[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.

[00:00:17] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Our guests today are Dr. Chantal Francois and Dr. Jen McLaughlin Cahill, co-authors of Identity-Affirming Literacies in Schools.

Dr. Francois is an Associate Professor at Towson University’s College of Education in the Department of Instructional Leadership and Professional Development. Dr. Cahill is a Lecturer in Educational Practice and the Director of the Philadelphia Writing Project at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Welcome, Chantal and Jen.

[00:00:49] Chantal F: Thank you.

[00:00:49] Jen M: Thanks so much for having us.

[00:00:52] Amy H-L: In your book, you talk about the importance of relationships among colleagues to humanizing pedagogy. What do you mean by humanizing pedagogy?

[00:01:05] Chantal F: I’ll start, Jen, and feel free to add on. The way that I have been thinking about, or we have both been thinking about humanizing pedagogy is rooted in some of Lilia Bartolomé’s work, and she talks a lot about, or she did talk, her article has been out for some time now. And drawing on work from Freire and other critical scholars, she has talked about humanizing educators, understanding that unfortunately, in our society, schooling can often reproduce the status quo, the social status quo, and the oppressive aspects that we see in society end up existing in our school institutions as well. And so schools are often supporting teaching students, particularly students who are racially and culturally diverse and traditionally marginalized, toward second-class citizenship.

The other important part of humanizing pedagogy, which we explore in the book, which is also grounded in that scholarship as well, is the idea that humanizing educators both see those oppressive forces in schools, but work toward enacting alternative possibilities for their teaching and for students’ learning, and even for the curriculum that they’re teaching.

[00:02:39] Amy H-L: Jen, did you want to add something?

[00:02:42] Jen M: I think the only thing that I would add to that really wonderful and robust description of humanizing pedagogy is that we, in our teaching and in our scholarship, seek to uplift and affirm the voices of young people in all of our work that is designed to argue that literacy is, or can be, should be, an identity-affirming enterprise. And that teachers who have that orientation to their teaching and have a stance toward liberating pedagogies, pedagogies that really view learners, especially in marginalized populations, as bringing great cultural assets to the classroom as in opposition to viewing them with a deficit orientation.

[00:03:36] Amy H-L: And how do those relationships among the teachers impact humanizing pedagogy?

[00:03:45] Jen M: So, Chantal, and we write about this in our book, we have been friends and have been teaching together for more than 20 years, and we were very fortunate to meet and to teach in a school that was set up and organized to have teachers working together to plan, not just plan curriculum, but also to always interrogate curriculum to make sure that it was really centering the needs of all of the learners.

And yeah, and so collaboration has really been foundational to our work, not just … There’s one thing to say collaboration, and it’s a buzzword for a reason. I think everyone knows intellectually how important collaboration is, but then to be in a place where we really took up the work, the deep work of collaboration is something that we really tried to elevate. And the book wouldn’t have existed without that intentionality.

[00:04:44] Jon M: How can school scheduling facilitate the creation and maintenance of those kinds of relationships?

[00:04:54] Chantal F: Yeah. I remember our principal at the time mentioned, I think in one of my interviews, in one of my research interviews, that he believed that the best form of professional learning for teachers was getting them in the same room and getting them talking about young people, about their teaching, about instruction, about the problems that were occurring, and also about what they wanted to do differently.

And that is a very different form of professional learning than what we typically understand to be professional learning opportunities for teachers these days, when they are often in a room with somebody who might not know their school culture very well, might not know the school community very well, and they are just getting training, right. They’re with a lot of PowerPoint slides and they’re supposed to absorb all of that and implement it the next day. And I think that because our school leadership really prioritized adults talking about the work, then that compelled them to design a schedule where there were formal opportunities for us to be talking about the work as much as possible.

So even though we still had the same typical responsibilities as any public school teacher would have, our schedules still allowed us to meet every week with other members of our grade team to talk about how students were doing in other administrative and logistical aspects.

Then in middle school and even in the younger grades in the high school, we could also meet twice a week, sometimes even three times a week, with teachers in our content area and the special education teacher to plan lessons, to plan assessments, to look at student work, to talk about issues that were coming up and to plan the entire school year curriculum.

