Teaching Black Boys in the Elementary Grades: Advanced Disciplinary Reading and Writing to Secure Their Futures

by Alfred W Tatum, Josh Parker (Foreword), Cornelius Minor (Afterword)

This book will help educators rethink their expectations of and practices for developing the literacy skills of Black boys in the elementary school classroom. Tatum shows educators how to bring students’ literacy development into greater focus by creating an early intellectual infrastructure of advanced literacy, knowledge, and personal development. He provides a strong conceptual frame, with associated instructional and curricular practices, designed to move Black boys from across the economic spectrum toward advanced literacy that aligns with the Black intellectual tradition. Readers will learn how to use texts from a broad range of potential professions, across academic disciplines, to nurture social and scientific consciousness. The text includes guidance for selecting texts, reading supports, prompts for analysis, and examples of student work. Teaching Black Boys in the Elementary Grades counters the current obsession with basic and proficient reading and argues for adopting an exponential growth model of literacy development. Book

Genres: Education

176 pages, Hardcover

Published December 3, 2021

Reviews

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a skeletal framework of how to go about engaging Black (and all) students in rigorous reading and writing practice. It gives context to its approach through examining the Black intellectual tradition and how some of the greatest Black intellectuals approached writing in a multidisciplinary fashion. I wish the study would have been conducted over a longer period of time in a more typical class size to better gauge its effectiveness. Overall, the instructional approach is supported by the science of reading and learning. Read and write more, read and write better. Doing a lot of something is the only way to become advanced in it.

[syv · Rating 3 out of 5]

A professional development read. Empirical and eye-opening, but lacking in practical application strategies. If this was the first book I’d picked up on this topic, I think it would have left a greater impact.

[Sarah David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye-opening and exceptionally instructive. As an educator, you cannot read this book and feel anything other than an urgency to get to work.

As Tatum explains, this means finding interdisciplinary texts and incitements: “My aim in selecting texts for Black boys is to communicate to them that they are never intellectual trespassers.”

Teaching writing is harder but equally important: “It is prudent to prepare these boys to write with an intellectual confidence and to engage in social and scientific analysis while they use their respective experiences to comment on topics. This is one of the hallmarks of the Black intellectual tradition… which often involves dissenting voices.”

The models of lessons and sample text sets makes Tatum’s concept easy to envision. As a middle school teacher, I can easily see adapting the framework and philosophy of his work.

Teacher friends… I highly recommend this. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start mining for better classroom texts!