Language Arts - Volume 101, Issue 1, 2023

This article explores how to disrupt anti-Blackness in early childhood education by teaching from a pro-Black stance. The authors explain African Diaspora literacy and illuminate classroom practices in kindergarten, first grade, and third grade. Readers are guided to transform their spaces and ensure that Black children are well.

This article examines three interrelated aspects concerning reader access, development, and engagement with Black children’s literature—educational policies and surveillance of Black children’s literature, publishing trends, and Black youths’ reader response—to consider what these elements tell us about where the field of Black children’s literature might go from here.

Using the Black Gaze Framework (BGF), this article details how to center Blackness in literacy teacher education courses.

Inspired by the Black Gaze Framework and with the notion to elevate consciousness, freedom, and the value of Black lives, we share ideas on how educational leaders can engage with a BGF to elevate literacy learning.

In this column, we expand the concept of Black Livingness as a lens to evaluate and select African American children’s literature.

This Perspective on Practice discusses how teachers can use hip hop lyrics as a mentor text to engage students through literacy instruction.

Using my personal narrative as a testimony, this article will demonstrate how teachers can use their stories to reflect; strengthen their literacy instruction; and cultivate a space of bravery, healing, and love in their classrooms.

Over the coming year, this column will explore the question, “What does it mean to prepare students for civic engagement?” To begin this inquiry, Chris Hass shares how one third-grade student’s epiphany, that literacy is meant to help us stand up for ourselves, inspired his class to spend a year exploring how they could use their reading, writing, and speaking to transform their world for the better.

In this column, the author features children’s books that combat single, ahistorical narratives about Black excellence and elucidate and promote its diverse manifestations in Africa and throughout the Diaspora.