Literacy to What End…for Students and Teachers of Color…because Academically, Systemically, and Structurally We Still are Not Saved!?
By Tiffany M. Nyachae, Ph.D.
When I left the classroom in June of 2013, I found refuge in creating out-of-school spaces for young people to use literacy to grapple with their realities and injustice.
How we literacy and what we literacy must be of use in the actual lives of students from marginalized and historically oppressed groups.
Growing weary of uncritical and Eurocentric workshop approaches to ELA, I designed and facilitated Social Justice Literacy Workshop (SJLW), an out-of-school space that fostered student critical literacies and critical dialogue around power dynamics and various social constructions while inciting them to act against injustice. This workshop approach employs diverse texts (and other texts, broadly defined) that reflect current societal injustices, such as, Jacqueline Woodson’s Hush and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. These novels scrutinize police brutality through Black youth protagonists. We use texts to understand and talk deeply about issues, like police brutality, to then think about our own social action and how we can act in our own communities and contexts to fight against injustice.
I never understood the resistance to critical approaches to ELA in schools. I mean, what’s the purpose of forgoing criticality when many students of Color are still not receiving the literacy support they desire through traditional ELA methods? On the one hand, thriving readers and writers of Color are rarely challenged enough in ELA classrooms. On the other hand, I believe that most students who are reading “below grade level” so to speak would like to be supported to improve their reading levels. I have yet to meet one student who does not smile with pride upon discovering that they have increased their reading levels or expanded their writing capacity. And to be clear, reading and writing competency is not solely the responsibility of K-3 teachers. Ethical ELA means that we support all students to be competent readers and writers at any grade level before expecting them to articulate how an author uses foreshadowing in a text, for example.
I was tired of hearing about how many of my seventh-grade students were reading “below grade level.” I wanted to work to change this because I cared about my students fully. I, along with one of the ELA teachers, was a trained literacy specialist/clinician. We knew how to use diagnostic teaching to improve students’ reading and writing. I made a proposition to this ELA teacher, “Instead of spending last period watching students read. How about you and I split up the students who are reading below grade level and create tailored literacy programs for them so that they can improve their reading levels.” She was on board. We went to the math teacher and shared our plan. The math teacher thought it was a great idea and offered that the other students could still read last period, but that she and the other junior high teachers would monitor them while we worked with the students who needed the support. Amazing, the team is on board, I thought. I then presented the idea to the head administrator who sent me to another administrator who shut it down. From that moment on, I was no longer convinced that they were interested in truly supporting our students academically even in a traditional sense. Not only were we failing students in their lived realities outside of school, but we were also failing them in school. I guess I should have known this would be their response considering the ways some administrators, program directors, and instructional coaches undermined my summer school successes of supporting students to increase their reading levels by making snide comments like, “Oh something was wrong with the way those tests were administered…there’s no way those students improved their readings levels that much.”
The specific goals of the Social Justice Literacy Workshop held in the summer of 2016 were for adolescent youth across Western New York to: (a) read novels about relevant issues, (b) connect those issues to larger social and political issues, (c) create art about those issues and about activism, (d) and develop a plan for activism in their local communities. Naively, I expected students to want to act and understand immediately why they must act to change their worlds not only for themselves, but for others. However, that wasn’t the case. While most students were receptive of my culturally responsive and sustaining approaches to teaching, some were not receptive of my calls to action. Even still, when it did come time to discuss what they would like to change in their communities and neighborhoods they often situated the problem in individuals who made bad choices and made their life difficult instead of the ways in which systemic and structural oppression is designed to set up such individuals to make “poor” decisions that hurt the overall neighborhood.
The move from literacy to action did not happen as I thought it would.