So I think that philosophy of adults coming together, and especially teachers, can really do productive things. That’s the cornerstone of professional learning, creating a schedule needed to reflect that as well, so that we could have enough time to talk and plan.

[00:07:35] Amy H-L: Is some of that collaboration also modeling for the students, about how people from diverse backgrounds can work together productively?

[00:07:48] Jen M: That’s an interesting question. I would say, to some extent, yes. Teaching can be a really lonely business. And so just to add on to what Chantal was saying, teaching is very hard work and especially when we would bring a lot of care and passion into what we were doing. And then if a lesson would flop, I would just walk down the hall to Chantal’s classroom and say, “Hey, can you talk to me about this lesson?”

So I think that students probably observed that and students probably observed that we were all, as a teaching and learning community, really prioritizing their learning and their experiences. So you wouldn’t hear people talking badly about another educator or if a student would come to me and want to say, “Oh, Chantal gave me an unfair grade.” No one would ever do that, by the way. But if they wanted to discuss something about a teacher, we would always encourage students to talk with their teacher directly, or their advisor. There were just a lot of structures to the school community. And there were structures, but it was really a community. I think structure has the implication of business and rigidity and capitalism and those types of things, but it was really a community, a profoundly impactful one, on both of our careers. And something we try to lift up in the book is that it’s very unusual for someone to teach in the same school, in an urban school, for 20 years like I did. And I actually taught there for 22 years. It was the only school where I ever taught. I did my student teaching there. I got hooked up with some really amazing teachers who were doing a lot of the things I was reading about in graduate school, and it was really a community that prioritized inquiry and collaboration and lots of things that I think are really important in education.

And also, we created a lot of our own materials because we would see textbooks that just did not really address the concerns and the curriculum that we wanted to teach.

[00:10:04] Jon M: And I guess we haven’t really mentioned this, but to give context to people, the school you call Pearl Street Collaborative is a secondary school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Is that correct?

[00:10:15] Jen M: Yes. 

[00:10:16] Jon M: You emphasize that literacy is not just about reading. What do you include?

[00:10:21] Chantal F: So this has come up in some of my recent research, but most definitely stems from my time at Pearl Street. This idea that literacy is really a social and political enterprise as much as it is about the fundamentals, or anything that we conceive it to traditionally be in school settings.

One of the things that my time at Pearl Street really emphasized was the social dimension of literacy, when we traditionally think of it as a very individualized act. When we think about students reading in school or writing in school, we see one individual learner with a book in their hands, or perhaps not even a book, unfortunately, perhaps shorter passages, completing worksheets, or completing questions at the end of a chapter from an anthology and what have you.

And yes, reading does encompass those things for sure, but there’s so much more to literacy that get shortchanged if we’re only thinking about it on those very functional terms. If you take a look back at some of the roots of African American enslaved people in this country, they were employing literacy in ways that were far more functional, right. Literacy was an activity that was meant to be shared with other people. Literacy was a form of resistance as well, that even though it was against the law and even though it was a really risky act, people still did it because they wanted to perhaps, like Frederick Douglass says, imagine themselves free and so on.

And so that thrives at Pearl Street a whole lot, where during our time at Pearl Street, students were in the library talking to one another about book titles that they should consider, titles that they should steer clear of, older students in the library suggesting what they should read, modeling reading for younger students, teachers are often having conversations with their students. “I thought of you this weekend, and this is the book that I think you would really like.”

The school also tried to recreate authentic literacy practices in the building often, so there were book clubs in the building, and authors would come and deliver book talks, for example. And so now we’re seeing all of these, again, authentic social experiences around literacy, far more than just what we often typically see as narrow conceptualizations of literacy in school, be it in an English language arts class or a history class.

[00:13:24] Amy H-L: So is reading, contemporary reading, all political in some way?

[00:13:34] Chantal F: Can you say what you mean by contemporary reading?

