This inspirational book is about engaged pedagogies, an approach to teaching and learning that centers dialogue, listening, equity, and connection among stakeholders who understand the human and ecological cost of inequality. The authors share their story of working with students, teachers, teacher educators, families, community members, and union leaders to create transformative practices within and beyond public school classrooms. This collaborative work occurred within various spaces—inside school buildings, libraries, churches, community gardens, nonprofit organizations, etc.—and afforded opportunities to grapple with engaged pedagogies in times of political crisis. Featuring descriptions from a district-wide initiative, this book offers practical and theoretical resources for educators wanting to center justice in their work with students. Through question-posing, color images, empirical observations, and use of scholarly and practitioner-driven literature, readers will learn how to use these resources to reconfigure schools and classrooms as sites of engagement for equity, justice, and love. Book Features: Provides a sound approach to deeply taking up the work of justice and engaged pedagogies.Presents linguistic, cultural, theoretical, and practical ideas that can be used and implemented immediately. Includes reflective questions, found poetry, lesson ideas, storytelling as narrative, and examples of engaged pedagogies. Shares stories from a district-wide initiative that embedded engaged pedagogies within classrooms, counseling offices, and libraries.Showcases original artwork and images in full color by Grace D. Player, one of the coauthors.

Envisioned as a story, a guide, a resource, and an aesthetic experience, this book features the work of a multigenerational collective of K–12 educators, students, and teaching artists seeking educational justice. This multivocal approach illustrates how bringing together arts-infused writing pedagogies, with the visionary and intellectual force of freedom dreaming, can create more luminous and socially transformative educational spaces. Through vivid vignettes, compelling first-person narratives, mixed media artwork, and detailed lesson plans, readers will experience schools as places of joy, belonging, and justice. As an act of radical hope during the turmoil and trauma of post-pandemic times, this book invites readers to draw on the principles of freedom dreaming and abolitionist teaching to imagine and enact arts-infused writing pedagogies across a multitude of settings. Authors offer guidance for teachers, teacher educators, and professional development leaders wishing to take up this work in their own contexts. Book Features: Provides detailed guidelines and principles for enacting arts-infused writing pedagogies, adaptable to a range of contexts.Showcases original artwork by K–12 students and educators, many in full color. Includes insights on teaching writing and engaging in inquiry-based professional learning from a local site of the National Writing Project.Highlights the role of teaching artists in enhancing teacher and student learning.Illuminates the potential of a/r/tography, affect, and wonder in qualitative inquiry.Contains visually arresting and narratively powerful contributions from students as young as 6 years old to teachers nearing retirement, as well as professional artists and novelists. Contributors: Marcus Kwame Anderson, Mandy Berghela, Dana Corcoran, Cheryl L. Dozier, Tammy Ellis-Robinson , Brittany Gonzalez-Barone, Emily Hass, Rana Hughes, H. D. Hunter, Patricia Poole Jeffress, Rae Johnson, Maria Latorre, Kyle McHugh, Gina M. Mooney, Christina Pepe, Matt Pinchinat, Brandon Porter, Camille Ramos, Amy Salamone, Fatima Shah, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Christina Taylor, Hanum Tyagita, Alicia Wein, Leah Werther, Vanessia Wilkins, Kelly K. Wissman , Jacquelyn Woods, Shania Yearwood

Addressing both veterans of justice work and novices seeking points of entry, the essays in this volume showcase practical approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion: ways to build community, earn trust, tell unheard stories, and develop solutions to problems. Emphasizing values such as empathy, self-reflection, and integrity, the volume is rooted in humanities work but also features contributions from fields as diverse as the performing arts, architecture, and evolutionary biology and represents settings beyond the college campus, such as schools, libraries, museums, and prisons. While bringing insights from higher education, it critiques the system as well, exploring the ways that institutions reinforce power structures and exclude marginalized voices. Interspersed with the essays, brief reflections by activists and artists offer testimony and inspiration.

