February is Black History Month

Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development, edited by Enid Lee, Deborah Menkart, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Washington, DC: Network of Educators on the Americas, 1998. 
A 463-page collection developed by educators, parents, and activists determined to create a valuable resource for change. Lesson plans and staff development activities are included, as well as critical examinations of controversial school issues such as bilingual education and tracking. Contains an extensive resource guide of teaching and learning resources and many helpful Internet sites.

Table of Contents here:

Here's the link to reviews at Teaching for Change

Don't Say Nothing

As educators we (sometimes unknowingly) step into roles of advocate, caretaker, guide, and even mother or father to students. Students pay attention to everything we say and do. They particularly pay attention to our silence. 

We may be uncomfortable talking about race, but we can no longer afford to be silent. We have chosen a profession, which—like parenting—requires that our comforts come second to those of children.

Read the article here:

Don't Say Nothing

Kwanzaa and Me - A Teacher's Story by Vivian Gussin Paley

“All these white schools I’ve been sent to are racist,” Sonya says. “I’d have done better in a black school. I was an outsider here.” These are hard words for Vivian Paley, whose own kindergarten was one of Sonya’s schools, the integrated classroom so lovingly and hopefully depicted by Paley in White Teacher. Confronted with the grown-up Sonya, now on her way to a black college, and with a chorus of voices questioning the fairness and effectiveness of integrated education, Paley sets out to discover the truth about the multicultural classroom from those who participate in it. This is an odyssey undertaken on the wings of conversation and storytelling in which every voice adds new meaning to the idea of belonging, really belonging, to a school culture. Here are black teachers and minority parents, immigrant families, a Native American educator, and the children themselves, whose stories mingle with the author’s to create a candid picture of the successes and failures of the integrated classroom. As Paley travels the country listening to these stories, we see what lies behind recent moves toward self-segregation: an ongoing frustration with racism as well as an abiding need for a nurturing community. And yet, among these diverse voices, we hear again and again the shared dream of a classroom where no family heritage is obscured and every child’s story enriches the life of the schoolhouse.

“It’s all about dialogue, isn’t it?” asks Lorraine, a black third-grade teacher whose story becomes a central motif. And indeed, it is the dialogue that prevails in this warmly provocative and deeply engaging book, as parents and teachers learn how they must talk to each other, and to their children, if every child is to secure a sense of self in the schoolroom, no matter what the predominant ethnic background. Vivian Paley offers these discoveries to readers as a starting point for their own journeys toward community and kinship in today’s schools and tomorrow’s culture.

Read an article from the New York Times here:

Are White Schools Bad for Black Children?

40+ Children's Books about Human Rights & Social Justice

40+ Children's Books about Human Rights & Social Justice

An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves … the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.

— Maria Montessori, Education and Peace

K-12 Teaching and Learning from the UNC School of Education

Teaching should be informed not only by the content of the discipline 

                                        but also by the lives of the students.

Culturally Relevant Teaching by Heather Coffey

Learning While Black: Creating Educational Excellence for African American Children by Janice E. Hale

Learning While Black
Creating Educational Excellence for African American Children

Janice E. Hale
with a foreword by V.P. Franklin

In Learning While Black Janice Hale argues that educators must look beyond the cliches of urban poverty and teacher training to explain the failures of public education with regard to black students. Why, Hale asks simply, are black students not being educated as well as white students?

Hale goes beyond finger pointing to search for solutions. Closing the achievement gap of African American children, she writes, does not involve better teacher training or more parental involvement. The solution lies in the classroom, in the nature of the interaction between the teacher and the child. And the key, she argues, is the instructional vision and leadership provided by principals. To meet the needs of diverse learners, the school must become the heart and soul of a broad effort, the coordinator of tutoring and support services provided by churches, service clubs, fraternal organizations, parents, and concerned citizens. Calling for the creation of the "beloved community" envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hale outlines strategies for redefining the school as the Family, and the broader community as the Village, in which each child is too precious to be left behind.

"In this book, I am calling for the school to improve traditional instructional practices and create culturally salient instruction that connects African American children to academic achievement. The instruction should be so delightful that the children love coming to school and find learning to be fun and exciting."—Janice Hale

Janice E. Hale is professor of early childhood education at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is the founder of Visions for Children, a demonstration school designed to facilitate the intellectual development of African American preschool children. Her two previous books, Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles and Unbank the Fire: Visions for the Education of African American Children, are also available from Johns Hopkins.