[00:13:37] Amy H-L: Well, I mean, reading now. Contemporary students is really what I mean. Contemporary students, you speak about in the days of slavery, and I think about people reading specifically so that they can imagine what it’s like to actually be a free human. When students read now, is the political aspect in what they choose to read or what the teachers choose for them to read, or is there something else that you have in mind?

[00:14:08] Chantal F: In our book, we write about literacy as a sociocultural activity. And so even though we started talking about writing the book in 2020, we’re very concerned about the proliferation of the book bans that really were gaining traction in 2021.

And then I designed a mini-unit of study with my students at the center of it that’s also featured in the book. I think throughout our time teaching at Pearl Street, and I, and we hope that this really comes through in the book, is that teaching is a political act. We live in an unequal society, and so we want every single student that we teach to take up literacy practices that honor their own experiences, but that also put them in the position of learning about someone else, so that reading provides windows, doors, and mirrors, Gloria Ladson- Billings and Rudine Sims Bishop, and others who really were able to show that when learners have that exchange with reading, that they are able to do tremendous acts.

And sometimes that includes activism. So in the things that we would ask students to write, there were lots of different multimodal literacy practices being enacted. So expository writing’s really important. Writing about works of literature and writing research papers is, of course, very important, but so are writing personal narratives, and creative writing, and writing as something that can be an extension of one’s identity and daily life, that there are different audiences for writing.

So depending on who your audience is, your audience shouldn’t, is not me, the teacher. I want you to view the audience as your classmates or New York City or the United States or somewhere else because it was very important to me and to us that our students viewed themselves as having a voice that was really valuable and vital for sharing their perspectives as young people who are growing up in a very different world than the one that I grew up in, with technologies that did not exist when I was young. So really being mindful of that and having some humility about that is really an important part of the work as well. So I’m not sure if I answered your question about politics, but we very much were asking our students to read the word and read the world, a Freirean concept. And this world that we live in every day, there’s just numerous issues that impact all of us really directly, and that in the time that we were teaching at Pearl Street, we would come in, we would be in a space, in a room with young people who were watching things that we would study and read about, and learn about what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a human being, what it means to have empathy. And then they would come in and read things in the newspaper that just were completely antithetical to things that they’re learning about in school, and they had really, really big questions about that. And so we didn’t shy away from those questions. Those questions were really difficult. And there were certainly days and moments where we did not have answers to those questions, but I think that the students coming in and posing those questions was indicative of a culture, a school community that really, it, students become invested in inquiry and they become invested in challenging the status quo and really exploring why do certain laws and rules exist.

Why are all the books that are being banned about LGBTQ+ people or about racism or about immigration? Huh, that’s pretty interesting. Our students notice that.

And then in the first set of journalistic articles that were coming out in 2021, almost none of them had a youth perspective. These were all coming from school boards and political groups. So one of the things I asked my students to do was to see if there are any youth perspectives on this topic. And some of them found some articles, but they were mostly, it was journalism where students were being interviewed and they were asked, “What do you think about this book being banned?” And they were saying, “We don’t think that politicians should be able to tell us what we can and can’t read.”

[00:18:53] Jon M: Mission statements are often word-smithed and then forgotten. And you talk about how the English department at Pearl Street Collaborative developed its mission statement as a meaningful document. Could you elaborate?

[00:19:07] Chantal F: Sure. I can start. I think one of the things that happened at the time when we decided to craft a mission statement was, I think it is a reflection of the mutual responsibility that we have as educators toward each other and toward the school and toward our students’ learning. And a few of us were like, “Well, we know we believe the same thing, but we actually haven’t ever written it out. ” And instead of just having one person be the author of this mission statement, because we believe in collaboration as a humanizing approach to our work, we should collectively write a mission statement to really articulate explicitly what we believe and what we want for our teaching and how we hope that our teaching impacts our students as well.

And so, during our department meetings, we spent some time just really engaged in a writing workshop as we would with our students focused on the mission statement. And we each wrote all of, I think it was probably about 18 teachers or so, we each wrote what we believed, why we taught it at Pearl Street, what we wanted our students to know and be able to do by the time they graduated, why we persisted in our work at Pearl Street and so on. And we collected all those drafts, we did some turn and talks and talked about resonant themes that were coming up across our drafts. We wrote a draft, got feedback from the whole group and everything and decided on some terms and what have you.

