George Floyd’s death in police custody, in May 2020, amplified existing calls for racial justice in all parts of our society. In my school, this took the form of a rededication to culturally responsive pedagogy. Our professional development centered on learning from Gholdy Muhammad’s book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. Muhammad’s text sets forth an equity framework, “Historically Responsive Literacy,” built upon five pursuits of Identity, Skills, Intellect, Criticality, and Joy. Incorporating and centering on these pursuits in my lesson plans have been transformative for my teaching practice by causing me to reexamine not only the stories I present to my students but how I present classroom stories. In this first of two blog posts, I will focus on the interaction between the pursuit of Identity and the pursuit of Skills and Intellect.
Muhammad shifts identity by broadening the definition. There is currently a focus on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and physical ability, as well as other characteristics, as defining aspects of one’s identity. Muhammad takes a wider lens and looks at identity as all the roles one has in life – both because of the characteristics mentioned above, which can shape how a person moves or is able to move through the world, and also because of all the internal characteristics that affect how a person thinks and acts in different situations: what kind of friend you are, how you react to injustices, how you listen, and so on. Identity means understanding your own roles and connections to the world around you. In this lesson plan on Ceres and the cultural value of xenia, I ask students to examine their own identities by considering the actions and decisions of characters in the text: What makes a good host? What makes a good guest? How does each of us act in those situations?
This brings us to the pursuits of Skills and Intellect, which allow our students to access the texts in the first place.
Latin teachers have traditionally been focused on the pursuit of Skills. Whether with specific grammatical rules or broader comprehension strategies, we strive to provide our students with the tools necessary to read a text. In the Ceres lesson plan, you can see the types of skills that I expect my students to develop; for example, filling out the reading frame, they are asked to find evidence to support their understanding of the main points of the story. When the skills-based tasks are connected within a lesson plan to identity-related activities, however, I have seen that it increases meaning for my students.
As students read the text, they both develop and rely upon their intellect, which Mohammad defines as an ability to think deeply and originally supported by knowledge. In this lesson plan, students increase their knowledge of xenia and hospitium through the language while still relying upon their previous understanding of the story of Pluto and Proserpina – as well as their existing knowledge of the nature of the Greek gods. They are building a kind of cultural literacy about the ancient world, which allows them to better understand the text within its original context and to analyze and come to conclusions about it.
In the next blog post in this series, I will look at how the pursuits of Criticality, the naming and critique of systems of power and oppressions, and Joy, the recognition and enjoyment of pleasure and delight, interact in the stories we tell in our classrooms.
Click below to download the lesson plan.
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