This inspirational book is about engaged pedagogies, an approach to teaching and learning that centers dialogue, listening, equity, and connection among stakeholders who understand the human and ecological cost of inequality. The authors share their story of working with students, teachers, teacher educators, families, community members, and union leaders to create transformative practices within and beyond public school classrooms. This collaborative work occurred within various spaces--inside school buildings, libraries, churches, community gardens, nonprofit organizations, etc.--and afforded opportunities to grapple with engaged pedagogies in times of political crisis. Featuring descriptions from a district-wide initiative, this book offers practical and theoretical resources for educators wanting to center justice in their work with students. Through question-posing, color images, empirical observations, and use of scholarly and practitioner-driven literature, readers will learn how to use these resources to reconfigure schools and classrooms as sites of engagement for equity, justice, and love. Book Features: Provides a sound approach to deeply taking up the work of justice and engaged pedagogies. Presents linguistic, cultural, theoretical, and practical ideas that can be used and implemented immediately. Includes reflective questions, found poetry, lesson ideas, storytelling as narrative, and examples of engaged pedagogies. Shares stories from a district-wide initiative that embedded engaged pedagogies within classrooms, counseling offices, and libraries. Showcases original artwork and images in full color by Grace D. Player, one of the coauthors.

This practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) study explores how a multiracial inquiry group of girls of color mobilized their literacies in service of building solidarity with one another across nondominant differences (Lorde, 2007). The stories and theories of the eight girls in the group, which they named the Unnormal Sisterhood, are centralized in this dissertation in service of adding nuance to conversations about the needs, desires, and brilliance of girls of color. Informed by feminist of color epistemologies (e.g. Anzaldúa, 1983; Collins, 2000; Lorde, 2007), postpositive realist perspectives (Mohanty, 2000; Moya, 2000), sociocultural perspectives of literacy (e.g. Street, 1984), and culturally sustaining/responsive literacy pedagogies (e.g. Ladson Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2017), this study inquires into how the writing practices of girls of color and the pedagogies that center them might provide a platform for the development of what I've theorized as "unnormal sisterhood," a new form of sociality produced as girls of color work towards self and group definitions that honor their simultaneous differences and connectedness. Using ethnographic methods, I gathered data including fieldnotes, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts, and utilized in Vivo and thematic coding and analytic memos to unearth findings. The first finding from this study is that the centralization of girls' narratives, theories, and understandings in literacy curriculum can help girls of color establish important notions of resistant self-love. Their narratives resist dominant and deficitizing discourses and, instead, illustrate their complexity, artistry, and brilliance. The second finding is that as girls of color engage literate activities that allow them to engage in one an others' stories and theories, they can progress towards conceptions and enactments of solidarity that honor difference, thereby allowing them to better understand not only how to fight for their own, but also their sisters' rights and humanity. The third finding is that as girls of color engage in literate activities that center their stories, theories, and ways of knowing, they are able to name and build incisive critiques of systemic oppression.