A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner We Be Lovin' Black Children is a pro-Black book. Pro-Black does not mean anti-white or anti anything else. It means that this little book is about what we must do to ensure that Black children across the world are loved, safe, and that their souls and spirits are healed from the ongoing damage of living in a world where white supremacy flourishes. It offers strategies and activities that families, communities, social organizations, and others can use to unapologetically love Black children. This book will facilitate Black children's cultural and academic excellence. Meet the editors: https://youtu.be/q21_yZCblk8 Perfect for courses such as: Multicultural Education | Black Education | Urban Education | Culturally Relevant Teaching
Focused on preparing educators to teach African American students, this straightforward and teacher-friendly text features a careful balance of published scholarship, a framework for culturally relevant and critical pedagogy, research-based case studies of model teachers, and tested culturally relevant practical strategies and actionable steps teachers can adopt. Its premise is that teachers who understand Black culture as an asset rather than a liability and utilize teaching techniques that have been shown to work can and do have specific positive impacts on the educational experiences of African American children.
Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.
In It’s All Love, Black writers celebrate the complexity, power, danger, and glory of love in all its many forms: romantic, familial, communal, and sacred. Editor Marita Golden recounts the morning she woke up certain that she would meet her soul mate in “My Own Happy Ending”; memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts, in a piece he calls “Learning the Name Dad,” writes stirringly about serving time in prison and how that transformed his life for the better; New York Times bestselling author Pearl Cleage is at her best in the delicate, touching “Missing You”; award-winning author David Anthony Durham enraptures readers with his “An Act of Faith”; New York Times bestselling author L. A. Banks is both funny and wise in her beautiful essay on discovering love as a child, “Two Cents and a Question.” And the poetry of love is here, too—from Gwendolyn Brooks’s classic “Black Wedding Song” to works by Nikki Giovanni, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Kwame Alexander. It’s All Love is a dazzling, delightfully diverse exploration of the wonderful gift of love.
The Future is Black presents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin, and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as, a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.
"This book provides evidence-based curriculum examples, pedagogies, and resources; demonstrates how teachers can achieve Pro-Black teaching while also addressing curricular standards; and explains the benefit of Pro-Black teaching for all children"--
This straightforward and reader-friendly text provides strategies for P-12 educators who are interested in ensuring the cultural and academic excellence of African American students. It presents a careful balance of published scholarship, a framework for culturally relevant teaching, and research-based cases of teachers who excel at teaching Black children. Examples from multi-ethnic teachers across P-12 grades and content areas (e.g., ELA, science, mathematics, social studies, arts) are presented so that others can extrapolate in their respective educational settings. This book explains Black culture, anti-Black racism, African Diaspora Literacy, African American Language, and pro-Black and actionable steps that educators can adopt and implement. Examples of culturally relevant family and community involvement are provided. As with the previous edition, readers will appreciate a multitude of resources. After reading this book, educators will view educating African American students as exhilarating and rewarding and Black students will flourish.
Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002), Collins (2009), Crenshaw (1991), and Dillard (2012), this volume makes a case for centering the voices and experiences of Black women in the protection and educational uplift of Black children. While examinations of how Black educators articulate and enact a need to protect Black students from racialized harm exist (McKinney de Royston et. al., 2020), this book is a collection of autoethnographic narratives from Black mother educators who work at the intersections of their personal and professional identities to protect Black children. Intersectionality allows us to look at the nexus of our identities in regards to race, gender and occupation-- as Black, women and educators. Our goal for this volume was to bring together scholars who can support theorizing the intersectionality of our identities as Black mothers and educators, particularly its influence on our pedagogical practices and the safekeeping of Black children. This volume explicates stories of motherwork from Black mother educators whose professional spaces span K-12 to higher education contexts. Collectivity, this volume expounds upon the dimension of “protector” within the literature on Black women teachers.
"Influential leaders reveal how they have helped to shape the field of early childhood education to help us understand what is important to young children and their families"--
A radical educator's paradigm-shifting inquiry into the accepted, normal demands of school, as illuminated by moving portraits of four young "problem children" In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem. From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age. Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.
