Roberto German 00:00
Welcome to Our Classroom. In this space, we talk about education, which is inclusive of, but not limited to what happens in schools. Education is taking place whenever and wherever we are willing to learn. I am your host, Roberto German, and Our Classroom is officially in session. Welcome back to Our Classroom folks. Today we have Dr. Amy Tondreau, an Assistant Professor of Elementary Literacy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on teachers and students' literacy identities, critical literacy in children's literature, and writing pedagogy, professional learning communities, and the cross pollination of culturally sustaining pedagogy and disability sustaining pedagogy and literacy teaching and learning. Also, Laurie Rabinowitz is with us. Dr. Laurie is an Assistant Professor of Education Studies at Skidmore College. The research looks at inclusive practices and the intersections of literacy and inclusive pedagogy. Looking forward to learning from both of these scholars today because disability and education, I think, is something that needs to be discussed more. We really gotta unpack that. We gotta look at that more. We gotta understand our blind spots as it relates to disability and education, and think about how culturally sustaining pedagogy fits that. And so, thank you for being here today, Laurie and Amy.
Laurie Rabinowitz 01:46
We are excited to be here. Thanks for having us.
Amy Tondreau 01:49
Yeah. Thank you so much. We're excited.
Roberto German 01:51
It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. You know, always looking to learn, always looking to expand my lens. And here you have this wonderful book here. Alright, this wonderful book. Lot of research that y'all did. And I would imagine it took you quite some time to put this together, but you did. So, kudos to you.
Laurie Rabinowitz 02:12
Thank you.
Amy Tondreau 02:12
Thank you.
Roberto German 02:14
So, your book emphasizes the integration of culturally sustaining pedagogy, CSP, and disability sustaining pedagogy, DSP, which I'm less familiar with, and balance literacy to create an inclusive literacy framework. In practical terms, how can educators weave these approaches into daily instruction without feeling overwhelmed by competing priorities?
Laurie Rabinowitz 02:39
Yeah, that's a good question. I think one thing that really comes to our minds when we think about that is that educators should give themselves grace. Teaching is not easy. Right?
Roberto German 02:53
That's true.
Laurie Rabinowitz 02:54
[laughs] And that's the reality of teaching. It's not easy. And we should recognize that. I was doing a research study a few years ago with educators that work with students with disabilities in inclusive contexts. And they were really, really, really skilled at presuming the competence of the students they were working with and giving them a lot of grace and recognizing that learning has an edge and a curve, and it takes time, but they were really hard on themselves and they gave themselves a really hard time that they weren't doing things well enough. So, I think one thing to think about in terms of a question like that is I encourage educators not to feel overwhelmed, but recognize that educated-- that learning how to teach in complicated ways is hard. There's a concept I like to use with my students, and I teach undergrads right now as they are becoming new teachers. We talk about the idea of having, what's your comfort zone when you're learning. So that's when you're not really taking in a lot of new information, but it kind of feels good. And then there's your learning edge when you're taking in new information and it's a little tricky and it doesn't feel great. And then beyond your learning edge, when you've put yourself way too far out there and you kind of shut down. And what we would encourage teachers to do is take their time with integrating three different pedagogical practices at the same time, and put themselves in a learning edge, recognizing it's okay if something feels hard when you're swimming in new learning. And like, knowing that even though this feels hard and it's complicated, if you don't integrate multiple ways of teaching at the same time, that's gonna feel hard in its own way too. So, you might as well do it in a way that you feel really good about with your students. Like, teaching from a script may feel easier in some ways, but it may produce students who are disengaged, students where you don't feel like they're really learning and that's not gonna feel great either. So, recognizing, yes, this might feel a little tricky, but that's part of the learning process. If that gives teachers comfort, I think that's important. I think the other thing to think about is we know a lot of teachers that are already doing this work, they're doing-- either holding onto multiple pedagogies that are complicated and critical at the same time. And we do feature several of them in the book and what often happens in our space in academia and we're former teachers. I'm a former special ed teacher from New York City, and Amy's a former elementary school teacher from the Massachusetts outside of Boston area. So, we've done this work. We know that you're always integrating all these practices at the same time, but academics like us don't write at like interdisciplinary intersectional ways often. And we even have found in publishing, it's really hard sometimes to get our work published because academia is so siloed. So deliberately we've tried to put together multiple pedagogies at the same time to show examples of what we know the actual practice looks like. You have students with disabilities who have multiple other identities intersecting in their lives at the same time all the time. And often academia says, but this is how you teach a student with a disability, and this is how you teach in a culturally sustaining way. The reality is you need to do both all the time. So, our book is aiming to give that example of what your actual life is like as a teacher in the classroom. You can't separate students' identities from each other at the same time. So that's part of the hope is the book gives those examples of what it looks like from teachers. And we have 20 different teacher contributions that do that.
