Culture, Community, and Educational Success

Deeply engaging and highly accessible, Culture, Community, and Educational Success: Reimagining the Invisible Knapsack is a transformative text that illuminates the complexities of race, social class, gender, family, and community as they shape learning in K-12 and higher education. Jenkins, Troutman, and Glover utilize intersectional analysis and critical pedagogies as a lens for examining structures of power and dominance. By offering readers both theoretical examinations and personal narratives, Culture, Community, and Educational Success: Reimagining the Invisible Knapsack makes an essential intervention into conversations about teaching and learning at the intersections of racialization and poverty; the authors dismantle deficit-based paradigms and assert the significance of liberatory education. Higher education researcher and professionals, K-12 education scholars and teachers, as well as administrators at all levels, will find the valuable insights offered in this book to be a vision for liberatory praxis that they too can implement. -- Mel Michelle Lewis, Director, The Center for Geographies of Justice, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies, Goucher College
Through storytelling and biography, Culture, Community, and Educational Success: Reimagining the Invisible Knapsack, by Toby S. Jenkins, Stephanie Troutman, and Crystal Polite Glover, pushes readers to rethink our notions of preparedness and privilege. Challenging those who demonize and pathologized students of color, this collection reflects on the expertise, power, knowledge, and cultural experiences they bring into each and every classroom.  Demanding that we account for the invisible and dismissed backpacks of ethnically diverse communities, this work highlights the power of and within family, community, and culture, making clear that in these inheritances lies both the tools and pathway of success, empowerment, and justice inside and outside the classroom. -- David J. Leonard, Professor of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, Washington State University
Culture, Community, and Educational Success: Reimagining the Invisible Knapsack is a timely and relevant book for those who wish to better understand literacies of Black and multiracial K-12 students turned advanced degree holding researchers, scholars and professionals. Focusing on first-generation narratives situated in various locations in terms of race, geography, schools and socioeconomic circumstances, this work insists on the beauty of culture and community in the educational journey and during the process of becoming an academic. Often the speech of Black and multi-racial students and scholars is muted, ignored and/or viewed negatively. In this book, Jenkins, Troutman and Glover insist on redefining the positive impacts of ethnic and racial community and family heritage toward the production of success in schools. Using intersectional autoethnography, the authors seek to ‘reimagine’ and theorize anew the importance of life writing as a method to explore and expose the domain of the deeply personal as it relates to race and ethnicity, and research on schooling success. This book recognizes educational systems and schooling as part of an ecology: it illustrates that learning is related to family and community in profound ways. It provides an account of how diverse experiences, positively redefined and reexamined, can challenge and transform discourses of educational deficits. -- Elaine Richardson, Professor of Literacy Studies, Ohio State University