ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges readers to reflect on the ways schools, schooling, and colonial culture have positioned themselves as distant from, and superior to, their students, both culturally and intellectually and to consider their students’ expertise. It begins with an illustration that demonstrates the predominance of white authors in literacy curricula. The chapter then provides instructional approaches designed to redistribute expertise. It introduces an approach to reading instruction that is purposeful in how it validates youth experiences, skills, and strengths through a reading workshop model. Next, the chapter provides ways to design writing instruction that sustains the linguistic and literacy practices students bring with them to the classroom from their communities and cultures through interviewing community members and creating documentaries. Then, it examines how to bridge ontological gaps or ways of being through storytelling and a human library. The chapter ends with a vignette to encourage discussion around how to teach in response to humans rather than scripted curricula, questions to consider when planning for positioning everyone as experts, and resources to explore to learn more about storytelling. It also offers tips on how to integrate student goal setting and self-assessment into assessment practices and potential video production tools.