Amy Tondreau 06:18
I think it might be helpful just because as you mentioned, right, folks might be a little less familiar with disability sustaining pedagogy. So as Laurie's talking about, right? Like, we're thinking about these things intersectionally. And so, I'll just give kind of a brief overview of disability sustaining pedagogy so folks are a bit more familiar with it. And for context, you know, we are really standing on the shoulders of incredible scholars of color who come before us, right? So, we're drawing on Gloria Ladson-Billings' work with Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Django Paris' work on Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. And you know, what Gloria Ladson-Billings did is went to excellent teachers of color who were-- their students of color were succeeding, right? And learned from them. And so, Laurie and I kind of took that framework and went to teachers with disabilities who are helping students with disabilities succeed. And we learned from them how their identities informed their teaching practice, right? They have all of this lived experience of navigating school systems that were not built for them. And so, they have all of this knowledge that all of us as educators can learn from. And so, we tried to create disability sustaining pedagogy as a counterpart to culturally sustaining pedagogy. Because often when we talk about culturally sustaining pedagogy, disability might be in the list of identities we're attending to, but it's often not taken up in robust ways, right? We don't have a lot of examples of what that looks like. And so that's something that Laurie and I were trying to do in this book, is give some concrete examples of what it looks like to treat disability as a cultural identity and thinking about it as something that we can sustain through our teaching practices. And so that involves really going beyond just thinking about access or inclusion in terms of like where students' bodies are placed, like what classroom we're teaching them in, or if it's a pushout or a pullout group. And really thinking about honoring students' identities and thinking about the cultural capital, the cultural competence that people with disabilities have. And so that includes things like connecting students with disabilities, with mentors who have disabilities. We've talked to-- we've been doing some interviews with educators-- additional interviews with educators with disability. Then we've talked to some like children's book authors who have disabilities. And as we talk to them, none of them can really identify mentors that they've had who share a disability identity with them. And so that's different than other identities we attend to in culturally sustaining pedagogy, right? Where you might share an identity with your family, right? And be able to connect with other folks and be in community. And so, we're thinking about leveraging the knowledge of disabled in individuals and connecting students with folks who share their-- a similar identity with them. And in this-- another sort of key point is the reciprocity of that cultural competence, right? That we're helping students who have disabilities gain access to dominant ways of knowing and being, right? That's typically how we talk about special education, right? We're helping them get access to general ed curriculum, for example. But that it's also valuable the other way around, right? For students who are able bodied and teachers who are able bodied to learn about disabled ways of knowing and being, right. That that is also valuable knowledge. And so, we call that gaining disability cultural competence, again, building on some of the terminology from Gloria Ladson-Billings. And so, we're really thinking about making sure that we're centering the voices of teachers and students with disabilities and valuing their knowledge and their lived experiences as a part of the pedagogy.
Roberto German 10:42
That's an important work, you know, and we really do need that. We need to hear these stories. We need to read through these examples. We need to put ourselves in proximity to individuals who are experiencing disabilities and get a sense. You know, get a better sense of not just what they're going through, but how it is that we could support them or how it is, as you stated, that we could also learn from them so that we're better informed. You know, I heard you use the term "access" a few times, and I also heard the term "inclusive" or "inclusivity" used. Which, you know, leads me to think that given the Trump administration's recent efforts to dismantle DEI initiatives, many educators fit at culturally sustaining and disability affirming practices will come under attack or are under attack currently. So how can teachers and administrators ensure that CSP and DSP remain embedded in literacy instruction even in politically hostile environments?
