On Historically Responsive Literacy

 

Interview here: Historically Responsive Literacy: A More Complete Education for All Students | Cult of Pedagogy

Muhammad’s critique of the education system is that the educational standards in place do not reach most black students because the “curricula and standards are lacking” [00:02:06]. The standards are lacking because they teach skills that are only useful on standardized tests. Muhammad believes that teaching should instead focus on a four-layer framework that involves identity, skill development, intellect, and criticality. The curriculum “was never designed for black and brown students” and as such, those students who are most alienated by said curriculum are the ones who will learn the least from it [00:12:50]. Muhammad stresses that the standards need to be rewritten to be equitable in order to fix them.

There are four layers to Muhammad’s framework: identity, skill development, intellect, and criticality. In the first layer, identity, representation is the key idea. Students need to see others who look like them, act like them, and dress like them to become more comfortable with their self-concept. I imagine that I feel the same way as I play the Sims. The ability to create a Sim that looks like me makes me feel more invested in the game, making me want to play more. The same is true of students; when students see images of themselves reflected in the characters of stories they will read, they will be more engaged with the text because they can relate to them easier.

The second layer of the framework, skill development, involves considering a wider range of skills than usually considered. Muhammad suggests that a wider variety of evaluation should be considered in evaluating if a skill is gained or not, stating: “And then when you assess it, you can assess it in discussion, if they were able to talk about it. You can assess it in a quiz or a summative kind of test at the end”. These types of assessment differ from the usually pen and paper tests while still adhering to higher-order thinking. I remember my English teachers in high school assessing us with Socratic Seminars. The teacher would grade us on participation and the quality of our questions asked and notes taken during the discussion which allowed teachers to assess us through writing and through speaking. By doing an assessment in a variety of ways, it allows teachers to differentiate instruction as well. Perhaps there is a student who is not good at taking a multiple-choice test, but they excel in discussion-based assessments. That could be one way to utilize “skill development framework” in the classroom.

The third layer of the framework is intellect. According to Muhammad, achieving intellectualism is a simple as asking, “what do we want our students to become smarter about?” Additionally, Muhammad makes a point to differentiate between intellectualism and skills stating that “the difference between knowledge and intellect, intellectualism is when you do something with that knowledge, where you apply it somehow, in your discussion, in your activism, in your actions, in your exercises, in learning”. Essentially, intellect is about getting students to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy by encouraging them to create new things. In an English class, this could involve students writing their own short stories. This could only come after students read and analyzed other short stories so that they know what works and what does not in the format.

Finally, there is criticality which is the act of “helping students to read, write and think in active ways”. In the classroom, this could be as simple as asking students to analyze a text or look at a text through a variety of different literary theories. Of course, teachers could also encourage students to view texts in an “anti-racist” mindset through Critical Race Theory or take use Peggy McIntosh’s iconic essay, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, to start conversations about privilege and race.