Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism edited by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler offers innovative approaches to teaching Black speculative fiction (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror) in ways that will inspire middle and high school students to think, talk, and write about issues of equity, justice, and antiracism. The book highlights texts by seminal authors such as Octavia E. Butler and influential and emerging authors, including Nnedi Okorafor, Kacen Callender, B. B. Alston, Tomi Adeyemi, and Bethany C. Morrow. Each chapter in Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: introduces a Black speculative text and its author, describes how the text engages with issues of equity, justice, and/or antiracism, explains and describes how one theory or approach helps elucidate the key text’s concern with equity, justice, and/or antiracism, and offers engaging teaching activities that encourage students to read the focal text; that facilitate exploration of the text and a theoretical lens or critical approach; and that guide students to consider ways to extend the focus on equity, justice, and/or antiracism to action in their own lives and communities.

This edited volume offers sound suggestions for advancing diversity in the teaching profession. It provides teacher education programs with needed training materials to accommodate Black male students, and school district administrators and leaders with information to help recruit and retain Black male teachers.

This highly focused collection of papers, commissioned by the National Urban League, offers a candid and courageous portrait of black education in transition. This is a period, as the editors note in their opening remarks, that is characterized by a huge shift from federal responsibility for minority education to authority and autonomy being lodged at the local government level. Further, many institutions that once worked well, no longer do so. Many ambitious social programs and policies that originally promised much, have been abandoned, have failed, or just faded away. Pivotal to these times and changes is the question of the extent to which the American educational system has been, or still is, capable of being responsive to incorporating and even instigating equity and excellence for black Americans. This volume asks the hard questions: is the educational system geared up for the maintenance of anything other than mainstream values? can it adapt to minority youth requirements? when, why, and how do educational policies of majorities and minorities clash? How are priorities to be established on the basis of wealth or need? The legal statutes and administrative enforcement of equal educational opportunities are explored in depth and with a deep compassion for all parties involved.

In this book on higher education the contributors make The Black Lives Matter (#BLM) their focus and engage in contemporary theorizing around the issues central to the Movement: Black Deprivation, Black Resistance, and Black Liberation. The #BLM movement has brought national attention to the deadly oppression shaping the everyday lives of Black people. With the recent murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd from state-sanctioned violence by police, the public outrage and racial unrest catapulted #BLM further into the mainstream. Institutional leaders (e.g., provosts, department heads, faculty, campus administrators), particularly among white people, soon began realizing that anti-Blackness could no longer be ignored, making #BLM the most significant social movement of our time. The chapters included in this volume cover topics such as white institutional space and the experiences of Black administrators; a Black transnational ethic of Black Lives Matter; depictions of #BLM in the media; racially liberatory pedagogy; campus rebellions and classrooms as sites for Black liberation; Black women’s labor and intersectional interventions; and Black liberation research. The considerations for research and practice presented are intended to assist institutional leaders, policy-makers, transdisciplinary researchers, and others outside higher education, to dismantle anti-Blackness and create supportive mechanisms that benefit Black people, especially those working, learning and serving in higher education. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

This book is about effective literacy instruction for students in grades K-4 who use the language variety that many linguists call African American English, but which, as explained in the Introduction, the author calls Black Communications (BC). Throughout, considerable attention is given to discussing the integral and complex interconnections among African American language, culture, and history, drawing significantly on examples from African American historical and literary sources. Although it is theoretical in its description of the BC system and its discussion of research on language socialization in African American communities, the major focus of this book is pedagogy. Many concrete examples of successful classroom practices are included so that teachers can readily visualize and use the strategies and principles presented. *Part I, ‘What is Black Communications?” presents an overview of the BC system, providing a basic introduction to the major components of the language—phonology, grammar, lexicon, and pragmatics, and illustrating how these components work in synchrony to create a coherent whole. *Part II, “Language Socialization in the African American Discourse Community,” examines existing research on African American children’s language socialization. *Part III, “Using African American Children’s Literature,” draws connections between strategy instruction and the linguistic and rhetorical abilities discussed in Part II. Each chapter ends with suggestions for using African American literature to help children develop their speaking and writing abilities. *Part IV, “Children Using Language,” moves from a focus on teaching comprehension strategies to helping BC speakers learn to decode text. This volume is directed to researchers, faculty, and graduate students in the fields of language and literacy education and linguistics, and is well-suited as a text for graduate-level courses in these areas.