Amy Tondreau 11:58
This is a big question.
Roberto German 12:00
Yeah, you know, I'm thinking we get it, get it dirty, get messy, get into it early.
Amy Tondreau 12:07
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. You know, and certainly with the caveat that we don't have all of the answers, right? Things are changing day by day, and we're all gonna be figuring this out together. But, you know, I think one of the things that we talk to our-- the teachers that we work with and our pre-service teachers, right? Is like, of course, as a teacher, you always wanna be able to articulate why you're doing what you're doing. Often it helps to connect it to standards and skills objectives and, you know, and understand that it is connected, right? That this is not tacked on additional work, right? But that the work that we do that is culturally and disability sustaining is, you know, contributing to students' academic growth, right? So being able to articulate that. We also really see our teachers who are doing this work, following their students' leads. For example, we really see writing as a space of co-creation, right? And a sort of crack in the curriculum to allow students' voices and students' stories and students' questions to be centered. So, Lindsey Mann is a teacher that we work with in Michigan. And she-- her students are always writing books that go into their classroom library. And, you know, that is a space where things that happen in their lives and their identities right become the curriculum because that's, you know, what they're writing authentically.
Roberto German 13:46
Right. That's good. That's the strategy.
Amy Tondreau 13:48
Exactly. You're not gonna ban.
Roberto German 13:50
You can't ban the students writing. I love it. I love it. Shout out to Lindsay.
Amy Tondreau 13:56
Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. And you know, another way into that is remixing curricular texts. So, we use strategies from-- I love postmodern picture books. And often they include techniques like, you know, where text is crossed out and rewritten, or there's a narrator that's put into an existing story that talks back to the text, right? So, you think about like fractured fairy tales or, you know, those kinds of things, right? Where we take a sort of conventional story and we remix it. And so oftentimes teachers are required to use particular texts in the classroom, right? Very contested over what those texts are. But whatever those texts are, we can use strategies to question those texts, to be critical of those texts, and to invite students to rewrite them in ways that better represent their identity or represent the questions that they have. And so, when you're limited by curricular mandates, it's kind the way that we're engaging kids with those texts can really open up a new world of possibilities.
Roberto German 15:14
Yeah, I like that. I like that because it invites the students in, right? It empowers them to be part of the process, but it also maintains and fosters their creativity. And so, like, I could even see myself, you know, if I'm in there, you know, we gonna need some horns, like remix. [imitates horn blowing]
Amy Tondreau 15:36
Exactly.
Roberto German 15:36
You know the horn is going off. It's, you know, remix time. We might have some turntables. You know, really make it a fun experience, right. Because learning should be fun. You know, we want kids to find the process of learning to be fun as much as much as we can, but we also want to continue to tap into that student voice, right? Get students writing, keep 'em questioning, push those critical thinking skills. So, I love that because that's the type of thinking, that's the type of innovation that we need, especially right now.
Amy Tondreau 16:08
Yeah. And, you know, kids have so much awareness of remixing because of, you know, the social media that they consume, right? Memes are all about remixing. And, you know, they're familiar with remixing from music as well.
Roberto German 16:23
I mean, you could do something right there, right? Just, you know, using memes to really teach literacy, right. To help them engage in literacy in a different way. It's just so many different ways to do these things. Laurie, I know you're itching to jump in.
Laurie Rabinowitz 16:41
Well, we have an example of that in the book. There's a teacher, a wonderful teacher, Ali Paddock, who teaches in Brooklyn. And she provides an example of where she had her students take the images from the Roblox game on the internet. And a lot of the representations of gender in Roblox are kind of problematic, very binary and like perpetuating, like very typical norms of femininity or masculinity. And she-- which Ali interestingly, works with students with significant language-based learning disabilities. So, these are students for whom critical literacy skills are often like, seen as something that they're not yet ready for. But she works with fifth graders, and when she has conversations with them, they're very aware of their environment. But a lot of the literacy work that they do in the classroom is like learning like basic decoding skills, like phonic skills. And they do need that work, and it's really important. So, she created a unit of study that didn't get rid of that instruction, that valuable important instruction that she was doing, but an additional unit where they were drawing on critical visual literacies. And they learned some critical visual literacy skills, similar to what Amy's talking about in terms of remixing, like thinking about cropping, thinking about what we emphasize in an image. And then had them redesign, they found these problematic Roblox images, and they designed them and explained why they redrew them the way that they did to like re-empower a female character that had been created in Roblox, or to demonstrate that masculinity can be more complicated than having big muscles. So that's one of the big examples in the book of the teacher drawing on some of that media culture to do it.
