One of our big projects this school year has been making updates to our Kindergarten–2nd Grade ELA curriculum to add Fishtank Plus content and features. In the process, we have been revisiting the texts we first selected for those courses over 5 years ago.
In all of our ELA revisions, we have been focusing on whose voices are heard and whose stories are told throughout our curriculum. Our K–2 updates are the most recent effort in our ongoing commitment to steadily improve the representation and inclusion offered by our text selections.
We strive to create resources that support anti-racist and culturally responsive teaching. The research and writing of Gholdy Muhammad and Bettina Love, the advocacy of We Need Diverse Books, and the teacher-driven movement around #DisruptTexts, led by Tricia Erbavia, Lorena Germán, Dr. Kim Parker, and Julia Torres, have all informed our thinking.
We have also incorporated Learning for Justice’s Social Justice Standards into our authoring process, as we share their vision of helping students to build strong identities, understand diversity, seek justice, and take action.
Our Revision Process
As we began re-examining our K–2 literature and science & social studies units, we asked ourselves a series of questions:
- What knowledge and understandings of the world will students take away from this unit?
- What will students learn about their own identity?
- What will students learn about diversity, justice, and action?
- Whose voices are currently amplified in the unit? Whose voices are missing?
- What perspectives and experiences are missing from the unit?
In the course of this review, we were able to identify many opportunities to improve representation and inclusivity in these units. We saw that we had almost no Indigenous and Arab authors represented in these units. Additionally, we found that several units had a high concentration of books where stories about Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) were written by white authors.
In the years since we first created these units, there has been a welcome movement to recognize and share #OwnVoices texts—those in which the author and protagonist share a marginalized identity. This shift has helped surface, elevate, and encourage the publishing of more stories that draw on authentic lived experiences and avoid overly simplified or stereotypical depictions of characters.
As we turned to the work of revising and selecting new texts for our K–2 units, we asked ourselves another set of questions:
- Whose story is being told? Is it being told by an #OwnVoices author or illustrator?
- How does this story help students answer the unit essential questions?
- Does this story highlight joy, not just struggle?
- Does the text highlight or allow for discussions of intersectionality?
With these answers in mind, we were ready to make changes to the units.
Text Changes
Several units in each grade offered us opportunities to make significant positive changes in representation and inclusion, particularly because steady strides have been made in the publishing world to make some of these texts newly available
In Kindergarten, we were able to deepen our unit that focused on biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks into an updated unit called What is Justice?. The unit begins with a collection of books focused on students exploring and understanding their own identities and the diverse identities of their classmates and the world. This includes exploring race and racism, a foundation necessary for understanding the civil rights movement. The second half of the unit builds students' understanding of segregation and injustice, and highlights how the community came together, led by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for justice.
With this foundation built in Kindergarten, our 1st Grade unit Movements for Equality (which was updated at the end of January) will now look more broadly at movements for change in the United States. The stories they read will highlight Black Americans fighting for justice during the civil rights movement, Indigenous people fighting for water protection, LGBTQ+ people fighting for their rights, women fighting for suffrage and equal access, people with disabilities fighting for accessibility, and workers fighting for labor protections.
Our 1st Grade unit Love Makes a Family will also have an infusion of new texts when the Fishtank Plus update is published in March. This change will allow more students to see themselves through texts that share the stories of LGBTQ+ families and adoption, the ways families can change through events like death and divorce, the importance of sibling relationships and grandparents, and the times we honor family traditions and customs.
In 2nd Grade, our unit People Who Changed the World will introduce students to an even wider range of exciting innovators, like physicist Wu Chien Shiung, inventor Temple Grandin, archeologist Julio C. Tello, entomologist Charles Henry Turner, and chemist Mario Molina.
We see these changes as necessary and positive moves toward a curriculum where more students can see themselves in characters, narratives, and important public figures, while at the same time being introduced to new perspectives and building foundational knowledge about justice and action.
But our work here is not done. We will continue to look for and incorporate new texts by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors that align with our units of study. In particular, we know that the vast majority of our science texts are written by white authors, and we would love to include more books by authors of color in those units.
If you have suggestions for books we should look into, we would love to hear them! Share your ideas here.
Details of Unit Changes
Kindergarten
- Updated versions of Units 1–6 have been published in the Kindergarten course.
- Unit 6 (formerly Biographies: Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks) is now titled What is Justice?. The text changes for that update are outlined in this document.
- Units 7 and 8 updates will be published in April.
1st Grade
- Updated versions of Unit 1–4 for both Literature and Science & Social Studies have been published in the 1st Grade course.
- The order for Science & Social Studies units has changed, with Fighting for Change becoming Unit 4 and Ancient Egypt becoming Unit 5.
- There are significant text changes for the following units, which are outlined in this document:
- Biographies: Artists and Musicians
- The Power of Reading and School
- Fighting for Change
- Appreciating Family
- Unit 5 updates will be published at the end of March. The update to the Ancient Egypt unit will include a number of text changes (due to out-of-print titles) that will be announced in March.
2nd Grade
- Updated versions of Unit 1–4 for both Literature and Science & Social Studies have been published in the 2nd Grade course.
- The units Stories of Immigration and People Who Changed the World have significant text changes, which are outlined in this document.
- Unit 5 updates will be published at the end of February and Unit 6 updates will be published at the end of March, but neither will include major text changes.