Honoring Identities

Honoring Identities argues that creating culturally responsive learning communities is a process which begins with building community, cultivating certain student and teacher dispositions, nurturing social justice, leveraging the power of talk and dialogic exchange, using Cultural Identity Literature (CIL) to build bridges and to normalize difference, and fostering a culture of civil discourse. Honoring Identities provides both theory and practice to advance the important mission of building culturally responsive mindsets and to ensure that all students feel like they have a place at the learning table. CIL reflects and honors the lives of all young people, and GREEN APPLE questions focus their reading on key facets of identity, multiplying the effectiveness of the reading experience. GREEN APPLE questions also provide a lens for anyone else wishing to select CIL. The questions not only illuminate different perspectives of a text but make readers aware that individual experiences color the reading of a text.

Donna Miller has spent much of her career studying the fluid roles of identity and culture inliteracy learning. In her book Honoring Identities, she describes classroom theory, dispositions, and activities that help students learn about themselves and others, which ultimately helps students make better sense of the world. Experienced classroom teachers and preservice teachers alike will find this book helpful when shaping culturally responsive practices., Donna Miller’s Honoring Identities gives busy teachers and teacher educators numerous strategies for enacting critical thinking and multicultural literacies instruction in their classrooms. With suggestions for self-reflection and classroom activities, readers will find much to gain through the tried-and-tested strategies Miller outlines. This book is a must-have for teachers and teacher educators who have long searched for practical activities that can launch serious inquiry into means for accomplishing culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies., Honoring Identities is a must-have for every university teacher preparation program, as well as every English language arts teacher who is looking for concrete steps in improving culturally sustaining pedagogy. Dr. Miller’s experience as a teacher of secondary English language arts methods courses, and student teaching supervisor at Arizona State University play almost as important a role in her understanding of this topic as her time as a director in the teacher education program at Aaniiih Nakoda Tribal College in Montana. Dr. Miller grounds her work in theory, but spends most of the book in the what, how and why of honoring the identities of students. Her acronym GREEN APPLE is brilliant, and provides a guide for meeting the National Council of Teachers of English brief on multicultural literacy for “seeing, thinking, reading, writing, listening, and discussing in ways that critically confront and bridge social, cultural, and personal differences” (NCTE, 5). Throughout the book, Dr. Miller explains and provides resources in the practical formats that teachers actually use to address issues of “gender identity, religion, ethnicity and race, economic class/socioeconomic status, name/family, age, place, perception of belonging, and exceptionality” (Miller, Honoring Identities, 3). The process for leading students into and through what could be troubled waters of political dialogue are especially well-conceived, practical, and useful. This book is reminiscent of Harold Wong’s First Days of School, in that it provides detailed resources on how to meet the needs of students in ways that set up the teacher and students, both, for success. Honoring Identities is a useful book from one of our nation’s most experienced experts!!

Donna L. Miller is an adjunct instructor, educational consultant, and manager of www.thinkingzone.org. With research interests that revolve around young adult literature and issues of literacy sponsorship, she has taught in the secondary school system for 26 twenty-six years and in the post-secondary system for another eleven.