Pages: 17

In this introduction, the authors ground the study of Pearl Street Collaborative School’s literacy pedagogy in their experiences with young people and knowledge of educational policy, literacy research, and theory. Both authors—former educators at Pearl Street and longtime friends—elevate the work of practitioner research that situates teachers as trusted and knowledgeable professionals. The authors describe their collaborative approach to writing their lived situations, including joining two distinct research projects at Pearl Street and a collection of stories from their work. The authors’ research and experiences offer a vivid and in-depth portrayal of a school that embraced a humanizing literacy pedagogy for its diverse, dynamic middle and high school students.

Pages: 19

This chapter describes Pearl Street Collaborative School’s professional culture whose internal accountability—the feeling of shared responsibility for teaching and learning—positioned the school as a site in a state of continuous improvement. Pearl Street’s leadership supported opportunities for staff members to engage in dialogue about students, literacy, and our teaching, thereby subverting typically isolating teaching experiences. Teachers’ frequent discussions about teaching and learning compelled them to move beyond naming what students couldn’t do to articulate collective goals for their progress. Furthermore, Pearl Street’s advisory program extended the school’s belief that all students could grow with the staff’s efforts to know and appreciate students’ full identities. The school’s multiple opportunities for dialogue solidified Pearl Street educators’ work as collective, intellectual, critical, and urgent, in turn, informing how they approached teaching literacy to young people.

Pages: 19

This chapter joins ethnographic and interview data from students and staff with anecdotes from Chantal’s teaching to describe the school’s anchor to its reading culture, independent reading. Three features characterized independent reading at Pearl Street: First, collective and ambitious expectations and support for reading—including scaffolding for reading widely and book recommendations that connected to students’ experiences and identities; second, multiple spaces throughout the building that welcomed interactions about and apprenticeship for reading; and third, students engaged in identity-cultivating reading experiences with the texts they chose. These features rendered an agentic and participatory reading enterprise for Pearl Street staff and students.

Pages: 23

This chapter draws on Jen’s practitioner memos, interviews with teachers, and artifact data to show how a teacher-designed, whole-class book club centered on reading, writing, and discussing young adult (YA) literature nurtured students’ independence, critical consciousness, and literacy engagement, as they worked collectively to learn (more) about disrupting dominant narratives about LGBTQ+ youth. YA book clubs created opportunities for students to collectively read, respond, and articulate their thinking about literature with peers. Many students insisted on LGBTQ+ rights and liberation, critiqued various forms of oppression, and made reflective, humanizing connections to characters and themes. To describe the impact and importance of students’ learning about disrupting reductive, harmful narratives about people with diverse genders and sexualities, this chapter highlights students’ voices and perspectives, as well as the instruction and text selections that supported teachers’ efforts to disrupt cis/heteronormativity and affirm youth at the intersections of multiple, marginalized identities.

Pages: 24

This chapter explores how whole-class discussions—or accountable talk discussions—gave way to humanizing discourse, inviting students to develop their ideas about texts with one another. Drawing on critical perspectives that view dialogue as a fluid activity between students’ lives, texts, and the world, the chapter first describes how teachers scaffolded accountable talk discussions as an authentic and inclusive learning experience. Next, the authors feature students’ exchanges during accountable talk discussions to demonstrate how students performed four major activities: Exchanging ideas, making revelations about humanity and society, challenging normative ideas about identity, and defining themselves. These activities underscore text discussion as a dialectical experience in which students constantly moved across the text, their lives, and one another’s ideas to deepen how they related to one another and the stories they read.

Pages: 29

This chapter describes Pearl Street Collaborative School’s approach to authentic literacy assessments. These teacher-designed tasks contextualized literacy in real-world dilemmas, thereby affirming students’ identities, cultivating their ability to interrogate their realities and society, and maintaining high standards for their academic success. As a member of the New York State Performance Standards Consortium, Pearl Street expected every student to demonstrate, reflect on, and celebrate their learning. With curriculum samples and student work, the authors offer four vivid examples of authentic literacy assessments: Roundtables, informational writing booklets, creative writing workshop peer assessments, and independent reading multimodal projects. These activities encouraged students to draw on their multiple ways of knowing to forge their paths as learners and people.