Teaching for Racial Equity

Becoming Interrupters

Tonya B. Perry, Steven Zemelman, and Katy Smith

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Filled with inspiring and sometimes difficult conversations, Teaching for Racial Equity captures the real work teachers and administrators are doing in schools today. By bringing essential perspectives and valuable strategies to the classroom, teachers lead students in learning how to listen and learn about one another’s identities and thoughtfully critique the racial inequities all around us.

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Description

About the Author(s)

Reviews

Description

All of us in education can find opportunities to interrupt the status quo that allows inequities to go unchallenged. In Teaching for Racial Equity: Becoming Interrupters, authors Tonya Perry, Steven Zemelman, and Katy Smith show us the way. Using Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz’s Racial Literacy Development framework, the authors demonstrate how critical love, humility, and reflection enable educators to understand their own perspectives, identify racial issues, and promote equity for their students.

Filled with inspiring and sometimes difficult conversations, the book captures the real work teachers and administrators are doing in schools today. By bringing essential perspectives and valuable strategies to the classroom, teachers lead students in learning how to listen and learn about one another’s identities and thoughtfully critique the racial inequities all around us.

Inside you will find:

challenges teachers face in bringing fellow educators together to discuss race,
strategies for teachers to understand their own and each other’s backgrounds through a racial lens,
ways to learn about students’ varying needs through careful observation,
examples of guiding students’ critical inquiry on racist conditions in their community and nationally, and
useful tools that document systemic inequities, and lists of resources for teaching about and interrupting racism in education.

We cannot sit back and allow ourselves to perpetuate inequity. We must all become interrupters.

About the Author(s)

Tonya B. Perry

Tonya B. Perry is a Professor of Secondary English Education and serves as the Executive Director for GEAR UP Alabama and the Red Mountain Writing Project at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In her roles, she works for equity, focusing on civically and justice-engaged teaching, service, and scholarship.

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Steven Zemelman

Steven Zemelman is a visiting scholar at Northeastern Illinois University and a founding director of the Illinois Writing Project. He promotes student civic engagement and restorative justice in Chicago schools. His books on teaching writing and reading have long been widely appreciated, including his most recent, From Inquiry to Action: Civic Engagement with Project-Based Learning.

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Katy Smith

Katy Smith is a Professor of Secondary Education and a Department Chair at Northeastern Illinois University, where she and Steve Zemelman direct the Illinois Writing Project. She has dedicated her career to developing and enacting equitable classroom practices, first as a teacher of high school students and now as a teacher educator.

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Foreword by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

Why We Are Writing This Book

Introduction

Time Out to Talk: Tonya Asks Steve a Hard Question

Chapter 1: Racial Literacy: A Guiding Concept

Time Out to Talk: Adding Katy to the Team

Chapter 2: Starting with Ourselves

Time Out to Talk: Discussing Challenges in Writing a Book Together

Chapter 3: Helping Students Teach Us About Who They Are

Time Out to Talk: Tonya and Katy Discuss Listening to Students

Chapter 4: Building Critically for Students—and Teachers

Time Out to Talk: Steve’s Frustrations

Chapter 5: Promoting Student Voice and Independence

Time Out to Talk: Continuing to Learn

Chapter 6: Creating Interrupters

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Equity Warriors Past and Present

Appendix 2: The Prevalence of Racism in American Education

Appendix 3: Online Resources

Appendix 4: Important Books on Antiracism and Equity

References

Index

Reviews

This book, like its authors, is courageous! It is a necessary guide for how we can more urgently envision and enact productive change as we move toward justice and freedom in this work and across the world.

Valerie Kinloch, PhD
This book offers us all a chance to do more than think about antiracism; it shows us how to examine our lives and make whatever changes we discover are needed in our personal and professional selves to better love, teach, encourage, support, and value all students in our classrooms.

Kylene Beers

Co-author of Forged by Reading and Disrupting Thinking
In Teaching for Racial Equity, the authors brilliantly respond to systemic racism and oppression that have created inequities in our schools.

Gholdy Muhammad

Author of Cultivating Genius
This volume is all about the mutuality and reciprocity that must occur in the midst of fighting against racism, sexism, heterosexist, classism, and any other ‘ism’ that oppresses us.

Gloria Ladson-Billings

Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison
At this moment of challenge and resistance in many communities to even broaching the topic of race in schools, this book is most welcome and needed.

Elyse Eidman-Aadahl

Executive Director, National Writing Project
I can’t imagine a more rigorous, more detailed, more compassionate book about interrupting racist systems in both our classrooms and in the larger learning communities we serve.

Matthew R. Kay

Author of Not Light, But Fire
Humanizing embrace among disciplinary content and racial consciousness. This book is an amazing read, setting in motion action-oriented ways for learners, teachers, and educators to augment racial equity efforts for positive change in and beyond schools.

Dr. María E. Fránquiz

Professor, University of Texas at Austin and President-Elect, National Council of Teachers of English
A deeply personal book, Teaching for Racial Equity reminds us that transformative change occurs not in a silo or through top-down directives; this change happens through dialogue, personal reflection, and sometimes uncomfortable action.

Antero Garcia

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Every day is an opportunity to interrupt inequity, shout Perry, Zemelman, and Smith in their brilliant new book. And, they remind us, in a school system where 80% of teachers are white and only 20% are people of color, the work of equity must be done together.

Harvey Daniels

Author of The Curious Classroom
Through their striking (and sometimes uncomfortable) ‘Time Out to Talk’ sections, the authors challenge us with their critical conversations, daring us to have our own as we move forward in our journey to become better allies, co-conspirators, and interrupters for change and equity.

Cathy Fleischer

Professor of English Education, Eastern Michigan University
Teaching for Racial Equity is a book that all current and future educators and teachers should read. It is full of authentic voices of educators and students wrestling with challenging, critical perspectives on race through compassionate dialogue, scenarios, assignments, and applied practice.

Betina Hsieh

California State University Long Beach
Teaching for Racial Equity is the next level of understanding the nexus of race and culture. The book illustrates different models of having conversations representing a variety of perspectives and opinions about race.

Jamal Cooks, Ph.D.

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Teaching for Racial Equity

Becoming Interrupters