80
Volume:
2018
,
October

Slow, Urgent Chats

Submitted By:
Kate Hewitt, Far Brook School, Short Hills, NJ

#DisruptTexts by Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Dr. Kimberly N. Parker, and Julia E. Torres
June 1, 2018

The four change-making women at the center of the #DisruptTexts movement have come together “to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve.”  Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Dr. Kimberly N. Parker, and Julia E. Torres are inspiring educators, dedicated not only to disrupting traditional texts, but also to advocating for anti-racist pedagogies. Searching their #DisruptTexts hashtag in Twitter yields a rich archive that has been built up over months of “slow chats,” in which the facilitators pose questions that ask the eduTwitter community to apply a critical lens to a different text each week. There, inquisitive onlookers and participants alike will find brilliant, provocative suggestions for text pairings and counter-narratives, along with powerful resources on topics like decolonizing the syllabus, critically questioning the centered and marginalized perspectives in a text, and making sure to teach #ownvoices texts written by authors who share the identities of their diverse characters. Most of all, the clarity of moral purpose from these four leaders is inspiring and immediate: this work of disrupting the canon is work that all of our schools must do in order to honor our students and prepare them for the 21st century.

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Curriculum
DEIJ