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Learn by Reading
BOOKS WE LOVE AND LEARN FROM
We present these books to you, not only because we love them, but because they have influenced our program goals, discussions, and learnings. We hope that by reading from this list, we will be in better alignment of what we stand for and who we stand for, together.
If there is a book you feel should be added to our library, please let Naehee Kwun know at nkwun@uci.edu
Need to process as you read?
Join (or lead) a book club!
The books above are not light reads! There is so much unpacking and just out-loud processing that might be helpful before putting these ideas to practice in your own classroom.
Join fellow Extravapalooza book readers and set up some times to chat about the books y'all are reading together. Complete the registration to join a book club.
BOOK CLUBS
Despite the Best Intentions:
How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools
On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?
Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students progress from elementary school to middle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latino counterparts. Most research to date has focused on the role of poverty, family stability, and other external influences in explaining poor performance at school, especially in urban contexts. Diamond and Lewis instead situate their research in a suburban school, and look at what factors within the school itself could be causing the disparity. Most crucially, they challenge many common explanations of the 'racial achievement gap, ' exploring what race actually means in this situation, and why it matters.
An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.
About the Author:
The Sum of Us:
How Racism Hurts Everyone (Young Readers Edition)
Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common root problem: racism. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out?
In unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own.
The Sum of Us is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and self-destructing, materially rich but spiritually starved and vastly unequal. McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to paint an irrefutable story of racism’s costs, but at the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy’s collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than zero-sum.
About the Author:
The Latinos of Asia:
How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race
Is race only about the color of your skin? In The Latinos of Asia, Anthony Christian Ocampo shows that what “color” you are depends largely on your social context. Filipino Americans, for example, helped establish the Asian American movement and are classified by the U.S. Census as Asian. But the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines means that they share many cultural characteristics with Latinos, such as last names, religion, and language. Thus, Filipinos’ “color”―their sense of connection with other racial groups―changes depending on their social context.
The Filipino story demonstrates how immigration is changing the way people negotiate race, particularly in cities like Los Angeles where Latinos and Asians now constitute a collective majority. Amplifying their voices, Ocampo illustrates how second-generation Filipino Americans’ racial identities change depending on the communities they grow up in, the schools they attend, and the people they befriend. Ultimately, The Latinos of Asia offers a window into both the racial consciousness of everyday people and the changing racial landscape of American society.
About the Author:
Disability Visibility:
First-Person Stories from the 21st Century
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act,
From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media maker, and research consultant based in San Francisco, California. She is the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. Alice is also the host and co-producer of the Disability Visibility podcast and co-partner in a number of collaborations such as #CripTheVote and Access Is Love. From 2013 to 2015, Alice served as a member of the National Council on Disability, an appointment by President Barack Obama. You can follow her on Twitter: @SFdirewolf. For more: disabilityvisibilityproject.com.
PODCAST | WEBSITE (lots of resources!)
About the Author:
Subtractive Schooling:
US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring
Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring won the 2000 American Educational Research Association Outstanding Book Award; honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards 2000; and the 2001 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award.
At least for those that know me, it is obvious to them that the preoccupations that I take up in this work are deeply personal and to a great extent autobiographical—even though this three-year ethnographic case study addresses the experiences of students in a particular inner-city high school that proved to be a "natural laboratory" for the questions that I had about assimilation.
It addresses concerns related to assimilationist policies, practices, and ideologies, and the bearing that these have on students' identities and the quality of their relationships at school. If you have not lived this experience, it is hard to understand it and this text, I am told, facilitates that kind of understanding.
Former San Antonio, and now State of Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla once expressed this predicament that many Latinos and Mexican Americans can fall into:
"I wasn't Mexican but I was Mexicana. I wasn't Americana but I was American. In Spanish, your terms meant your culture. In English, they meant your citizenship."
I call it "subtractive schooling."
Book Reviews | Rethinking Schools Article
About the Author:
Bettina Love
Punished for Dreaming:
How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal
In Punished for Dreaming Dr. Bettina Love argues forcefully that Reagan’s presidency ushered in a War on Black Children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the War on Drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding in the name of reform, as white savior, egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children in particular, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. Today, there is little national conversation about a structural overhaul of American schools; cosmetic changes, rooted in anti-Blackness, are now passed off as justice.
