“The classroom environment serves as a space for identity development where children learn about their humanity, strengths, and justice,” Erica Buchanan-Rivera writes in her book Identity Affirming Classrooms: Spaces that Center Humanity. That quote stopped me in my tracks, because these are the kinds of spaces that I cultivate and dream of as an educator and coach: spaces where our students can breathe, where every day we are centering their identities and building a curriculum around the ideas of humanity, strengths, and justice.
In my role as an instructional coach, I’m constantly thinking of how to make children-centered pedagogy into a manageable process for teachers. The Social Justice Standards help to weave the curriculum and thread it together in a culturally responsive way. One way I connect this directly to students is by asking teachers to bring a picture of their students to professional learning so that we can both feel grounded by their presence as we plan and envision classrooms spaces for identity development. Next I open conversation with a question that assumes that educators are already building classroom environments of humanity, strengths, and justice.
“Tell me, in what ways do you already celebrate students’ humanity in your classroom space?”
This is a question of validation, because I choose to start from a place of love, abundance, and positive intentions. Serving teachers as their coach means coming to the conversation with an understanding that I’m in front of someone who wants to do the work and therefore, unbeknownst to themselves, they might already be implementing powerful practices rooted in justice and strength. After naming those teaching practices and making them visible, we look at the four strands within the Social Justice Standards: identity, diversity, justice, and action.
Once we identify which standard we would like to center in our planning, we start building the language arts curriculum around it. For example: Social Justice Standards on Identity ID.K-2.1 says, “I know and like who I am and can talk about my family and myself and name some of my group identities,” and ID.K-2.2 explains, “I can talk about interesting and healthy ways that some people who share my group identities live their lives.”
Next we look at the Common Core Standards to anchor our teaching in powerful ways. The two powerful Social Justice Standards mentioned above thread perfectly with CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.1.3: “Write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure.”
In classrooms where we are nurturing students’ identities, then, their narratives, if they choose, should center their lives. When finding the common thread in our teachings, of course, we start noticing that other standards support this teaching as well, such as CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.2: “Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson.”
Having a big-picture planning session and weaving our teaching in a way that starts with the humanity of our students makes this work not only possible but also rewarding. From a place of strength, we build units of study that continue to celebrate, affirm, and center students’ identities and also keep the larger goals of justice and their strengths at the core. The next step is to look at resources that will support this level of excellence.
Rethinking Resources
I understand that we are all creatures of habit, and when it comes to resources, we are no different. We tend to use the same books for those familiar minilessons. However, we live in a world with many wonderful texts that are rich and varied in experiences, languages, cultures, and relationships. There are texts that provide accounts of authors whose lives have been impacted by the experiences they share. There are stories of joy, resilience, and celebration. These stories belong to our classrooms and in our students’ hands. There are many wonderful resources that facilitate learning and accessing these resources. Here are some of my most used and beloved resources:
Learning for Justice has one important mission for their work: to be a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond. They accomplish this by working with communities and educators around the areas of culture and climate, curriculum and instruction, leadership and family/community engagement.
Rethinking Schools: One of my favorite nonprofit publishers supporting public schools with a curriculum rooted in social justice teaching and education activism. Their resources are always being updated.
Amplifier: This is a nonprofit organization that builds art and movements that are rooted in justice and in humanity. They have amazing free resources for educators to download for classroom use.
En Comunidad Collective: This is the wonderful page of Dr. Carla España and Dr. Luz Yadira Herrera, authors of En Comunidad. Tons of multilingual resources are available for teachers.
Disrupt Texts is a wonderful resource created for teachers by teachers that challenges the traditional canon and instead nudges and encourages educators to create a more inclusive language arts curriculum. One way they accomplish this goal is by looking closely at texts through a critical lens.
Classrooms that are centered in nurturing and developing students’ identities are classrooms rooted in liberation. This is the kind of education I wish for every child in all school systems. Learning spaces like these are spaces where all of us can breathe deeply and expand our learning in many different directions.
