability

Pragmatic Vision and the Decolonial