The Heart, Head & Hands of Anti-Bias and Anti-Racist Teaching with Lorena Germán

Phenomenal Teaching with PEBC

Listen in as Lorena Germán, co-founder of #DistruptTexts, joins Michelle Morris Jones on the Phenomenal Teaching Podcast to unpack the Heart, Head, and Hands of Anti-Bias and Anti-Racist (ABAR) Teaching. At the heart of ABAR teaching lies Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) and the importance of exploring one's own identity, implicit biases, and instructional practices. Lorena encourages all educators in an invitational yet firm way to consider, "Whose values are we holding onto tightly and how are those values impacting young people? and In what ways can our teaching be more inclusive of others?" The what of ABAR teaching is the head and requires us to ask, "What do we teach and why do we teach it?" Moving from occasional performative experiences that feature a multicultural text, a holiday, or event in history to a culturally sustaining curriculum requires us to re-envision our curriculum, units of study, materials and lessons. Our planning practices must evolve to include the planning question, "How does this (topic, text, concept, etc.) move us toward positive social transformation?" So what might ABAR teaching look like on Monday morning? Well that is the how or hands of ABAR teaching. Lorena introduces her framework for ABAR education, Textured Teaching, explaining that it is flexible, interdisciplinary, community centered & student driven, and experiential. Lorena and Michelle link these elements of ABAR Teaching to the areas of planning, community and workshop of the PEBC Teaching Framework which is published in Phenomenal Teaching by Wendy Ward Hoffer.

Lorena is is the Chair of the NCTE’s Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English and she’s a co-founder of #DisruptTexts. Lorena also co-founded Multicultural Classroom with her husband and education leader, Roberto Hermán and serves as the Director of Pedagogy at EduColor. Lorena has held educational leadership positions at the department level, school-wide level, and in the larger district level from designing curriculum to strategizing for improvement. She is the author of “The Anti Racist Teacher: Reading Instruction Workbook” and upcoming Textured Teaching. To learn more about Lorena's work please visit https://www.multiculturalclassroomconsulting.com/