Roberto German 18:28
That's great. That's great that you bring us there into the classroom level 'cause I think it's important for our listeners to hear some of these concrete examples. So, thank you for doing that. You know, now I want to bring it to the 30,000-foot level. And as a former school leader, these are definitely curiosities that always crossed my mind. One of the key ideas in your book is that a whole school approach is necessary for Sustaining Cultural and Disability Identities in the Literacy Classroom. What are some concrete steps school leaders can take to support and equip teachers in implementing these frameworks effectively?
Laurie Rabinowitz 19:06
Yeah. I'm a former school leader too.
Roberto German 19:09
Oh. Shout out to my school leaders. Yes! You know, we gotta stick together 'cause sometimes our, you know, our folks, they don't understand the struggle. They don't understand how hard it's to lead a school. It's a thankless job. You know, we love it. We love it, but it could often feel thankless.
Laurie Rabinowitz 19:27
It's very hard. I worked at a school that was all-- So when we talk about inclusion, I think about inclusion as a mindset and a way of thinking about kids. But I worked at a school that was all integrated co-teaching classrooms throughout the whole school, which is a special education service delivery model. So, have-- had the opportunity to sort of think about this idea of what does it mean to have students with disabilities integrated across an entire school. And some of the things that we've seen work, and I saw work in that context, were teacher-centered learning communities rather than top-down learning. And that would be teachers having inquiries about particular students, having teachers lead each other. So, teachers serving in leading roles to do like professional learning. The school where I worked, we had like a weekly professional learning community time where people were in choice groups addressing needs of students who they were thinking about, they were wondering about. This can be done in the form of book clubs. It could be done in the form of a lesson study, which I found highly effective where you choose a pedagogical practice, hopefully something from our book if you wanna try out, perhaps remixing as Amy just shared in detail about. And then you take the-- you have a group of teachers write a lesson that remixes together, and then someone lead teaches that everyone observes and gives feedback, and then they design the next lesson, and then people bring it into their own classrooms. Videotaping each other's pedagogies and then giving each other feedback on them in a teacher-centered space, not from the administrative level. Recently we were very lucky to been invited to a school in Brooklyn where they're using our book for book clubs. And the way that school is structuring it is each grade level is working with their literacy coach, and they're reading the book in chunks, and they're getting together and they're thinking about very practical examples in their classroom. And this is done with administrative support and lunch in a low-key way. So, it's not meant to be like a high-pressure environment. And they're trying out different practices, thinking about particular students in mind and getting together and talking about them. And the school literacy specialists are being very deliberate about picking, because there's-- we did write a lot of examples. So, they're picking out like particular examples that might be relevant that they wanna try out with teachers. And so, I think increment-- doing it incrementally, making space for it and centering it as a learning environment for teachers where they're not being told, for example, in the school that we just visited, like, "You have to do this." It's, “What are you thinking about?" "What would you want to try out?" "What's working, what isn't?" We really believe in teachers as professionals and having agency in doing this work and giving feedback. So, centering the teacher as a professional learner is key. And presuming that they can be professional learners in an environment where we often really have been restricting teaching practice and saying, follow these scripts, center the students, center the teacher as a learner as well.
Roberto German 22:23
That's good. That's good. Yeah. You also highlight 'cause I think these are things that if we're given space for teachers to drive the conversation, to bring their wonders to bring their curiosities that in the process of doing so there will be a great deal of discovery. And one of the things that we're constantly discovering is who our students are. And your book highlights the intersection of multiple identities, race, disability, language and culture, and shaping students' literacy experiences. What are some practical strategies for helping students explore and express their multifaceted identities through reading and writing? And we talked a little bit about this early on, but love for us to build on this.