Educational Equity and the Responsive Classroom

Reaching Educational Equity: It Is Possible! Responsive Classroom Plays a Role

"...During the last twenty years, educators have made considerable strides in improving the quality of education for our nation’s students. Overall student achievement and graduation rates have risen. Yet the unfortunate reality is that certain populations of students, particularly those living in poverty, students of color, and English language learners, continue to lag behind. Educators are increasingly aware and in agreement that this 'achievement gap' is really an equity gap.These students are lagging in achievement because they are lagging in access to educational opportunities..."

Absent Narratives Resources

The Minnesota Humanities Center is committed to helping people tell their stories. These stories, histories, and contributions are the Absent Narratives that are often left out of the mainstream story of Minnesota and many of its K-12 classrooms. These resources and many more can be found on the Absent Narratives Resource Collection, a free, searchable database of over 900 ready-to-use videos, teacher guides, and readings. Items included in the resource collection have been created or developed by the Humanities Center and its partners. 

Absent Narratives Resource Overview from Minnesota Humanities Center

Resource Assessment Tool from Minnesota Humanities Center

Minnesota Humanities Center

Books as Mirrors

On the Importance of Mirrors

"... the curriculum is a structure that ideally provides “windows out into the experiences of others, as well as mirrors of the student’s own reality.” In other words, schools should be spaces where kids explore the unfamiliar, but also see their own lived experiences validated and valued. For students whose racial, cultural, linguistic, or economic backgrounds differ significantly from that of the mainstream, the “mirrors” part of the metaphor can be particularly powerful..." Gregory Michie

Publishing Statistics on Children's Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators

CCBC's Choices 2016 List
CCBC Choices is the annual best-of-the-year list of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. This is a listing of titles that have been chosen for CCBC Choices 2016. The final CCBC Choices 2016 publication will include additional books (one or two might be removed) and include annotations and recommended ages for all of the books selected for final inclusion, as well as an author/title/subject index, and a commentary on the publishing year. The CCBC Choices 2016 booklet will be available at the CCBC after March 5, 2016. 

Cooperative Children's Book Center
CCBC's history statement:
In 1985 the Cooperative Children's Book Center began to document the numbers of books we received each year that were written and/or illustrated by African Americans. Then CCBC Director Ginny Moore Kruse was serving as a member of the Coretta Scott King Award Committee that year, and we were appalled to learn that, of the approximately 2,500 trade books that were published in 1985, only 18 were created by African Americans, and thus eligible for the Coretta Scott King Award.

As a statewide book examination center serving Wisconsin, the CCBC receives the majority of new U.S. trade books published for children and teens each year. In the early years of gathering these statistics, we used the CCBC's collections and worked in conjunction with the Coretta Scott King Award Task Force of the American Library Association, to document the number of books by and about African Americans published annually.
Starting in 1994 we began also keeping track of the numbers of books by Asian/Pacific and Asian/Pacific American, First/Native Nation and Latino book creators as well. We also began documenting not only the number of books created by people of color and First/Native Nations authors and illustrators, but the number of books about people of color and First/Native Nations, including the many titles that have been created by white authors and/or illustrators.

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta L. (Lynn) Hammond

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta L. Hammond 

This book presents a bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction. To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation-until now. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction. The book includes: information on how one's culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships; ten "key moves" to build students' learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners; and, prompts for action and valuable self-reflection. 

Take a look inside here.

Ready4Rigor

Culturally Relevant Teaching: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in Urban Schools by Darius D. Prier

Culturally Relevant Teaching: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in Urban Schools by Darius D. Prier

Culturally Relevant Teaching centers hip-hop culture as a culturally relevant form of critical pedagogy in urban pre-service teacher education programs. In this important book, Darius D. Prier explores how hip-hop artists construct a sense of democratic education and pedagogy with transformative possibilities in their schools and communities. In a postmodern context, students’ critical street narratives challenge educators to rethink where «public education» can happen, and the political and empowering purposes to which Black popular culture can serve social justice ends for youth in urban education. This book provides educational leaders in the academy and public schools with new cultural contexts that connect teaching and learning with music and popular culture in relation to race, class, gender, culture, and community.

Click here to read inside.

Bringing Hip-Hop to Education in a Meaningful Way by Sam Seidel