And as you mentioned, Jon, one of the things that often happens is that it’s posted on a website or it’s in a pamphlet and it looks nice, it’s a lot of words, and then that’s done. But I remember during my time at Pearl Street, and I get the sense that this continues that we would bring it out every year or so and spend time during our department meetings rereading it and talking about what’s coming up for us now in this year, and how is that impacting X area of instruction? Are there other aspects that we should be thinking about in our teaching, given what we’ve written about?

We also agreed that that mission statement was not set in stone, and we believe that it was dynamic just as the times are, just as our young people are, and that we could amend it and revise it as we saw fit to continue to be responsive to our teaching demands and the context of the world in our school. And so revisiting it like that occasionally allowed for that process to happen. And I’m pretty sure we had students read it as well. I remember using it in some of my teaching, and we would also use it when we would talk to candidates who were interested in teaching at our school. So it was a really great exercise and, or a great process, I’ll say.

And it also, I think, was a great way to help us remain accountable to each other and to our community so that we could … I think we understood that having some shared values was very important and that if there was anyone who didn’t quite understand why we were pursuing certain lines of inquiry in our curriculum and so on, that we would be, really be able to trace it back to our mission.

[00:23:17] Amy H-L: Returning to the subject of literacy, how do you structure literacy instruction around independent reading and reading whole books? I mean, do kids read whole books today?

[00:23:31] Jen M: Yes. They do. But Chantal, do you want to talk first about independent reading?

[00:23:37] Chantal F: Yeah. I’ll start and then you can chime in, as you were teaching more recently at Pearl Street.

Amy, you asked such an important question because I think about kids reading whole books these days, because the news would tell us differently. And I think that we’ve seen some news reports about students not being able to complete books, that it’s not a priority in the curriculum anymore. Higher education professors and instructors are lamenting that their students are unable to complete whole books and all of the things. And I do believe that we always need to pay attention to young people’s literacy development, but there are sometimes when we frame certain narratives in this crisis language, that what ends up happening is that it just often hurts the young people who are often most traditionally marginalized because the response can often be, “Okay, let’s just continue to do remediation and rote learning so that they can catch up or meet the standards or what have you.” And so I think that’s just one thing for us to be thinking about.

The way that Pearl Street’s approach, especially during the time of my research, was never really an either or approach, right. There was never an either or of they’re just going to read from textbooks for English language arts, they’re just going to read the texts that are privileged in the common core standards, for example. Our approach was always, we want our students to have the kind of capital that is important to be successful in middle school, high school, college, and in all of their arenas, and we also want them to be exposed to a wide variety of authentic literacy experiences.

I think the other fortunate thing about our school was that there was also an emphasis on not just teaching literacy in English language arts, but there was also an emphasis on literacy instruction, both reading and writing, speaking and listening in history, in science. They’re reading in advisory classes, in math, they’re keeping math notebooks and so on. So having a more comprehensive approach to literacy also meant that students are reading a lot of different texts in a lot of different contexts. The way that you’re going to read something in a biology class, for example, might look very different than the way that you’re reading it in an English language arts class.

That all meant that students were reading short texts, both fiction and nonfiction. They were reading memoirs. They were reading from the typical United States canon of books that might include Shakespeare, any particular year, anything like that, and they were also reading during independent reading their books of choice. And so I think that comprehensive approach allowed for, “We know that you want a time to exert some agency and make some choices about the books you read, and we’re going to have time for you to do that every single day. We also are going to allow for our English language arts classes to push you out of your comfort zone, and expose you to texts and characters and worlds that you might not normally meet. And so we’re going to have those opportunities as well.”

