I recently read Kiese Laymon’s book Heavy. I can’t stop talking about it. It was powerful, raw, beautiful, impactful, and heavy. (Pun intended!) One of the moments he narrates is about an incident that happened to him as a college professor. He was the only Black male professor in a predominantly white institution. He pushed… Read more
I work toward welcoming marginalized voices into my classroom while moving my students toward a stance grounded in love and freedom. As a student, I never encountered a curriculum that did that. When I first became an educator, I struggled to find examples of curricula or lessons that effectively and respectfully welcomed these voices. I… Read more
Lorena German and fellow educator, Jazmen Moore, presented at the International Literacy Association’s (ILA) conference in Austin, TX this past weekend (July 2018). They were there on behalf of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Their session: There is No Apolitical Classroom, focused on the work of NCTE’s Committee Against Racism and Bias… Read more
We spent this last weekend of June 2018 in St. Paul, MN at the Montessori for Social Justice Conference. Wow! What a powerful conference. What a powerful group of people working together to change Montessori and all other educational spaces. What a radical and justice-oriented community space and what strong allyship from white brethren. We presented… Read more
The Intersection of Rhetorics and Justice: an IB unit of study When teaching about historically marginalized and oppressed communities, that’s usually what students understand: we are in pain, in sorrow, and are oppressed. While there is accuracy to that due to systemic oppression, we often end up leaving out the ways that we are more… Read more
Recently, I wrote a response to the Larry Ferlazzo’s Classroom Q & A blog question: What are good strategies teachers can use when exploring “controversial” topics? Since my courses are infused with what folks consider to be controversial topics, this was somewhat of an easy write up for me. My work focuses on discussing equity &… Read more
I’ve taught 9th grade for many years and one thing I’ve learned is that they are young, ready, wiling, and needing of a space to be themselves. Since I began working with a predominantly white student body, I have tweaked my approach to teaching from an anti-bias/anti-racist lens to meet the needs of the learners… Read more
Working at this independent school has been a great and challenging experience for me. The biggest challenge? I have never taught in a classroom where I was the ethnic minority. I have never taught in a classroom where the group wasn’t Latino. That was a big shift and certainly something that impacted HOW I taught,… Read more
As part of a professional development session we offered about racial identity and how that relates to teaching, we discussed Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. We analyzed him as the first indigenous person in the Western literary imagination. We thought about how he was represented and made modern day connections. Watch the short clip… Read more
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