In Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework--one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names, Historically Responsive Literacy, was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices. The equity framework will help educators teach and lead toward the following learning goals or pursuits: Identity Development--Helping youth to make sense of themselves and others Skill Development-- Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplines Intellectual Development--Gaining knowledge and becoming smarter Criticality--Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression When these four learning pursuits are taught together--through the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Muhammad provides probing, self-reflective questions for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators as well as sample culturally and historically responsive sample plans and text sets across grades and content areas. In this book, Muhammad presents practical approaches to cultivate the genius in students and within teachers.

Provides the first practical, hands-on resource to help early childhood educators create learning environments in which black children thrive.

This accessible book features K–12 teachers and teacher educators who report their experiences of culturally responsive literacy teaching in primarily high-poverty, culturally nondominant communities. These extraordinary teachers show us what culturally responsive literacy teaching looks like in their classrooms and how it advances children’s academic achievement. This collection captures different dimensions of culturally responsive (CR) practice, such as linking home and school, using culturally responsive literature, establishing relationships with children and parents, using cultural connections, and teaching English language learners and children who speak African American language. This engaging collection: Provides a window into what teachers actually do and think when they serve culturally diverse children, including classroom-tested teaching practices.Depicts teachers enacting CR teaching in the presence of scripted curricula and rigid testing schedules.Covers childhood, secondary, and higher education classrooms.Helps readers imagine how they can transform their own classrooms through “Make This Happen in Your Classroom” sections at the end of each chapter.Includes a “Becoming a Culturally Responsive Teacher” self-evaluation form. “A thoroughly contextualized description and understanding of culturally responsive teaching. It will become a classic.” —From the Preface by Lee Gunderson, University of British Columbia “The teachers profiled in this book keep the conversation alive and move us toward more just educational settings.” —From the Foreword by Patricia A. Edwards, Michigan State University

Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment?Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “social justice?”Recognizing these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the “bottlenecks” that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. The authors initiate a conversation – one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse – about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice learning among a diversity of education students. Although this is not intended to be a “how-to” manual, or to provide five easy steps to enable straight students to “get” heteronormativity, each chapter does describe practical strategies that teachers might adapt as part of their own practice.

"20% Time" is a passion-driven, personalized learning program that is sweeping education in America. Teachers are incorporating passion-based learning in the classroom and kids are creating, making, researching, innovating, and learning more than ever before. "20% Time" is a game-changer in education. This book will inspire you and provide you with everything you need to awaken the creativity and passion in your students.

This book convincingly argues that effective culturally responsive pedagogies require teachers to firstly undertake a critical deconstruction of Self in relation to and with the Other; and secondly, to take into account how power affects the socio-political, cultural and historical contexts in which the education relation takes place. The contributing authors are from a range of diaspora, indigenous, and white mainstream communities, and are united in their desire to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric education and to create new educational spaces that are more socially and environmentally just. In this venture, the ideal education process is seen to be inherently critical and intercultural, where mainstream and marginalized, colonized and colonizer, indigenous and settler communities work together to decolonize selves, teacher-student relationships, pedagogies, the curriculum and the education system itself. This book will be of great interest and relevance to policy-makers and researchers in the field of education; teacher educators; and pre- and in-service teachers.

Summary: The author "offers portraits of three high-performing urban schools that have made character development central to their mission. [The book] highlights each school's unique approach to character development and shows how qualities like empathy, integrity, perseverance, and daring can nurture student success."--p. 4 of cover.