And so, Jon, I know you had an earlier question about the schedule. The English language art schedule was often a double period to allow for those multiple forms of reading and reading instruction as well during the day. I’ll just add on that what you just shared, Amy, that there’s, in the discourse right now, there’s this notion that students aren’t reading whole books and they’re going to college really unprepared. So I would take … I wasn’t hearing that when I was still in the classroom teaching, but if I were still there now, I would bring in those articles and have my students read them and say, “What do we think about this? Where do we see ourselves in this? Can we acknowledge that we are reading less?” I think that many of us would acknowledge that we have a proliferation of digital media that we are bombarded with, which is reading also, but really finding and identifying some new ways to carve out routines and things like that that will really protect time for reading and time for reading books and literature. And I think the only other thing I’ll lift up is that across various domains of literacy, reading, writing… so if we were going to read memoir, we would then also have times during the day to learn about the craft of memoir and be engaged in some written work around memoir. If we were reading canonical literature, which we did not read as frequently as other schools around the United States, because we very intentionally would select literature that was part of a whole year of study, and the curriculum was articulated from sixth through 12th grade, so we would be focused on various themes and topics of inquiry across the English curriculum, and also with finding moments for interdisciplinarity.

So for instance, in 10th grade, if there was a particular unit in the world history curriculum, we read a novel by, gosh, the author’s name just slipped, The Leavers, which is a fiction novel, but the character is an immigrant who’s been adopted by a white family, and it’s a really rich and layered novel that connects to a lot of different issues that we’re grappling with, alongside reading Hamlet.

So lots of different kinds of texts, lots of different engagements with reading and with writing, and lots of different ways that we were asking students to be in dialogue with each other and be prepared to have analytical, text-based discussions about what they were reading.

And then also they had to present sometimes, they had to present things. So earlier, when I mentioned that I had my students go out and find journalism about what young people were saying about book bans, they needed to come to class prepared to present and talk about what they had found with a small group of peers, which is another form of literacy, having presentation skills using various digital platforms that they could showcase their work and opportunities to make things.

Zines is something I’ve been able to do a lot more work with in my teaching with teachers and grad students, but was always something that I was wanting to explore with young people as well. And then lo and behold, our art teachers were better at doing that at the school where we taught at Pearl Street, who had students create these mini-zines about a social justice topic that they were interested in.

So yeah, I totally got off my point about reading, reading books, but lots and lots of reading. And if I were still in the school building now, I would be getting students to really examine that topic and really look at to what extent is that happening and to what extent might this be not disinformation, but just not entirely accurate based on their experiences.

[00:31:23] Jon M: Why did the faculty decide to focus on LGBTQ+ identity-affirming literacies and what did that look like as you did it?

[00:31:31] Jen M: When I was a student teacher at the school, I had been out of high school for a few years, obviously, but I was really surprised about the homophobic language that I heard in hallways, because I had somehow thought that school like the rest of society would have progressed in advance to a much more progressive understanding of identity and, and affirming queer and trans people and so on. But I learned as a student teacher that that was not the case, even at this wonderful school where I started my teaching. But what was really so important, and I’m pretty sure I wrote about this in the book, was that I was a student teacher, I noticed homophobic language, and then there were teachers, the teacher who was supervising me and a couple of other teachers who started, who formed an inquiry group and who were talking as a faculty about how we address this as a school community. What should we be reading about? What should we learn? How do we do this well? How do we really try to make our school community, how do we combat homophobia? That’s what the conversation looked like in the 2000s. And so, our principal invited GLSEN in to do some professional learning and some reading with teachers. The teachers who had questions or didn’t understand why it was important were able to do some reading and some learning about, yes, in fact, it is really important. And then in New York City in particular, it’s required that students are not marginalized or excluded based on their, their race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. So it was really a project that was undertaken from the very beginning of my teaching career.

And in writing the book, I had journals that I’d written in before I was even a teacher at the school, at Pearl Street, and I had been journaling about this from the very beginning of my career. So at first it was combating homophobia, but then it was, what we learned from GLSEN is that there are really four supports. It’s important that students can identify their supportive educators in the building, that there are visual symbols around the building that demonstrate that there’s support for LGBTQ+ youth and individuals, but then an inclusive curriculum and GSAs was another one. So having school clubs, but then inclusive curriculum was one of the recommendations from this organization. And, that was something that we saw as a school community that we did not have that, and so we wanted to begin creating that. And so it started that we created curriculum in our advisory classes, which is an advisory is, each teacher has a group of about 12 to 15 students that they’re like the homeroom teacher, but they’re also like, that’s the home base. And then the advisory class is taught a couple of times a week, and that those are for students to learn about issues that are things like health education. So we started by including some LGBTQ+ topics in advisory. But then from there, we identified like, well, we need to be doing this in English and history class also because there’s this whole body of literature and narratives and stories about people with, if we’re doing culturally relevant pedagogy, then we really want to make sure that we have as much, uh, diversity in our curriculum as we can.

