Honoring Identities: Creating Culturally Responsive Learning Communities

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.