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Culturally Sustaining Literature
Equity, Language and Literacy | K-12
Literature is powerful. It can serve as both a window into other worlds and a mirror into our understanding of self. Its ability to achieve both of those things—inspiring introspection and extrospection—depends heavily on educators’ ability to teach about a large range of texts.
In this course, we’ll use the lens of culturally sustaining pedagogy to examine the importance of texts that are both culturally responsive and culturally representative. You will explore how to select texts for curriculum and classroom libraries that are reflective of your students and that include a wider lens of diversity to introduce students to a world that is full of beautiful differences. Throughout your learning, you will critically evaluate canon and form a better understanding of the potential and limitations of different pieces of literature.
Using the techniques and resources from this course, you’ll be able to diversify your classroom literature to broaden your students’ understanding of this great big world.
Connections to Practice
This course provides the following classroom connections:
- Criteria for evaluating the representative nature of diverse texts
- Tools for creating text inventories and auditing the representation present in your curriculum
- Strategies for integrating more diverse texts into your curriculum and instruction
- Techniques for addressing barriers to text changes in curriculum and instruction
Course Objectives
In this course, participants will:
- Examine culturally sustaining pedagogy as a lens for diversifying course and classroom readings.
- Analyze the role of canon in representation and classroom course and library texts.
- Develop a process for diversifying course and classroom texts through auditing and evaluation.
- Evaluate criteria diversifying texts to increase representation.
- Outline approaches to integrating more diverse texts into your curriculum and instruction.
- Develop a plan for approaching challenges to decentering canon.
Interested in School/District PD?
Request a Free ConsultationWhy Partner With Us
- Train your staff in as little as eight hours or delve deeper into complex topics in our longer courses.
- Replace in-person PD days with 100% online, self-paced training teachers can complete virtually.
- Get PD tailored to your school's unique needs with our customizable content and flexible solutions.
- Offer higher education rigor and quality designed to give your teachers targeted, relevant training they can apply immediately.
- Increase buy-in and morale by providing teacher choice while maintaining school/district oversight and strategic alignment.
Interested in School/District PD?
Request a Free ConsultationCourse Design
We intentionally plan and build our course offerings to solve real problems in education. We regularly update our existing catalog and develop new courses based on schools’ needs, trends in K–12 education, and continual feedback from educators. Depending on your needs, you can train your staff in as little as eight hours with our short courses, or delve into complex topics in our longer ones.
Our course writers are content experts with extensive subject matter credentials and classroom experience. They work closely with our development team to build an experience that is relevant, highly practical, and aligned with industry standards. Courses are not just filled with innovative techniques, but also illustrate how to apply these tools in practice. With each course, teachers develop tangible products such as lesson plans or assessments that they can use immediately in their classrooms.
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