So it was a long, ongoing process. And when I started, then when I was a doctoral student and was exploring, “What do I want to focus my research on? What is my dissertation going to be about? And it was then that I said, “Oh, this is, this is an inquiry that I’ve been pursuing for my entire teaching career. And this is something that the field of literacy and English education is deeply concerned with. And then here’s this school community where it is possible.” It is not possible to do that in school communities around the United States right now. But the reason that the chapter in the book, chapter three, is focused on that study that I was just referring to, it’s situated in the middle of the book because a lot of the other things about the school community that we’ve already talked about are what really created the conditions where a queer- and trans-inclusive curriculum was really possible.

Without some of those things in place, it is possible for educators to enact harm on young people if they are not in a place where they are well-supported and well-situated and steeped in some knowledge and some learning about how to support LGBTQ youth with an inclusive curriculum. There are lots of other ways that people can and should affirm LGBTQ youth in schools, but not all of them, it might not be possible to do that through an inclusive curriculum at this moment in time, unfortunately.

[00:36:44] Jon M: What was the impact on students of the LGBTQ+ focus? What did you find?

[00:36:50] Chantal F: Well, what we found is that all of the dimensions of the English department at Pearl Street, which included things like, independent reading, students having time throughout the day to choose books, read things that they want to read, but then also talk to others about it, doing lots and lots of writing, writing literary response papers and deep analysis of literature, and then also drawing, ideally drawing connections across and among works of literature to their own authentic experiences, where they are able to draw connections to their own lives, or they’re able to learn about someone whose experience is really unlike theirs, and that they can learn about it and empathize.

So I saw that, and I think one of the things that I was most struck by was, when students are in a book club curriculum, which means that they, there are six tables of students reading a different novel together, and as the teacher, you’re just kinda off to the side and the students are doing their thing in a small group, that takes an enormous amount of work to really set that up so that students are able to, in those small groups, have rigorous discussions, to get really close with the text, to be sharing different quotes, and talking, and asking questions of each other, and posing theories about characters. And so it was a lot of work to set that up, and I was really, I wasn’t surprised by it, but I was really encouraged that they did so with so much thought and a lot more rigor than I had anticipated. I think sometimes when we think about teaching with young adult literature, we think, “Well, it’s not as literary as some other forms of literature that we teach with, and so this and that.” But because they were reading it on their own, the novels were very intentionally selected at a variety of levels so that they would be able to read it independently without a teacher’s, I don’t want to say guidance. There were structures that all of the groups had to follow, but they didn’t … The books were at an instructional level, so they could, excuse me, at an independent level. When books are at an instructional level, it means that we’re reading a book together as a class, but this is probably at a reading level that is beyond where you are, or we’re going to be engaging in some deep work with this literature, so that I can support you with how to read a really challenging or sophisticated piece of literature when you were in college or in 11th grade or so on.

These were books that were pretty close to where the students’ reading levels already were, and yet they brought a very sophisticated analysis to the novels, where they were learning about each other and asking some pretty fundamental and really thoughtful questions about the characters in the novels.

So that, to me, was very important. There were other things that happened that were somewhat problematic reifications of, or … But at the same time, the prevailing spirit of the curriculum was that it was just part of the 9th grade curriculum. This is what we’re doing in English class, and the students were very engaged in these opportunities to read books that featured young adult characters.

[00:40:34] Jon M: Thank you, Chantal Francois and Jen McLaughlin Cahill, authors of Identity-Affirming Literacies in School.

[00:40:42] Amy H-L: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show.

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