Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy

The last question "What do humanizing practices look like in and outside of the classroom?" is also essential, because it speaks to those "social justice" educators who leave the school and don't live in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other anti-oppressive ways in their daily lives. This is why we must not just be non-racist or non-oppressive but also work with passion and diligence to actively disrupt oppression in and outside of the classroom. Simple good intentions aren't enough. The intentions must be deliberately connected to actions.

As long as oppression is present in the world, young people need pedagogy that nurtures criticality.

The need to agitate for criticality historically spoke to the social unrest at the time, and I argue that the need to agitate is still necessary and pressing in classrooms today.

Literacy was not just for self-enjoyment of fulfillment, it was tied to action and efforts to shape the sociopolitical landscape of a country that was founded on oppression.

literacy serves as a form of protection in this world and is rightly guided by both imagination and reason—two constructs that are often dichotomous, especially in current public education.

Perhaps the people who need criticality the most become those who share identities with the greatest oppressors of the world.

We live in a period where there's no time for "urgent-free pedagogy." Our instructional pursuits must be honest, bold, raw, unapologetic, and responsive to the social times.

Structure opportunities for critiquing and evaluating what students read and write about within the instruction.

Literacy was to be developed in a socially constructed environment so that new ideas and information learned from texts could be shared and spread among one another and those in the community. Members of all ages and experiences with reading would assemble to teach one another. Although individual literacy was valued, these societies were highly collaborative and prompted social responsibility to share knowledge gained from acts of literacy rather than keep education to one’s self. This collaboration for literacy learning built the foundation of the “chain letter of instruction” model, which embodied a shared accountability for knowledge (Fisher, 2004). If one person, for example, acquired knowledge, it was then his or her responsibility to pass it on to others to create a flame-like effect. To keep knowledge to one’s self was seen as a selfish act, and each person therefore was responsible to elevate others through education in the immediate and larger community. This ideal of collectivism is in direct conflict with schools today, as schools are largely grounded in competition and individualism. This is perhaps one major reason why students of color often do not reach their full potential in schools—because schools are in disharmony with their histories and identities.

When we frame the stories of people of color as narratives steeped in pain or even smallness, this becomes the dominant or sole representation.

There have been too many data meetings, curriculum meetings, or problem-solving meetings without students’ voices at the table.

This ideal of collectivism is in direct conflict with schools today, as schools are largely grounded in competition and individualism. This is perhaps one major reason why students of color often do not reach their full potential in schools—because schools are in disharmony with their histories and identities.

If we aim to get it right with all youth, a productive starting point is to design teaching and learning to the group (s) of students who have been marginalized the most in society and within schools. Thus, we need frameworks that have been written by people of color and designed for children of color.

Engage students with texts that create social action and cause them to think differently as a result of what they read. 2. Create an environment that affords students the opportunity to shape their own ideas through acts of literacy.