Cultivating Genius: Joy

Posted on by Kathy Collier
In my last post, I wrote about Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally Responsive and Historically Responsive Literacy. Muhammad has developed a tool based on the rich practices of Black Literary Societies of the 1800s. The framework includes 5 Learning Pursuits: Identity, Skills, Intellect, Criticality, and Joy. These pursuits are empowering and connected to the lives of students. They are used to design interdisciplinary unit plans through the use of multi-modal layered texts. In my last post, I focused on the Learning Pursuit of Identity. Today, I will focus on Joy. Let me preface by saying I am just a learner in this work, and have so much more to learn. However, I need to start somewhere and am taking it step by step. As always, I look forward to feedback!

Initially Muhammad’s framework included: Criticality, Skills, Intellect, and Identity. Joy was added later, because it is connected to learning and to the history of Literary Societies and because it is truly the center of all learning.

“Children deeply need and deserve a curriculum that is intended to capture their brilliance, their genius, their beauty – offering more complex and more complete views of themselves – and aren’t just seeped in narratives and stories of pain but also of joy.”

Our children need to, and deserve to, feel joy in the curriculum. They also need to hear stories of strength, action, and joy from their ancestors and communities. In fact, Historical Literary Societies centered joy; they were intentional about this focus. Muhammad says, “There is no justice without joy.” Some words/phrases that come up when Muhammad writes and speaks of joy include:

  • loving, thriving
  • beauty, humanity
  • invent, create, innovate
  • art, science, jazz, hip hop, dance, hair, image, poetry, language
  • walk, move, feel joy – a multi-sensory experience

Joy can come from simply reading a particular book – the goal for reading can be to instill and/or recognize Joy. Joy can be found and developed in yourself and others. There is Joy in improving your mind, celebrating your genius. Community can give Joy, as you give and receive Joy. Consider the Joy that sustained the geniuses of the past, despite huge mistreatment and pain. Joy can also come from telling your story and hearing the stories of others. We develop respect for others by listening to each other, in order to understand, in order to connect.

Muhammad talks about enabling and amplifying Joy. This is deep work. Ongoing work. Work that needs to be embedded in our planning, our lessons, our units, our ways of being.

In For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too, Emdin also writes about Joy. He describes “collective effervescence” as what happens when the joy of teaching matches the joy of learning: rigor is high, high-order questions are frequent, and discussions result in a deeper knowledge than what one person alone could articulate. Students are safe to bring their whole selves and participate in free-flowing ways instead of in the ways many classrooms function with highly structured talk and a premium on quiet spaces.

I don’t want to narrow the understanding of Joy to one example, however I feel that examples scaffold understanding. Here’s one of many examples that I’ve found useful:

Please visit Gholdy Muhammad’s Twitter account for much more information: @GholdyM.

Today I want to close with a quote from a parent at my school. She said “Being accepted by a child is the world.” We know what acceptance leads to a sense of belonging and belonging is a foundation for Joy. One of my core values is Belonging and I’m inspired by the possibilities that lie in Muhammad’s framework.

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