When teachers develop inclusive curriculum, the most powerful mirrors can magnify, helping students see and define themselves while gaining a sense of self.
October 23, 2024 by Sabrina Wesley-Nero, Ph.D. 
When my son was turning 3, we had a small party in our basement. It was a themed playdate really with just his normal friend group who regularly met in local parks to play together plus the added fun of cake and ice cream in my basement. It was simple. The theme also was simple. Riffing off Sesame Street, the ultimate parenting bible, I chose the party theme “Brought to you by the letter “B” – books, blocks, balls, and bubbles” all items that took up residence in my basement. I invite you to a similar party, a party brought to you by the letter “B” where we critically clean Blurred mirrors and windows and actively Build a just and equitable future.
The focus on mirrors and windows, imagery advanced by Emily Style and Rudine Sims Bishop to articulate how students should see themselves and others in diverse materials, is often concentrated on how that diverse representation arises in the books and other materials teachers use. However, educators’ practices are a critical element to the construction of windows and mirrors.
When curriculum and pedagogy are carefully constructed, the most powerful mirrors can magnify, helping students see and define themselves and their communities while gaining a sense of self that transcends time. They can allow educators to look closely at complexity and nuance. They surface previously ignored details. Magnifying mirrors can disrupt “single stories.”
Clear windows are those that make it easy enough to see contextually bounded lived experiences. Well-constructed curriculum and pedagogy help students see through clear windows, challenging stereotypes, exposing assumptions, and developing comfort with difference and discomfort. Through clear windows, students begin to recognize sameness among differences and resituate the sameness in ways that don’t essentialize and the differences in ways that do not denigrate. Good practice uses these windows to build students’ cultural dexterity and expands their repertoires.
Clear windows also allow educators to see what is in front of them, so they can look for who is missing. Who is missing in seats of power, voice, and access – in classrooms, schools, and communities? Who is missing in the voices of those who author the texts teachers use? When educators engage students in problem-solving and sense-making in math and science classes, whose problems are centered? Whose knowledge is foregrounded? Whose ways of problem-solving are honored? Windows allow teachers to foster empathy and help identify inequity as well as possibility.
Blurred mirrors reflect poorly, distorting our senses of self. Think, for example, what “single story” narratives mean for those students whose social identities are portrayed. Flat narratives that paint you and your ancestors as perpetual heroes or perpetual victims. Or narratives that portray only one way of being and belonging to your regional, cultural, racial, ethnic, or linguistic group. Blurred mirrors in a classroom label your language as valued but denigrate the variety of the language you use to express your values, interests, and passions.
Dirty windows are difficult to see through, providing only flat, one-sided, distorted and often deficit-based views of those who are different from you. This can take the form of idolizing another person’s language, culture, and identity or internalizing a deficit-view of your own while wrestling with imposter syndrome. This also can take the form of pathologizing or demonizing others based on the limited view a dirty window makes available.
By contrast, equity and justice-oriented education can be revolutionary. It can be liberatory.
I invite us to go a step further still, beyond “books” and beyond a focus on magnifying mirrors and clean windows so that we, as educators, ignite our students’ justice imagination. What kind of future do we hope our students will build? How could we equip our students with the fundamental skills and dispositions to create building blocks that span the deep divides evident in our country? How could igniting our students’ justice imagination provide oxygen to sparks where they envision a more equitable future?
Igniting students’ justice imagination involves at least two components: courage and critical hope. Educators are to develop students’ understanding of systemic and institutional injustice. A nuanced understanding of injustice is facilitated by engaging with mirrors with high degrees of amplification and windows cleared from smudges that seek to mar, blur, and erase. Mirrors and windows humanize. They set the foundation for imagining equity. A justice imagination enables students to paint a vision of an equitable world. Without a vision the people perish. Equipped with critical insight into themselves and others, students are positioned to create a new future and paint a new world onto canvases. Courage and critical hope are the brushes and paints that students use on their canvases. As Duncan-Andrade explains, critical hope is animated when we skillfully and bravely apply a critical lens to our history and contemporary contexts, manage the pain that occurs when we develop a nuanced understanding of oppression and inequity, and boldly imagine a more equitable future.
To advance this nation toward educational justice, we must ensure our schools are mirrors and windows; provide students with canvases and ignite their justice imagination built upon the hope of a better future. Inclusive and representative curriculum and classroom celebrations become the norm, necessary and insufficient. Through equity-oriented education that also provides windows, students can see beyond their lived experiences. Education should equip students with the skills, knowledge, and critical understanding of the world, the peoples of the world, and the histories of the world. For some students, this may mean developing a nuanced understanding of those who traditionally have been “othered,” shining light on those who previously were rendered invisible. For some students, this may mean developing the skills and knowledge to clearly see the power dynamics that operate outside of, but often constrain, their communities.
Students take this knowledge into their lives, where they are neither expected to abandon their home communities or colonize the communities of others. Instead, learners gain the ability to facilitate and to live in a heterogenous, multilingual world. Learners then imagine and co-create a future where plurality is celebrated and equity is the norm.
I collaborate with educators, families, and community supporters to inspire students’ social justice imagination and envision a just future at the 1619 Freedom School. This community-based after-school program enhances students’ literacy, knowledge of Black history, and academic self-efficacy. The historically responsive curriculum explores rich, often-untaught narratives of Black American history, emphasizing resistance, excellence, and bravery. Students learn local history, encountering the actions and actors that propelled their communities toward liberation through place-based units. In addition to developing critical reading skills, the students create projects and texts that reject deficit perspectives and envision freedom for themselves and their communities. The school’s ethos and pedagogical strategies affirm students’ identities and power as literate, agentic changemakers.
Join me. Let’s grab our tools that include but also reach beyond the literature we offer in our classrooms. With courage and humility, let’s embrace the messy process of becoming better humans together and supporting our students as they do the same. And, let’s move forward with intention and purpose.
We can position justice and an equitable education as our north star. We can refashion tools that shine light, embrace the iterative experiences of a process that is messy and worthwhile. We can form teams and communities of future-forward designers with strategic and intentional plans. We can envision with students and families the world we want and the world they deserve.
Sabrina Wesley-Nero, Ph.D., is a teaching professor at Georgetown University and a curriculum lead for the 1619 Freedom School.
Each piece in this series is accompanied by relevant resources and book recommendations provided by one or more of our partners, with input from the authors.
Teaching for Change is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write and change the world. Join our mailing list for updates about new resources and events.
Since its founding in 1989, Teaching for Change has vetted and promoted social justice books for children and adults. This is in response to the wide diversity gap in children’s books and the publishing industry. More than half of the children enrolled in U.S. public schools are people of color or Native American, but only 34% of children’s books published in 2022 were about people of color.
Teaching for Change developed SocialJusticeBooks.org to critically review and promote multicultural and social justice children’s books. It builds on the tradition of the Council on Interracial Books for Children which provided a social justice lens to reviews of children’s literature. We aim to provide visibility to books that address the goals outlined in Professor Wesley-Nero’s article and encourage publishers to produce more titles with the windows, mirrors, and canvases she describes.
Here are just a few examples of books we recommend. They are currently threatened by book bans and the chilling effect of anti-history education laws.
November 27, 2024 by Jordan Daniels What does it mean to have true intersectional representation?
One example of book bans is the deliberate exclusion of any discussion of the history of the prison industrial complex from school curricula.
November 13, 2024 by OiYan Poon Politically repressive campaigns such as anti-CRT are harmful to children’s cognitive and civic development.
