Collectively, all over the country and world, we are seeing the effects of what happens when we come together in the name of justice. The death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Nina Pop, and so many others has sparked an unprecedented outcry for anti-racist structural change and a complete end to police violence against Black people.
As an organization that promotes the educational tools to create an equitable classroom that uplifts the imaginations of all our students, we understand that we must first dedicate our practices to cross cultural education and anti-racist community building.
Below are articles from the archives of Teachers & Writers Magazine that can be starting points for conversations, both in and out of the classroom, about the Black experience and what we—as individuals and as a nation—can do to make things better.
Interviews
- Interview with Nikky Finney: Say Hard Things Tender
- Interview with Renee Watson and Ibi Zoboi: The Platform the Book Can Provide
- Rigorous Play and Necessary Joy: An Interview with Poet and Teacher Ross Gay
- The Talk: Dr. Joshua Bennett on Obsessions, Music, and Blackness Across Time
- The Talk: Roya Marsh on Student Voice, Black Queer Joy, and Getting Out of the Way
- You Must Always Ask Yourself: Whose Story Am I Missing – Interview with Yaa Gyasi
- The Ball Turned into Poetry: A Conversation with Glenis Redmond
- The Braver We Become: An Interview with Elizabeth Acevedo
- Are We Teaching in a New World?: Yahdon Israel on Language Barriers, Educational Politics, and Online Teaching
Lesson Plans
- Who Am I? Exploring Stereotypes and Identity Through Poetry
- Dear America
- Exploring Candidates and Campaigning
- Using Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to Prompt Writing About Prejudice
- Using Douglass Narrative to Inspire Student Writing
- Origin Story Lesson Plan Using Afro-Latina by Elizabeth Acevedo
- “What If”: Trusting Students With Difficult and Challenging Model Texts
- Finding Your Voices: How Jericho Brown, Diana Ross, and Janis Joplin Can Inspire Student Writing
- Feel: Exploring Emotion in Poetry With Kendrick Lamar
Reflections
- I Find it Hard to Say: Creating Space for Young People to Feel and Reflect
- Reading While Black: Or, For Colored Children who Considered Literary Suicide When the Rainbow Wasn’t Enough
- Teaching about Racism: Toward a Shared History and Common Language
- Trouble the Waters: Caribbean and Diasporic Writers Resource
- Valves, Salves, and Blueprints: Poetry and Artivism
- The Writer as Activist
- A Black Person’s Life: Student writing by Jasmine, 7th grade
- Black: Student writing by Eric, 4th grade
- Poetry as a Mirror
Additional Resources for Educators
- We Rise, We Resist, We Raise our Voices Edited by Wade Hudson and Cheryl Willis Hudson
- Teaching for Black Lives Edited By Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au
- Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-imagining the Language Arts Classroom by Linda Christensen
- Teaching for Justice: Implementing Social Justice in the LIS Classroom Edited by Nicole A. Cooke and Miriam E. Sweeney
- The Schomburg Library’s Black Liberation Reading List
Books & Booklists for Youth
- Brown Bookshelf: 28 Days Later – Spotlight of children’s and YA books by African American authors
- Embrace Race: Children’s Books We Use to Teach Young Kids to be Anti-Racist
- School Library Journal: 10 Books to Read After “The Hate You Give”
- Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi.
Photo by Octavia Beale
Teachers & Writers Magazine is published by Teachers & Writers Collaborative as a resource for teaching the art of writing to people of all ages. The online magazine presents a wide range of ideas and approaches, as well as lively explorations of T&W’s mission to celebrate the imagination and create greater equity in and through the literary arts.
