What is it about?
With an intended audience of younger people, this book seamlessly combines easy to access information relating to anti-racism with useful journalling ideas, to help readers actively engage with the topic. Not only does it explain difficult to grasp issues clearly, it is also an incredibly beautiful book – the illustrations, by Aurélia Durand, are gorgeous!
How will I use it to help me in the classroom?
There was very little in this book that I didn’t already know, from reading other anti-racist books targeted at adults. However, there were two main reasons I wanted to read this book:
- To see if it was appropriate to recommend to students. I am wary of recommending anything to students, without reading it myself first. The vibrant images make this book one that I would have been tempted to pull off the shelves as a teenager myself, which I felt made it all the more important for me to quickly check it was appropriate. I needn’t have worried though – this is the first book that I have read on the subject that I would happily give to any of my 11+ aged students to read!
- To see if I could use any takeaways in my lessons – which there are , plenty of them in fact! I currently don’t have a tutor group, but I felt like a lot of these activities would be great to use in an extended tutor period. For example, the first section of the book ‘Waking Up: Understanding and Growing into My Identities’ is all about coming to terms with your own identity, addressing the typical ‘all about me’ conversations, that happen throughout a young person’s education, in not only an anti-racist way, but making sure that heterosexuality, cis-gender and other things are not centred, allowing the young people to have a safe space where they can explore their true identity.
All in all, I am incredibly happy with my purchase – so much so that it was one of the few books I decided to take with me to Australia. It is an incredibly useful resource and I can’t wait to start sharing it with my new students.
The Road to Inclusion 