At the core of the intractability of racism is the persistent cultivation of our collective ignorance of it. This book argues that this cultivated ignorance compels us to support a status quo that we abhor. We are stuck because we cannot imagine a world beyond racism. We are also stuck because engaging with issues of racism with others usually produces immense acrimony and little result. The author responds directly to this challenge by introducing Brave Community—a research-based and learner-tested method that leverages learning as a vehicle to increase the bravery and empathy that we need to both imagine and pursue a world beyond racism. It is an approach that can be used by educators, administrators, cultural workers, human resources professionals, community leaders, and others. The text includes effective practices embedded in vivid portraits of learning across higher education, K–12, and cultural institutions. Now as ever, we need effective tools for creating a shared understanding of the relationship between racial justice and democracy. Designed to be immediately applicable, Brave Community teaches in clear and practical ways how anyone who wants to tackle racism can do so, and help others to do the same. Book Features: A how-to book for confronting racism in real time. A reliable learning process to achieve an authentic and diverse community.An approach to teaching about racism that edifies and empowers all learners.A method that has been tested across diverse settings, from elementary schools to graduate schools, from workshops to museums, and from Board rooms to living rooms. A simple and adaptive approach that was created to address issues of racism but can be used to address any difficult topic.

The issue of social justice has been brought to the forefront of society within recent years, and educational institutions have become an integral part of this critical conversation. Classroom settings are expected to take part in the promotion of inclusive practices and the development of culturally proficient environments that provide equal and effective education for all students regardless of race, gender, socio-economic status, and disability, as well as from all walks of life. The scope of these practices finds itself rooted in curriculum, teacher preparation, teaching practices, and pedagogy in all educational environments. Diversity within school administrations, teachers, and students has led to the need for socially just practices to become the norm for the progression and advancement of education worldwide. In a modern society that is fighting for the equal treatment of all individuals, the classroom must be a topic of discussion as it stands as a root of the problem and can be a major step in the right direction moving forward. Research Anthology on Instilling Social Justice in the Classroom is a comprehensive reference source that provides an overview of social justice and its role in education ranging from concepts and theories for inclusivity, tools, and technologies for teaching diverse students, and the implications of having culturally competent and diverse classrooms. The chapters dive deeper into the curriculum choices, teaching theories, and student experience as teachers strive to instill social justice learning methods within their classrooms. These topics span a wide range of subjects from STEM to language arts, and within all types of climates: PK-12, higher education, online or in-person instruction, and classrooms across the globe. This book is ideal for in-service and preservice teachers, administrators, social justice researchers, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in how social justice is currently being implemented in all aspects of education.

Join the authors of this book in starting a movement of hope and possibility for an antiracist child care and early childhood education system. This volume disrupts mental models regarding where the work of early care and education began—with enslaved African women—and how the stigma of that beginning relegates present-day child care workers to a low-status, low-wage field of practice. Expert authors contribute their wisdom, experience, research, and practical knowledge on issues related to equity and social justice. They examine the oppressive historical, political, economic, educational, and cultural systems that continue to oppress early care educators and, by extension, racialized children and children in poverty. The interrogation and litigation of past and current issues and grievances of injustice and inequities in the field are addressed, while threading the needle of social justice and critical consciousness throughout the chapters. Child Care Justice calls on educators, activists, and their allies to rethink, reimagine, and reconstruct a more equitable and just system for all who receive and provide care to our nation’s youngest of children. When historically marginalized child care workers are held in high esteem, then, and only then, will America live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all. Book Features: Centers the historic and current oppression of Black people in the United States as foundational to the disregard for childcare workers today.Uses Paulo Freire’s critical consciousness framework to guide readers to see, analyze, and act. Calls for a multiracial coalition of activists for racial justice, gender justice, and economic justice. “The roadmap has been drawn, but it requires inspired and knowledgeable advocates to implement. Read, be inspired, build community, and take up the mantle for change.” —From the Foreword by Barbara T. Bowman, Erikson Institute Contributors: Rebecca Berlin, Sarah R. Bussey, Michael Gramling, Ed Greene, Iheoma U. Iruka, Alexis Jemal, Denisha Jones, Hakim M. Rashid, Joey Saunders, and James C. Young