‘Teaching for Black Lives’ — a handbook to help all educators fight racism
Black students’ minds and bodies are under attack.
Fifteen-year-old Black student Coby Burren was in geography class at Pearland High School near Houston in the fall of 2015. As he read the assigned page of his textbook, he noticed something that deeply disturbed him: A map of the United States with a caption that said the Atlantic slave trade brought “millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” Coby took a picture of his textbook and texted it to his mother, adding, “We was real hard workers wasn’t we,” along with a sarcastic emoji. Not only had the McGraw-Hill textbook replaced the word “slave” with “workers,” they also placed the chapter on the enslavement of Africans in the chapter of the book titled “Patterns of Immigration” — as if Africans came to the United States looking for a better life. …
From the North to the South, corporate curriculum lies to our students, conceals pain and injustice, masks racism, and demeans our Black students. But it’s not only the curriculum that is traumatizing students.
That is part of the introduction to a new book, “
Teaching for Black Lives,” a collection of writings that help educators humanize blacks in curriculum, teaching and policy and connect lessons to young people’s lives. Edited by
Dyan Watson,
Jesse Hagopian and
Wayne Au, the book is designed to show how educators “can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as well as sites for knowing the hope and beauty in Blackness.”
It is no coincidence that this book was published now, in the era of President Trump, who is seen as normalizing racism with repeated comments in which he disparages people of color. In February, a Black Lives Matter at School movement saw thousands of teachers around the country focus lessons and conversations on institutional racism, black history and identity, and restorative justice. One of the co-founders of that movement is Hagopian, one of the three editors of the new book.
Here, with permission, is the introduction to “Teaching for Black Lives” and two chapters from the book, which was
just added to Teaching for Change’s 2018 list of top books about social justice.
Watson, social studies coordinator for the secondary program in teacher education at Lewis & Clark College, is an editor at
Rethinking Schools, a national publisher of educational materials. She is also a member of the organization’s executive board. She began her professional career as a GED instructor for young mothers in Portland and then taught social studies at Sunset High School in Beaverton, Ore., where she developed and taught the first African American history course and helped create and implement a school-within-a-school program for freshmen and sophomores. Watson is also a co-editor of
“Rhythm and Resistance: Teaching Poetry for Social Justice.”
Hagopian, an editor for Rethinking Schools, teaches ethnic studies at Seattle’s Garfield High School, where he is also co-adviser to the Black Student Union. Hagopian is a founding member of the Social Equity Educators and a contributing author to “
Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation” and “
101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History.” He is also the editor of “
More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.”
Au, an editor for Rethinking Schools and a former public high school social studies and language arts teacher, is a professor in the school of educational studies at the University of Washington at Bothell. He is editor of “
Rethinking Multicultural Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice” and co-editor of
“Rethinking Our Classrooms Volume 1 (Revised and Expanded Edition).” Au is also the author of many academic articles and books, including “
Critical Curriculum Studies: Curriculum, Consciousness, and the Politics of Knowing.”
). I don't remember if these books in the article are part of the list. But brehs and brehhettes with kids in school are these books on your reading list? If you have already read them, what's your opinion of them?
what I get from this is our people pushing back against the bullshyt. 
Lil 15 year old breh knew the deal.