PAWLP Social Justice/Anti-Bias Study Group: Our Story Continues By Janice Ewing

             Our December meeting was a time to celebrate endings and to look ahead to new beginnings. We started by checking in with ourselves in the present moment, prompted by the suggestion that we each reflect on and share one word that expressed our current mood or mindset. The words shared included: Exhausted (twice), Grateful (twice), Saturday, Balance, Believing, Courageous, and Ready. We recognized that the words speak to our multiple identities as educators, colleagues, and members of a learning community.

            Following that, we turned our attention to completing our fall discussion of Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, which we had finished reading. We shared both overall and specific reactions to and takeaways from the book. Of course, we’re never really “finished with” a book, nor do we want to be, so Muhammad’s ideas will stay with us and find expression in a variety of ways. One specific goal that we set for ourselves, based on the book, is to adopt the idea of a preamble. Muhammad connects preambles to the practices of Black literacy societies throughout the 19^th century” (127), and describes them as  “powerful statements of intention and objective” (128). We are each planning to bring a draft of a preamble for our group to our next meeting. Our thinking is that the reflection and sharing of that work will help us to hone our sense of purpose and actions moving forward. We have many issues to explore, including how to bring our learning to life in our families, schools, and communities; how to determine what is and is not in our sphere of influence; how to share our work with a larger audience; how our various areas of study within social justice intersect; how to persevere in the face of the frustrations and obstacles that we encounter along the way.

            At our next meeting, on January 16^th, we will share our preambles to see the patterns that emerge, where our ideas align and where we need further clarity of our common purpose. We also plan to share the independent reading and reflection that we have been engaged in, to help expand our thinking and growth, to explore how our various social justice learning paths intersect, and to guide us in selecting our next shared text. Along with these goals, we are also exploring ways to incorporate our story into the larger story of PAWLP as a whole. We are looking forward to our virtual PAWLP Day on March 6^th, at which Tiana Silvas will be our keynote speaker, with the theme of “Decolonizing Your Classroom Library.”

            We ended our meeting by revisiting the concept of gratitude, from our opening activity. Together, we expressed gratitude for the community that we have created and are working to sustain, and the opportunity it affords us to grow together, with humility, vulnerability, and openness to learning. We are a work in progress.

            This is the second in a series of posts about our group. You can read the first one here. We welcome comments or questions about ideas that resonate from these posts, or about the group overall. Thank you for following our story.

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Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic, 2020

Janice Ewing has been a reading specialist and literacy coach, and an adjunct instructor in the Reading Specialist Program at Cabrini University. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project, of which she is a 2004 fellow. Her interests include teacher inquiry, collaboration, and mentoring. She and her colleague, Mary Buckelew, are the authors of Action Research for English Language Arts Teachers: Invitation to Inquiry (Routledge, 2019).