More than three‑quarters of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education.
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Although the 7th grade English books my school has sets of for our students are engaging books - The Giver, The Pearl (Steinbeck), Much Ado About Nothing and Anna of Byzantium - they also represent an impoverishment of representation in my classroom. These are books about white characters (except for The Pearl, which is set in Mexico and adapted from a Mexican folk tale) by 100% white authors.
At a school with > 90% students of color, it has been left up to the teachers to bring diverse perspectives and stories into the curriculum which they may in fact see themselves in. One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia, situates a coming of age story inside the cauldron of 1968 Oakland, weaving the Black Panther Party in and out of the universal experience of growing up. For my Alameda County kids, the relevance is still close to home in so many ways.
I'll be teaching this book instead of Shakespeare if I'm able to fund this project, and this will also give me the opportunity to build my own culturally responsive materials to support it - and to supplement with masters of that work like the Zinn Education Project and Learning for Justice (a.k.a. Teaching Tolerance).
About my class
Although the 7th grade English books my school has sets of for our students are engaging books - The Giver, The Pearl (Steinbeck), Much Ado About Nothing and Anna of Byzantium - they also represent an impoverishment of representation in my classroom. These are books about white characters (except for The Pearl, which is set in Mexico and adapted from a Mexican folk tale) by 100% white authors.
At a school with > 90% students of color, it has been left up to the teachers to bring diverse perspectives and stories into the curriculum which they may in fact see themselves in. One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia, situates a coming of age story inside the cauldron of 1968 Oakland, weaving the Black Panther Party in and out of the universal experience of growing up. For my Alameda County kids, the relevance is still close to home in so many ways.
I'll be teaching this book instead of Shakespeare if I'm able to fund this project, and this will also give me the opportunity to build my own culturally responsive materials to support it - and to supplement with masters of that work like the Zinn Education Project and Learning for Justice (a.k.a. Teaching Tolerance).