In this last installment to the Culturally Responsive Instruction series from Scholastic Education Solutions, Chief Academic Officer Amanda Alexander asks Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, author of the bestselling books Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy, about the need for joy in the classroom and how it can further student achievement.
The Culturally Responsive Instruction series includes three webinars and follows the launch of the Scholastic Literacy Framework. At the core of this framework is evidence-based literacy instruction that works to identify responsiveness, equity and belonging, well-being, and joy as important components to driving learning outcomes.
Check out the webinar here and read more below* to learn how Dr. Muhammad’s approach to culturally and historically responsive teaching not only opens important opportunities for students to cherish their heritage and cultural backgrounds, but fosters deep, impactful academic learning experiences.
*This portion of the webinar has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How do you define joy in the context of education and why is it so important?
Joy is wonder, elevation, laughter, beauty – teaching students to see the aesthetics in the world. Joy is art, music, performance, the spirit of our work, like Cynthia Diller says, joy is abolition and community and collectivism. Joy is safety, feeling at peace.
Abolitionists and the ancestors fought for things like anti-slavery, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-sexism, anti-classism. They fought against genocide. But what folks are really fighting for is joy. No one seeks to get up and fight every day to say that we have the right to belong here to survive and to be alive. Joy is hope, wellness, and purity of one's heart for humanity. It is the thing that we strive for every day in our lives. And it's what we should continue to fight for, for ourselves and for our children. So one cannot understand joy if you don't understand oppression.
Oppression is one of those concepts like joy that is very multi-layered and complicated. And this is why in my book I brought in artists and poets, such as Langston Hughes, because they help us to make sense of these very complicated things through their art. Langston Hughes writes: "Oppression. Now dreams / Are not available / To the dreamers, / Nor songs / To the singers. / In some lands / Dark night / And cold steel / Prevail / But the dream / Will come back, / And the song / Break / Its jail."
Once oppression is eliminated, joy can enter. He's basically saying that joy is this sort of erasure, abolishment of oppression. We understand joy as being defined in this way, when one is allowed to dream deeply, when one is allowed to sing loudly. It's that freedom, that liberation to just be free to live out your highest dreams and your most potential self.
People say, "Oh, joy is just this fun, fufu thing." No, it is the reason why we are here today. It is the fight for our lives and for our children.
Q. How does Unearthing Joy build upon the framework that you introduced to us in your first book, Cultivating Genius?
I introduced a model, and it sort of began to put a practical ‘something’ in teachers' and leaders' hands. This model began with teaching children – number one – identity. We're teaching them to know who they are, who they are, who they are not, who they desire to be every unit plan, every lesson plan. Number two, we're teaching the skills, the proficiencies, the state standards. Number three, we're teaching intellect, new knowledge.
Number four is criticality. This is where we teach our young people how to read, name, understand, question, and disrupt oppression in the world. We teach them how to problem solve, use their gifts, their skills to make the world and humanity a better place.
So I introduced those four major pursuits. That's what the ancestors called them, pursuits. They did not call them standards or goals or objectives. They called them pursuits because this is not just something that's needed for school K-12 or PreK-12. It's something that's needed for your life.
And in Unearthing Joy, I continued the work, and I fulfilled the model in my own viewpoint, and I added the fifth pursuit of joy because we needed a balance to the injustice. Joy is the goal, the goal of the Freedom Fighters, the goal of the youth protesters right now on college campuses, the goal as we protest against genocide and harm that's happening around the world. The goal is joy and our children cannot just understand oppression. They need the balance of what's good in this world, the benefits of the world, the beauty of the world.
Unearthing Joy not only introduced the fifth pursuit, but it gave a practical, step by step guide on how to implement the model altogether with lots of examples, templates, and lesson plans.
Q. How does focusing on joy contribute to creating a more inclusive and equitable environment for everyone?
When we include joy and the other four pursuits that come before it, what we're doing is creating a more equitable environment because if children can perceive themselves in the learning, then that makes them feel safe to have access to those skills. If you learn the skills, you then have access to the intellect. You cannot learn intellectualism and knowledge without skills.
Once you have intellectualism, that's when you can take a stance and understand the problems, the injustice. We are now living as a consequence in the world. This is what happens as a consequence when we don't have an educational system that is threaded with identity, intellect, criticality, and joy. So the sadness you feel when you wake up, that's why. The passive learning of some people where they just take in information, and don't question truth and knowledge, that's why. The oppression and pain that you're seeing, that's why. This restoration of confederate leaders' names to schools, that's why.
You know, when I think of the name of a school where children enter every day, where teachers enter, to feel safe, you want each school named after the brightest and the best among us that made this world a more joyful, loving place. Why do you want to go backwards? It's because these same people who are creating these laws and policies never had an educational system with identity, skills, criticality, and joy.
So that's enough of an understanding of why we have an inequitable and unjust society, and we've done it that way for too long. It's now time to do education in the United States, and in the world, very differently. One that is more responsive to the needs of our children and gives children what they deeply deserve. I know that was a lot, but I'm very serious about it. I don't take this lightly.
Q. Can you share an experience or anecdote of a joyful learning experience that you had in your own educational journey?
I grew up in Gary, Indiana, and I would look at my own teachers and I would go home and emulate them. I wanted to talk like them, command the space like them. I wanted to write lesson plans like them. Those were my heroes and the people I really looked up to.
I can remember a handful of lesson plans that my teachers did, because I was analyzing their pedagogical moves there. I didn't know I was doing that back then, but I was. So there was one lesson plan I wanted to mention and it was called "Where Does the Sky End?" and we had to visually draw the sky and answer that question through a visual and through an argument paper. This is elementary, you know. I was so intrigued by this question – I mean, I had to be in the 2nd, 3rd grade.
There was a big part of me that's like ‘where does the sky end?’ It had me thinking scientifically about the world and the earth, but it also metaphorically got me thinking. I knew it didn't end. It only had new parts that felt like new beginnings. And you know, what that lesson plan taught me is that there are infinite possibilities.
So here I am in my forties now, still using the knowledge and the information from that lesson plan to think about the infinite possibilities of my work in this world today.
Q. This concept of joy, how do you envision it evolving in the field of education and even beyond education? What do you see as the evolution of this concept of joy?
I hope we have learning standards or pursuits for joy that we can read and assess. I hope our curriculum is embedded explicitly with joy as a learning objective. And I hope we have assessments for joy. I hope we collect assessments for joy at the state level, at the district level, at the school level, at the classroom level.
I hope that when we hire folks, we interview them to ask them “joy” questions. That includes our teachers, our principals, our school board members, and anyone else who has interests or who have any say on how children are educated. I hope we have joy in our mission statements and our faculty meetings and our observations. Everything threaded throughout the educational system, joy should be there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad is a Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Specializing in Black historical excellence within educational communities, Dr. Muhammad's focus lies in reframing curriculum and instruction to better reflect contemporary needs. Her scholarly contributions have been featured in prominent academic journals and books, solidifying her reputation as a leading voice in the field.
Dr. Muhammad's dedication to excellence has been recognized through various national awards, including the 2021 NCTE Outstanding Elementary Educator in the English Language Arts and the esteemed 2024 Divergent Award for Excellence in Literacy and Advocacy.
Dr. Muhammad is the author of two influential and best-selling books tailored for educators: Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy and Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning. These works serve as foundational resources for educators seeking to enhance their practice through culturally responsive pedagogy.
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