Find your fierce.
Teaching Fiercely: Spreading Joy and Justice in Our Schools offers educators important, practical antidotes to remedy injustices experienced by kids, teachers, and families in schools everywhere, every day, all the time. It also offers a treatment plan immersed in care and community, and poses that connectedness as a sustainable way to move forward.
“What a grounding and energizing reminder of the power, hope, and everyday joy of our world-changing profession. When the weight of teaching feels heaviest to bear, pick up this book.”
“Kass leads from her years of experience working in New York City schools, and a place of loving accountability. This is a must-read for any educator looking to grow community.”
“Kass animates possibilities that have not yet been imagined or realized in this rhythmic compilation of curated practices for a truly fierce commitment to serving children.”
What is the pedagogy of justice? How is joy implicated in that pursuit?
What could it mean to teach with your full self, fiercely?
You’ll find this book is more than a quick fix; it is a treatment plan for unjust practices.
It acknowledges:
- The importance of reflective practice.
- Historically and culturally responsive teaching.
- Theoretical foundations of teaching and learning.
- The essential need to examine yourself in connection to community
A primary component of your justice work is in curriculum-making.
Curriculum-making and developing classroom life is expansive work. Those who spend the most time with students are in the best position to make decisions about their learning life, alongside research and community support.
Herein lies the just nature of a curriculum-making journey, a primary component of an educator’s justice work:
- We focus on self-awareness to understand who we are, where we’ve been, and what it is we’re trying to do.
- We develop a strong base of knowledge that underscores brain-based learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, and developmentally appropriate foundational literacy and numeracy skills.
- We work to deeply understand the communities in which we work; that is who we are teaching and what we are teaching.
- We care for ourselves, and we care for our community.
The Nexus of Joy and Justice.
The resistance lies in educators’ ability to locate, experience, and sustain joy for themselves and their community. It also lies in their ability to identify and unpack both justice and injustice.
Justice is multi-faceted. Part of our justice work is positioning youth, teachers, and families as co-creators of the school experience alongside policy-makers, researchers, principals, and superintendents. Agency comes from trust, expertise, and collective work toward justice and joy.
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More than anything, teaching through the lens of justice requires our whole self; it is a lifelong commitment, and it is a consideration of all that we are and everything we do within the ecosystem of school.
