4.3 Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy

When educators consider ways to make their curriculum historically and culturally responsive, many struggle to go deeper than content integration and literary substitutions. As part of our "Equity Thought Leader" podcast series, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, author of Cultivating Genius, explains her HILL pedagogy model (History, Identity, Literacy, and Liberation). Dr. Muhammad’s research examining abolitionists and 19th century education among communities of color found that early Black readers, writers and thinkers held five goals or pursuits for learning. This approach extends Culturally Responsive Education to include these 5 pursuits: Identity, Skills, Intellect, Criticality, and Joy. Listen in as she explains the historical roots of our current education system and the reason that intentionally cultivating our students genius serves as an antidote to that history. For those who may want to extend the learning evoked by the podcast, the following facilitation guide (https://bit.ly/3a11LYI) has been developed to help with next steps in deepening the shared learning. This series is brought to you in collaboration with Learning Forward, the only professional association devoted exclusively to establishing and sustaining highly effective professional development for educators. To learn more about Learning Forward, visit www.learningforward.org. myPD Unplugged is a production of the Office of Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Development in the Long Beach Unified School District.