Learn how to foster critical conversations in English language arts classrooms. This guide encourages teachers to engage students in noticing and discussing harmful discourses about race, gender, and other identities. The authors take readers through a framework that includes knowledge about power, a critical learner stance, critical pedagogies, critical talk moves, and vulnerability. The text features in-depth classroom examples from six secondary English language arts classrooms. Each chapter offers specific ways in which teachers can begin and sustain critical conversations with their students, including the creation of teacher inquiry groups that use transcript analysis as a learning tool. Book Features:Strategies that educators can use to facilitate conversations about critical issues.In-depth classroom examples of teachers doing this work with their students.Questions, activities, and resources that foster self-reflection.Tools for engaging in transcript analysis of classroom conversations.Suggestions for developing inquiry groups focused on critical conversations.

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1. Introduction: Why do we need to have critical conversations in schools? -- 2. What do critical conversations look like in schools? -- 3. Building knowledge about power and privilege: Confronting dominant narratives -- 4. Engaging a critical learner stance through racial literacy -- 5. Preparing students for critical conversations: Creating a critical space -- 6. Making meaning during critical conversations -- 7. Sustaining critical conversations through critical talk moves -- 8. Studying critical conversations in teacher inquiry groups using transcripts.