Black women in higher education continue to experience colder institutional climates that devalue their presence. They are relied on to mentor students and expected to commit to service activities that are not rewarded in the tenure process and often lack access to knowledgeable mentors to offer career support. There is a need to move beyond the individual resistance strategies employed by Black women to institutional and policy changes in higher education institutions. Specifically, higher education policymakers and administrators should understand and acknowledge how the race and gender makeup of campuses and departments impact the successes and failures of Black women as they work to recruit and retain Black women graduate students, faculty, and administrators. Black Women Navigating Historically White Higher Education Institutions and the Journey Toward Liberation provides a collection of ethnographies, case studies, narratives, counter-stories, and quantitative descriptions of Black women's intersectional experience learning, teaching, serving, and leading in higher education. This publication also provides an opportunity for Black women to identify the systems that impede their professional growth and development in higher education institutions and articulate how they navigate racist and sexist forces to find their versions of success. Covering a range of topics such as leadership, mental health, and identity, this reference work is ideal for higher education professionals, policymakers, administrators, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

Black Experiences in Higher Education: Faculty, Staff, and Students illuminates the narratives of Black faculty, staff, and students and how they navigate their professional experiences, confront the hidden curriculum and work to transform academia. As we think about the context of Black Lives Matter, intersections of race and gender, and what it means to be Black in America, there is a new consciousness and attention to the uniqueness of Black experiences in the world. This book calls attention to how Black folks are navigating their experiences within higher education. The book will present an overarching aim to delve into Black voices and experiences in higher education. Contributing authors hold varying roles of faculty, staff, and students, all sharing their experiences in higher education in the USA. In particular these scholars reflect on the challenges and opportunities within the three themes of mental health and wellness, mentorship and creating supportive spaces, and career experiences, trajectories and pathways. The aim of the variety of contributing authors creates a space to reveal unique Black experiences and voices, therefore contributing to the scholarly discourse on race in America, and in higher education, in particular.

Black Intellectual Thought in Education celebrates the exceptional academic contributions of African-American education scholars Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke to the causes of social science, education, and democracy in America. By focusing on the lives and projects of these three figures specifically, it offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant, established discourse in education and critical social theory--helping to better serve the population that critical theory seeks to advocate. Rather than attempting to "rescue" a few African American scholars from obscurity or marginalization, this powerful volume instead highlights ideas that must be probed and critically examined in order to deal with prevailing contemporary educational issues. Cooper, Woodson, and Locke’s history of engagement with race, democracy, education, gender and life is a dynamic, demanding, and authentic narrative for those engaged with these important issues.

Black Males in Secondary and Postsecondary Education contributes to the existing literature on this population with a focus on teaching, mentoring, advising, and counseling Black boys and men, from preschool to graduate/professional school and beyond into their careers.

Build learning environments that support Black girls' excellence and academic achievement. In this thought-provoking and illuminating book, former educator and social justice advocate Monique W. Morris addresses the harmful policies, practices, conditions, and assumptions that too often criminalize Black girls' behavior and steer them down "school-to-confinement pathways" in disproportionate numbers. The key to disrupting such punitive pushout is for educators to develop meaningful relationships with Black girls—connections that are grounded in cultural understanding and focused on helping Black girls develop their identities as valued individuals and contributors to the larger community. Such relationships, Morris argues, can shift Black girls' schooling from a punishment-oriented experience to one that is joyful, healing, and transformative. Along with her own research and experience, Morris explores the topic through in-depth conversations with three distinguished educators and clinical practitioners: Venus Evans-Winters, Janice Johnson Dias, and Kakenya Ntaiya, who provide insights about the challenges of educating Black girls and uplifting accounts of success in promoting their excellence and achievement. These conversations and takeaways for practice are essential guideposts for any teacher, school leader, and policymaker committed to creating learning environments that dispel damaging attitudes and practices and allow Black girls to flourish.