It is time to put a price tag on the miseducation of Black children. In this prequel to The New Jim Crow , Dr. Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of the people who lived it. Punished for Dreaming lays bare the devastating effect on 25 Black Americans caught in the intersection of economic gain and racist ideology. Then, with input from leading U.S. economists , Dr. Love offers a road map for repair, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core.
Book Reviews | Author Video Trailer
BOOK SHELF
Cultivating Genius:
An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy
In Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework—one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names, Historically Responsive Literacy, was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices. The equity framework will help educators teach and lead toward the following learning goals or pursuits:
Identity Development—Helping youth to make sense of themselves and others
Skill Development— Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplines
Intellectual Development—Gaining knowledge and becoming smarter
Criticality—Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression
When these four learning pursuits are taught together—through the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Muhammad provides probing, self-reflective questions for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators as well as sample culturally and historically responsive sample plans and text sets across grades and content areas. In this book, Muhammad presents practical approaches to cultivate the genius in students and within teachers.
Author Interview on EdWeek.org | Goodreads Reviews | Sample Chapter
Unearthing Joy:
A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning
In this follow-up to Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad adds a fifth pursuit--joy--to her groundbreaking instructional model. She defines joy as more than celebration and happiness, but also as wellness, beauty, healing, and justice for oneself and across humanity. She shows how teaching from cultural and historical realities can enhance our efforts to cultivate identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and-indeed-joy for all students, giving them a powerful purpose to learn and contribute to the world. Dr. Muhammad's wise implementation advice is paired with model lessons and assessment tools that span subjects and grade levels.
Textured Teaching:
A Framework for Culturally Sustaining Practices
As middle and high school teachers, we know that students begin to develop racial identities and ideologies as early as preschool. By the time they reach us, there is much socializing and learning that needs to be undone. Textured Teaching is a way to seamlessly embed the social justice work that is needed to undo; to begin to make things right.
With Culturally Sustaining Practice as its foundation, Textured Teaching helps secondary teachers in any school setting stop wondering and guessing how to implement teaching and learning that leads to social justice. Lorena shares her framework for creating a classroom environment that is highly rigorous and engaging, and that reflects the core traits of Textured Teaching: student-driven, community centered, interdisciplinary, experiential, and flexible. Throughout the book, Lorena shares lesson design strategies that build traditional literacy skills while supporting students in developing their social justice skills at the same time. The actionable strategies Lorena uses to bring Textured Teaching values to life illuminate what is possible when we welcome all types of texts, all types of voices, and all forms of expression into the classroom.
Start Here, Start Now:
A Guide to Antibias and Antiracist Work in Your School Community
Most educators want to cultivate an antibias and antiracist classroom and school community, but they often struggle with where and how to get started. Liz helps us set ourselves up for success and prepare for the mistakes we'll make along the way.
Each chapter in Start Here, Start Now addresses many of the questions and challenges educators have about getting started, using a framework for tackling perceived barriers from a proactive stance. Liz answers the questions with personal stories, sample lessons, anchor charts, resources, conversation starters, extensive teacher and activist accounts, and more. We can break the habits that are holding us back from this work and be empowered to take the first step towards re-imagining the possibilities of how antibias antiracist work can transform schools and the world at large.
We must remind ourselves that what is right is often not what is easy, and we must continue to dream. Amidst the chaos, our path ahead is clear. This is our chance to dream big and build something better.
Street Data:
A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation
Radically reimagine our ways of being, learning, and doing.
Education can be transformed if we eradicate our fixation on big data like standardized test scores as the supreme measure of equity and learning. Instead of the focus being on “fixing” and “filling” academic gaps, we must envision and rebuild the system from the student up—with classrooms, schools and systems built around students’ brilliance, cultural wealth, and intellectual potential. Street data reminds us that what is measurable is not the same as what is valuable and that data can be humanizing, liberatory and healing.
By breaking down street data fundamentals: what it is, how to gather it, and how it can complement other forms of data to guide a school or district’s equity journey, Safir and Dugan offer an actionable framework for school transformation. Written for educators and policymakers, this book
Offers fresh ideas and innovative tools to apply immediately
Provides an asset-based model to help educators look for what’s right in our students and communities instead of seeking what’s wrong
Explores a different application of data, from its capacity to help us diagnose root causes of inequity, to its potential to transform learning, and its power to reshape adult culture
Now is the time to take an antiracist stance, interrogate our assumptions about knowledge, measurement, and what really matters when it comes to educating young people.
