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Literacy for Justice, Equity, and Antiracism Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy Gholdy Muhammad. Scholastic, 2020.
As a teacher and educational researcher, I believe that education plays a crucial role in fostering students' critical perspectives toward racism, bias, injustice, and discrimination in our schools, society, and world. The book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy by Gholdy Muhammad provides educators with a concrete plan for advancing equity and justice in the present by looking to the history of Black literary societies of the past. In nineteenth-century societies, African American men, and later women, gathered together to share and expand their knowledge, and to read widely and deeply in order to cultivate their minds. From her research on these societies and in present-day schools, Muhammad presents a four-layered pedagogical model: the historically responsive literacy framework. This model centers the historical pursuits of identity, skills, intellect, and criticality for cultivating the genius in students.
When teachers bring these pursuits together through the historically responsive literacy framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Most importantly, this model develops students' abilities to recognize their own power and genius to enact change in unjust structures they encounter. Muhammad describes the potential for the historically responsive literacy framework this way: "If we start with Blackness (which we have not traditionally done in schooling) or the group of people who have uniquely survived the harshest oppressions in this country, then we begin to understand ways to get literacy education right for all" (22). Although Muhammad intentionally designed the framework with Black students in mind, I have been convinced of the benefit for students across all racial groups.
Evidence of the need for Cultivating Genius began with its launch at the 2019 NCTE conference in Baltimore, Maryland. The Scholastic author signing event...