Social Justice Literacy Workshop needed to be more contextualized and localized. We were discussing instances of injustice that garnered national attention, but that mostly took place in other cities while urging students to act in their local contexts. Students understood police brutality and how it was wrong, but when it came to social action, they didn’t really see themselves as social actors or playing a crucial role in changing this reality. What do these infamous instances of injustice really mean in their everyday and whose acting for justice in their local contexts and neighborhoods? If we only use examples of injustices and activism that hit the national stage, then we fail to teach students to pay attention to the everyday ways that injustice happens and the ways that ordinary individuals act against it.
What does literacy matter when we consider the material realities of our most structurally oppressed students?
We must use literacy as a tool for action, acting, and political engagement beyond the civic and democratic realms—as if these are the only ways to engage politically. What does voting, for example, mean anyhow in the right now of a young person who is unable to vote? And how can young people engage in a democratic system that discriminates against their age? Sure, this is a lot to consider. So, what can one ELA classroom do?
Social Justice Literacy Workshop saved me and my educator calling. I was the seventh and eighth grade social studies teacher of record and not the ELA teacher. However, with my extensive literacy background and intentional incorporation of literacy into my social studies instruction, I describe my job title then as a social studies and literacy teacher. Everyone from my fellow teacher colleagues to my administrators were aware of my literacy background. Still, I felt pushed out of ELA. Sure, my literacy skillset was useful for an extra set of text prep hands, but beyond that not so much.
I grieved being pushed out of literacy while in the classroom and then the loss of a physical classroom space when I left. Social Justice Literacy Workshop saved me and helped me to heal so that I can now be of use. It helped me to reimagine what is possible in literacy spaces because the literacy in the school where I worked did not transform or attempt to help young people to really act. Perhaps it would have been counterproductive for those ELA classrooms to empower students to act. Would they have organized against the hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism of the ELA classroom? Would they have organized and protested the lack of carefully tailored support for students who were “reading below grade level” in ways similar to Chicano/a/x students on the west coast in the 1960s? As much as I don’t buy much of the “reading level” rhetoric, I do believe that it is unjust and inequitable for us to not exhaust all possibilities (especially the ones that we know work) and instructional skillsets to improve the reading and writing abilities of our most marginalized students. When there’s no urgency, that is in fact unethical ELA.
Rigid disciplinary boundaries are not the answer when we need many corners, slopes, doors, bridges, and matrices for education to become a pathway towards justice.
To truly use literacy as a pathway to justice, we must draw upon other subject areas such as Ethnic Studies, sociology, and dare I say, Critical Race Theory…even in K-12 schools. Social Justice Literacy Workshop can be empowering for teachers because they will begin to pay attention to local elections, policies, and instances of injustice. This empowers them to really consider themselves to be leaders of change. Teachers need to create educational experiences for students where teachers themselves don’t want to leave, and where they are changed and challenged just as much as students.
Why is it that we always must leave the classroom to find liberatory literacy teaching?
Why can’t teachers experience this kind of teaching in their everyday?
I desperately missed my students, especially the classroom space we created and recreated together every year. I grieved the loss of my students and of a physical classroom space that was assigned to me and only me to shape in ways that welcomed and showcased the brilliance of my students.
The year before I left the classroom, we had all witnessed the brutal murder of Trayvon Martin. And, from that point on, the mantra “Black Lives Matter” would forever be imprinted into the world’s consciousness. And yet, in a school filled with beautiful Black children who looked like me, ascendants of African peoples enslaved throughout the United States, I wanted the literacy I taught to do something for me, my students, and the world. I will forever resent the fact that I had to leave the classroom to create this space.
Ethical ELA welcomes teachers to teach in their full glory no matter the space or place.
About the Author
Tiffany M. Nyachae, Ph.D. is host and creator of a podcast called The Evolving Education Project. Additionally, she provides educational consulting through The Evolving Education Project which centers the educational joys, passions, interests, and inquiries of people of Color. Tiffany is also Assistant Professor of Education at The Pennsylvania State University. She researches and facilitates teacher professional development, social justice literacy workshops for youth of Color, and extracurricular programming and curriculum for Black girls.