Amy Tondreau 23:17
Yeah, absolutely. One thing I think that, you know, we emphasize in the book is thinking about book choice and thinking about linking book choice, right? That we're not thinking about stories in isolation as representing, you know, sometimes we read a text for Black History month or a API month or you know, a particular holiday, and we have that single story, right, as though it represents a particular identity and that can lead to essentializing. So really thinking about building tech sets and thinking about linked texts to develop that diversity of understanding and that intersectionality. So, one example that Laurie and I love that we mention in the book is two sort of middle grade chapter books. So, From the Desk of Zoe Washington and Roll with It. And both of those texts center main characters who love baking and, you know, want to sort of, you know, lean into to that hobby. But they center very different identities. So, From the Desk of Zoe Washington is about a black man character who lives with a parent and a stepparent and has a parent who's incarcerated and sort of, explores some of those experiences and identities. Roll with It is a character with a disability. And so, thinking about those different characters and the things that they have in common across texts, right? Create some really interesting conversations for students. We also love Milo Imagines the World as a great mentor text for some of these conversations. In that story Milo is writing the subway and he's imagining the lives of all the people that he encounters, and he draws his imaginings in the book. But then he sees his own reflection in the subway window and realizes that people wouldn't just by seeing him know all the things about him. And so, then he reimagines, he redraws the illustrations of kind of non-dominant ways that show, right, the sort of multiplicity and the intersectionality of people's lives. So, I think if we use text in that sort of intentional way, we can really invite students into those conversations. And again, we have some amazing teacher examples in the book that highlight that. We have Kate Augustus created this beautiful fantasy writing unit. She was teaching fantasy writing and realized, you know, that fantasy often perpetuates their sort of a white main character, right? Typically, male who's the hero and on the quest. And there might be side characters who are female or characters of color who are there for kind of comic relief. And so, she like leaned into that with her class. And as her students started to write fantasy stories that challenged these dominant perspectives, disability sort of naturally came up. Students started writing their disability identities into the stories. And so again, it's-- she was doing this sort of iterative process of revising her unit to become more and more intersectional over time because of the identities that students are naturally bringing to their writing. And so, we really see the way that, you know, we can maximize the text that kids are interacting with and then invite them into those conversations. And we're gonna continue to deepen it because kids are living intersectional lives. And so, if we're listening to them, right, and centering their voices that's gonna help us to give them space to express the fullness of who they are.
Laurie Rabinowitz 27:24
And I would just add, like the example of Kate. I think that's particularly salient because Kate identifies as having disabilities herself. And so, I think teachers who are comfortable in spaces that we build, go back to the question about school leaders building school spaces where talking about disability identity as an educator is part of the main practice. So, her students knew that she was dyslexic and knew that she identifies as having ADD. And so that had already been part of the classroom conversations. So, they had some, what we call like disability fluency. They were able to speak about disability in that classroom. I was in the room observing while she was teaching some of this unit. And the students started talking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the movie Willy Wonka. And they naturally were critiquing. They were like, "Wait a minute, what's the situation with the Oompa-Loompas? Are these people with these disabilities who have been taken by a colonizer from their homeland and brought to the western world and then forced into enslavement?" And the students, these were fifth graders, started to notice that. And then she was like-- and then she like rewind it herself after the lesson and was like, "Wait a minute. Disabilities a feature of my identity. I talk about it; the students are seeing this because we've talked about it so much and it's something that we have this conversation in the classroom. This needs to be part of the unit. I hadn't written it into my unit, so it needed to be part of that." So, I think it also has to do with, I don't know, the dialogues you have in the space, what you develop fluency in speaking about, and like giving teachers with disabilities spaces as school leaders to talk about disability identity. Like this is kind of like a little bit of an add-on to that point, but it's really valuable to have like disability affinity clubs in colleges-- in elementary schools and middle schools. We have one at my college for professors, that's why just came up to. So, professors with disabilities can meet with students with disabilities because that builds that kind of space where you have that fluency in your school. So, it can naturally be a part of literacy curriculum. And one of the teachers that we work with, Charlotte Maltby, has developed one of those clubs at her middle school and it's been really, really valuable to see the work that she is a teacher with ADHD has done with students. And it becomes more integrated in curriculum because it's that affinity space exists.
