http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/education-update/feb19/vol61/num02/The-Text-Disrupters.aspx
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Decolonize the Curriculum
The founders of the #DisruptTexts movement—English educators Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Kim Parker, and Julia Torres—offer a new set of tools to create a more equitable ELA curriculum through recurring chats and a crowdsourced website of resources. They started the hashtag in 2018 to center perspectives of marginalized voices, especially people of color, in student literature. They now present on #DisruptTexts at gatherings such as the National Council of Teachers of English conference and Teachers College's Social Justice Saturday.
"We have a lot of power over what and who we bring into the classroom," said Ebarvia. "Collectively, we have an opportunity to make real change."
The benefits of disruption are wide-ranging: Research has shown that diverse literature reduces stereotypes and increases empathy, global awareness, and academic performance among all students. Absent districtwide shifts in curriculum, teachers can choose which books to highlight and how to frame literary discussions to better reflect the needs and experiences of every student.
Individual awareness is the first step to challenge traditional, whitewashed pedagogy and prevent damaging experiences for readers of color. The #DisruptTexts model asks teachers to audit their personal and classroom reading experiences:
What experiences have shaped and limited your ideas about race, culture, gender, and power?
How inclusive are the books and media you consume personally and professionally?
How inclusive are your class discussions and curricula?
Teachers can then employ two main levers of disruption: the diversity of the texts they choose and the critical pedagogy they use to guide students' engagement with the texts. That might mean using pairings and counternarratives to champion missing voices or replacing texts with alternative titles. Last year's #DisruptTexts chat about The Great Gatsby suggested teaching the text alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Harlem Renaissance poetry, and the film Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Empower Students
Any text is prime for disruption, but the movement's founders caution that it isn't just about replacing older texts with newer ones—it's a professional responsibility to both focus on marginalized voices and develop students' critical literacy skills to question the status quo.
Parker works with preservice teachers in Massachusetts to design inclusive units, thinking critically about how to teach about Christopher Columbus using voices of American Indian scholars like Debbie Reese. Ebarvia, who teaches at Conestoga High School near Philadelphia, asks her students to examine national identity in novels like The Things They Carried. In an account of the Vietnam War, why do they hear military voices but not Vietnamese or civilian ones?
To frame discussions of any book, educators should think about the following questions alongside students:
In what ways might a text present problems related to equity and representation?
How do the disruptive texts and multimedia stand with or against the traditionally taught text?
Whether her students devour The Poet X or Othello, Torres—who teaches in a predominantly black public high school in Denver with majority-white colleagues—always keeps in mind: How is this story empowering or disenfranchising students?
"As educators of color, this work is something we do as a means of survival," said Torres, a teacher librarian. "All of us teach in different environments, but all of us have the experience of going to school and not reading stories that reflected our cultural and linguistic realities and beliefs. It was very natural for us to want to create a better experience for our students—helping them reclaim what has been stolen from them."
I didn't take a lot of time to read the whole article closely, but what I read made sense to me, and was not flaming radicalism.
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