A review by mrjess_bhs
For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education by Christopher Emdin

5.0

I had read several chapters of this book before, but since I just picked up Emdin’s new book Ratchetdemic, I wanted to go back through and read the full text. It’s a powerful texts with a lot of insights and I sincerely hope white teachers, like myself, will do the real work of reflection and growth to be able to implement what Emdin shares with authenticity. There are several strategies in here I have used, and while some may wonder if they are the right approaches for the population they teach, that is the whole point. Your students should get to decide and choose what is effective and what engages them. I deeply appreciate his use of neoindigenous for black folks in the US as it honors the complexity of decolonizing in a nation that has both indigenous peoples and descendants of those stolen from their homelands and brought here. My one critique is he mentions extra credit a lot, and while I can see where he is getting at (that students should be rewarded for their authentic learning and engagement), I think this should be done by writing those possibilities into the goals of the course and the “standards” we are assessing.