Roberto German 29:41
Yeah. Thinking about it becoming more integrated, not just in curriculum, but the fabric of the school. Some schools celebrate diversity through one-off events or heritage months, but your book advocates for a much deeper integration of CSP and DSP. What are some ways educators can move beyond performative inclusion and ensure that literacy instruction truly sustain students' cultural and disability identities throughout the year?
Laurie Rabinowitz 30:13
I think part of that begins with like, shifts in mindset. Like once you're aware of something, you can't be unaware of something.
Roberto German 30:21
I can't turn the switch off.
Laurie Rabinowitz 30:23
No, you can't turn the switch off. And politics can't turn the switch off it too, right?
Roberto German 30:27
That's good.
Laurie Rabinowitz 30:29
It's the decision making you're making as an educator is going to be informed by what you believe, no matter what sort of outside forces exist around you. An example of that that just recently came up for me is I teach a class that has a lot of these themes embedded in it. It's an intro course to beginning educators. And we were reading about the recent fires in LA and a number, it's very sad, a number of disabled people were the victims of the fires because there was no emergency planning on how to evacuate many disabled people. And the stories of people perishing in their home and their family were not allowed in to come and get them. And so, we were reading about this and how that is a form of ableism that's embedded, like structurally embedded into systems that people see disabled people as an afterthought. They didn't think about them in emerge-- it's not thought about in an emergency evacuation planning. And when I was having this conversation with my students, a number of them brought up these examples from when they were in high school or middle school where they remembered when they were fire drills that physically disabled students would stay in the building and there wasn't a plan. They would-- the schools would shut the elevators off 'cause you had to take the stairs in an emergency and then they wouldn't practice evacuation plans. And I had a number of students bring this up as an example. And then other students started bringing up examples of like, well, when the fire alarms would go off for students with autism, there would be like too much sensory information. They would remember peers who would have like a lot of trouble evacuating the building. And my students were like, "What do we do if this happens when we're classroom teachers? How do we resolve these issues in the moment?" And the conversation-- But now, you know, right? Your mindset has just changed 'cause you're aware that disabilities shouldn't be an afterthought, right? So that's not gonna happen to you. What you're gonna do is you're gonna-- when you have a student with a disability in your class, you are gonna ask at the beginning of the school year, we need to sit down and have an emergency evacuation plan, right? That's not gonna-- so this doesn't happen and you're not gonna be able-- that's not gonna be the situation for you. And that comes from a piece of an awareness. So, I think that professional learning piece is key. And once your mindset is there, then this is integrated into the way you think in the types of decisions that you make.
Amy Tondreau 32:40
I think the other component to think about is that, again, like these are not add-on practices and they don't live only in read aloud, for example. That we can embed and bring this mindset to what are often presented as like neutral practices. So, for example, with science of reading right now, you know, phonics is top of mind for many elementary school teachers. And folks have new curriculum that they've adopted that, again, they're being asked to implement in scripted ways. And we often think of phonics as neutral, right? As though language and cultural background is not involved in phonics instruction. We present it as though there's one right way, right, for phonics. But we know that student’s dialect and their linguistic background shapes things like pronunciation, things like their understanding of certain phonemes. And so, one way to really embed this work is to bring it across all of your teaching, right? And understanding that students' identities shape all of their literacy practices and therefore need to shape all of our teaching practices so that we're responsive to them in all contexts, rather than thinking of it as something that we only do in certain parts of instruction or certain parts of our day.
Laurie Rabinowitz 34:15
I'll give a personal example of that. I am from New Jersey, I'm Jewish, and I say the word "D-O-G, dog." And if you were to phonetically sound that out, it would be "dawg" using many of the standard curriculums. So, it would be "dawg" and then I would say "dog". So, we wanna allow-- we talk a lot in our book in the section on word work about embracing dialectic difference in phonics instruction and not telling someone that's the correct pronunciation. What lang-- what letters are and phonemes are our symbols to match the way that our language works. So, you start with your linguistic practice first, and that can be embedded in any of the spelling instruction that you do, that you're embracing a diversity of pronunciation, recognizing maybe there's some value of knowing some of the standardized spelling, but we can say it different ways. And that's a part of our identity. We're not taking that away from our students. That like linguistic identity piece.