GoodReads Reviews | Free Resources | Book Talk on YouTube
Teaching Climate Change for Grades 6-12:
Empowering Science Teachers to Take On the Climate Crisis Through NGSS
Looking to tackle climate change and climate science in your classroom? This timely and insightful book supports and enables secondary science teachers to develop effective curricula ready to meet the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by grounding their instruction on the climate crisis.
Nearly one-third of the secondary science standards relate to climate science, but teachers need design and implementation support to create empowering learning experiences centered around the climate crisis. Experienced science educator, instructional coach, and educational leader Dr. Kelley T. Le offers this support, providing an overview of the teaching shifts needed for NGSS and to support climate literacy for students via urgent topics in climate science and environmental justice – from the COVID-19 pandemic to global warming, rising sea temperatures, deforestation, and mass extinction. You’ll also learn how to engage the complexity of climate change by exploring social, racial, and environmental injustices stemming from the climate crisis that directly impact students.
By anchoring instruction around the climate crisis, Dr. Le offers guidance on how to empower students to be the agents of change needed in their own communities. A range of additional teacher resources are also available at www.empoweredscienceteachers.com.
Go to www.empoweredscienceteachers.com to learn more.
Choosing to See:
A Framework for Equity in the Math Classroom
Most of the top jobs for the future require students to have a strong foundational understanding of mathematics. Our failure to mathematically educate most students in general, and students of color in particular, is bad not only for these students individually but also for our society. In Choosing to See, Pamela Seda and Kyndall Brown offer a substantive, rigorous, and necessary set of interventions to move mathematics education toward greater equity, particularly in serving the needs of Black and Brown students, who are underrepresented and underserved as math scholars. The authors’ thoughtful ICUCARE equity framework serves as a lens to help teachers see where they are achieving this alignment and where they are not. Through this lens, choosing to see means caring enough about what you see to act. It means accepting that every one of your students can be an expert given the opportunity. It means recognizing negative stereotypes about marginalized students and understanding their effects. It means knowing that your students have rich lives outside the classroom that can inform what you do inside the classroom. And it means recognizing and celebrating their human dimensions, so that all students’ strengths, capabilities, and talents can grow.
NEW RELEASE! | Choosing to See Book Talk
Dear Citizen Math:
How Math Class Can Inspire a More Rational and Respectful Society
American democracy is at risk. Fueled by partisan news and emotion-stoking social media, Americans are becoming less and less able to think rationally about the challenges facing the country. For self-governance to succeed, citizens must analyze issues objectively, engage with one another respectfully, and ground their disagreements in reason and facts. At this precarious moment in our history, we need a renaissance in critical thinking.
It can start in the math classroom.
Composed as a letter to fellow educators, Dear Citizen Math offers an inspiring new vision for math class: as a forum for discussing the most important and interesting issues in society, from healthcare reform to global pandemics, fake discounts to the acceleration of technology. For generations students have viewed mathematics as a set of random skills to memorize and concepts with a little connection to reality. In fact, math is a powerful prism for exploring and making sense of the world, and math teachers can be the most influential people in American democracy. They have the potential to kindle a newfound commitment to reason and cultivate a more thoughtful citizenry.
Free Resources | Goodreads Reviews | Sample Chapter | Podcast Interview
Ungrading:
Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)
The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.
GoodReads Reviews | Grading Blog by Author | Podcast Episode
Going Gradeless:
Shifting the Focus to Student Learning
Reform assessment, reduce stress, and strengthen learning
Great things happen when students are able to focus on their learning instead of their scores. However, assessment reform, including standards-based grading, remains a hotly debated issue in education. Going Gradeless shows that it is possible to teach and assess without the stress of traditional grading practices.
Sharing their successful shifts to alternate assessment and their perspectives as experienced classroom teachers, the authors show you how to remove the negative impacts of grades while still maintaining a high level of accountability. Readers will find concrete examples of how these approaches can be developed and applied, plus:
• Sample assessments and rubrics
• Student work samples from all grade levels
• An accountability checklist
• A review of collected data
It is possible to go gradeless! Focusing less on letter grades allows students to interact with the content more deeply, develop better relationships with their teachers and peers, and gain confidence in the classroom, school, and beyond.
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$50 Registration for participants not affiliated with UCI.
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When you register, you will have access to all open courses and book clubs.
Design your own learning package by participating in as many open courses and book clubs we offer.
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You can purchase DCE units for $250, through the registration link.
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Once your registration is complete, you will receive an email with zoom links for virtual courses and links to the resource folders.
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