A review by jaelyn7
Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy by Gholdy Muhammad

3.0

I finally got around to sitting down and reading through all of Cultivating Genuis, after learning about Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) at a PD. It's a quick read, but the book itself was not as impactful as the ideas or hearing a talk by Dr. Muhammad. I will also say from a teacher's perspective, this book is not immediately helpful unless you are very new to this work. I agree that to start implementing HRL in your classroom, you need to do the work internally first, and there are guiding questions at the end of each chapter to help you. Aside from that, I was missing a wide variety of lesson plans and advice on how to successfully implement HRL. In addition, one of the barriers of this work is that people are resistant. At least in this book, HRL is not supported by student anecdotes or any type of data, aside from it being successful in Black literary societies. The book is theory heavy, which is harder for me to connect back to practical application. I would say this is more a book in defense of changing how we think as opposed to a book for teachers on how to implement the framework. I would love to see Dr. Muhammad produce a book or resources that are more teacher-friendly, with full lesson plans as well as best practices when implementing these lessons across all grade levels.