Roberto German 35:12
Yeah, I get that. I'm from Massachusetts, so there's a, you know, there's a lot we-- That's right. That's right. Drop the, "ah." Well, what is your message of encouragement to our audience?
Laurie Rabinowitz 35:32
The youth, they're wonderful people. Embrace the youth. They're critical, they're engaged. They are the next generation. Let's not squash their critical thinking skills. Let's embrace them and help them make the world a better place. Let's do it with them. Teaching's an amazing, amazing profession. I could be having the worst day in the world, and I get in my classroom and I talk to my students and I feel awesome. So, go do your work, feel awesome, make those four-- those walls that you close when you get in that room. It's such a really, really special place. And feel good about the fact that you get to be there every day. What about you, Amy?
Amy Tondreau 36:09
I had a colleague who used to say, "The best part of this job is that it matters every day. And the hardest part of this job is that it matters every day." And you know, I think that that helped me on hard days and that helped me on great days, right? To know that the work matters every single day is really motivating. And I think Carla Shalaby wrote that in Troublemakers, which is an incredible text.
Roberto German 36:40
Yeah. Shout out to Carla.
Amy Tondreau 36:42
Absolutely. And she talks about that, like the classroom is one of the only places where we can create another world, right? Like you're creating the future. And that is incredibly powerful, right? So, I think like for teachers, embrace the power, right? We talk to folks all the time who have vivid memories of things that happened in classrooms when they were children, right? Like decades later as adults, the things that we're doing matter. And I teach a children's literature class. I was telling our-- my students that like, you know, right now, future presidents, right, future leaders of our country are in classrooms. What they're reading, what they're learning matters. And so, their teachers are in very real tangible ways shaping our future as a society. And so, you know, under-- we unfortunately, teachers get a lot of messages that are disempowering but they can't take that power away from us.
Roberto German 37:48
That's right. That's good. That's a message that we need to hear right now. There's probably a lot of folks who are feeling powerless but need to be reminded that we do have power, we do have agency, and we need to exercise that now. [chuckles] So for those that wanna learn more about your work, for those that want to dig into Sustaining Cultural and Disability Identities in the Literacy Classroom, K-6, where can they learn more about you? Where can they connect with you? Where can they get a copy of this book?
Amy Tondreau 38:31
Yeah. So, you can get a copy of our beautiful texts and see these beautiful kids engaging in incredibly joyful literacy practices from Routledge. It's also available on Amazon. And in terms of following us, you know, you can certainly connect with Laurie and I at our email addresses. I'm Amy Tondreau on Twitter and also on Blue Sky. We also have an Instagram account that we really encourage everyone to follow. It's Sustaining Disability Identities on Instagram. And we are in the process of building a website. And so, when we have the website to release, we will be announcing that on the Instagram account. And so that's the best place to stay up to date with our work and where else we're talking and presenting and writing and all that good stuff.
Roberto German 39:30
Listen folks, this is 300 plus pages wealth of knowledge, resource for you to apply to your craft. All right. Appreciate y'all, Amy, Laurie, continue to push this work forward. Thank you for expanding my lens. Definitely feeling challenged and encouraged to understand how CSP and DSP complement each other. And so, I still have some work to do, and I think there are probably many after listening to this episode that are going to feel the same way. And we appreciate y'all guiding us to notice how these pedagogies intersect and pushing us to ensure that we not only become aware, but that we take some action that we implement what you're offering here as a framework so that we're in greater proximity and a better support to individuals that have disability identities.
Amy Tondreau 40:46
Thank you so much. Really appreciate the conversation and the chance to share about our work.
Laurie Rabinowitz 40:53
Likewise. It's nice to meet you.
Roberto German 40:57
As always, your engagement in Our Classroom is greatly appreciated. Be sure to subscribe, rate the show and write a review. Finally, for resources to help you understand the intersection of race bias, education, and society, go to multiculturalclassroom.com. Peace and love from your host, Roberto German.
