This teaching note reviews a four-part discussion post assignment that asks Black-identified students enrolled in a class connected to a Black living-learning community to make sociological and personal connections to concepts related to race, anti-Blackness, and institutional racism in Yaa Gyasi's novel "Homegoing." Reflecting on their…

I use Toni Morrison's "Paradise" as a backdrop for framing a "Black Liberatory Fantasy" (Martin et al., 2019) that is rooted in what Dumas and ross ("Urban Education," 51(4):415-442, 2016) have conceptualized as BlackCrit. The goal of the current undertaking is to evaluate anecdotes of this working idea of paradise,…

An African American teacher and students engaged in meaningful reading and writing that included African American literature. These literacy experiences allowed the development of cultural models through exploring identity, questioning dominant narratives, and building capacity for literary analysis. This study shows how meaningful literacy…

It has been suggested that culturally relevant literature can be beneficial to elementary school students' learning. Yet, less research has focused on African American students' perspectives of that literature, including aspects of that engagement that may benefit their learning. Therefore, the main goal centred on US elementary school students'…

On the second day of a 2019 high-stakes English Language Arts assessment, Massachusetts 10th graders faced an essay question that was based on a passage from the novel "The Underground Railroad" and publicly characterized as racially insensitive. Though the state excluded the essay responses from student scores, an unresolved public…

Baby Suggs's sermon in the clearing to formerly enslaved Black folx offers readers an important anecdote about living in the afterlife of white supremacy (Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016). Baby Suggs seemed to understand that the priority for survival and emancipation was loving one's flesh in a world where "yonder they do not love your…

We explore how valuing Black male students' literacies within academic contexts during multimodal writing can position students' ways of knowing at the center of their learning. This centering requires a repositioning of students' cultural literacies at the core of instruction. Using multiliteracies and Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks, we…

In this article, the authors argue that the racial violence that unfolds against Black youth in various communities seeps into English language arts (ELA) classrooms. They offer a theoretical framework that centers on Black literacies that secondary ELA teachers can use to disrupt the violence and curricula and pedagogical inequities against Black…

How do students read tales about the past? What kinds of stories might they tell in response to these histories? Within broader considerations about the teaching of history through literature, a more comprehensive consideration of students' understanding of children's and young adult historical literature is warranted. African American historical…

In 1983, when the author began graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as the only black student in the Graduate English School, it offered no graduate-level African-American Literature course. Today an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia can major in African-American and African Studies and take courses…

This content analysis study examined 99 basal reading narratives from three publishers: Harcourt, SRA-McGraw Hill, and Scott Foresman. The stories were classified according to the ethnicity of the major characters. The observed frequencies were compared to expected frequencies to indicate over representation, adequate representation or under…

The author had the pleasure of being in an academic setting where students of color were in the majority. That was the summer of 2004 as she observed African-American Literature 1900-Present, a writing intensive class in the Special Program in Talent Development (SPTD) at the University of Rhode Island (URI). The author wants to tell the story of…

This qualitative study highlights the interconnectedness of literature, literacy practices, identity, and social positioning within a framework of a common enactment of multicultural education: adding literature by and about people of color to the language arts curriculum. The study provides a window on the meaning-making of six 16-year-old Black…

In this article, the author builds on McHenry and Heaths study of the "literate" and the "literary" and McHenry's research on "forgotten readers" by examining the often undocumented literacy traditions and practices of men and women of African descent. First, the author traces the legacy of blended traditions of both written and spoken words in…

150 students at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, DC have engaged the Harvard Model for creating a culture of thinking. This Tishman, Perkins, and Jay framework introduced them to four forces of enculturation and six dimensions of a thinking classroom in combination with African American Literature and Future Studies as specific…