Drawing from a wealth of historical and cultural knowledge, Scholastic’s newest professional title, Revolutionary Love: Creating a Culturally Inclusive Literacy Classroom, provides educators with the tools needed for inclusive literacy teaching. Pulling from the various experiences between veteran educators from the University of South Carolina and Kennesaw State University, the five co-authors – Sanjuana C. Rodriguez, Michele Myers, Eliza G. Braden, Natasha Thornton, and Kamania Wynter-Hoyte – utilize their collective backgrounds to produce nine vibrant chapters that highlight how instructing students through a culturally responsive lens enables teachers to love students deeper and more emphatically.
Revolutionary Love celebrates all students and their identities by offering educators practical resources on self-examination, pointers on how to identify and break from systems of oppression, and ways to richly engage with families and communities. Through inclusive reading and writing instruction, the authors hope that teachers can positively honor the cultures and legacies students of color bring to the classroom, and by doing so, create an environment that not only welcomes differences, but embraces them, too.
With inspiration from poets and scholars such as Maya Angelou, bell hooks, Ibram X. Kendi, Paulo Freire, Kalamu ya Salaam, and more, this title affirms the excellence of Black and Latine students. This title provides extensive guidelines on how to choose diverse children’s books, and also how to guide them through their experience of learning how to read, exploring multiple languages, finding their favorite titles, and above all, becoming lifelong learners.
Authors of the title elaborate on the deeper meaning behind “revolutionary love” and why this approach is critical in today’s classroom:
“Revolutionary love helps all students by disrupting messages of racial inferiority, omission, and inaccurate historical representations. Teachers who embrace revolutionary love understand the tremendous responsibility of shaping the next generation of lawmakers, medical professionals, financial managers, and teachers who will either perpetuate racism or disrupt it. Teachers who embrace revolutionary love understand that this disruption is twofold. First, it involves cultivating spaces for Black and Latine children that affirm their brilliance in an educational system and curriculum that has failed them. Second, it involves cultivating spaces so that non-Black and non-Latine children recognize the brilliance of their peers’ communities, histories, and heritages.”
To learn more about Revolutionary Love, follow this hashtag #RevolutionaryLoveBook and find these authors on Facebook: Sanjuana C. Rodriguez, Michele Myers, Kamania Wynter-Hoyte, Eliza G. Braden, Natasha Thornton