Wanda Brooks
Biographic Data
| ID | 3828458 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wanda Brooks |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wanda |
| FAMILY NAME | Brooks |
| SIGNATURE | BROOKS W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Temple University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0675-5327 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Classroom is a Reflection of the Real World: Black Women Urban Teachers’ Activist Pedagogy and Leadership
This article utilizes narrative inquiry and a Black feminist lens to explore the political and social justice orientation of Black women educators and their commitment to students in urban schools. Three Black women teacher leaders explain their pedagogy and leadership during a period of heightened sociopolitical tension, including racial violence and legislative censorship. Analysis of semistructured interviews revealed three themes: (1) facilit…
Roots and Refuge: A Critical Exploration of Nature in Black Visual Narratives
This article examined the underrepresentation of Black characters in children’s picture books, particularly in natural settings, and its effect on Black children’s relationship with nature. Through an analysis of four contemporary picture books, the study revealed how visual depictions challenge these exclusions and expand narratives about Black engagement with the natural world. Utilizing visual semiotics and the theory of Black Aliveness, this …
Tracing Terror, Imagining Otherwise: A Critical Content Analysis of Antiblack Violence in Middle Grade Novels
This research offers a critical content analysis of three middle grade novels that is substantiated by key concepts within Afro-pessimism, Black critical theory, and Black futurity. Through this framing, we examine significant historic and sociopolitical moments reflected in the novels when Black preteen protagonists are forced to confront racialized violence. Across the set of novels, we outline a distinct pattern of antiblackness—one that chron…
Reading, Sharing, and Experiencing Literary/Lived Narratives About Contemporary Racism
This qualitative case study explores the literary/lived interpretations and experiences of middle school girls attending a book club located in an urban public school. We examine how the girls’ responses to depictions of racism in the novels read reveal the ways in which they understand and/or experience racism in their own lives? We ground this research in critical race theory. Our inductive analytic process yielded the following three themes: (…
Multicultural Children’s Literature as a Context for Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance in Urban Schools
Documenting Instructional Practices in a Literacy‐Infused Arts Program: Respecting Pedagogues From the Community
This study examines the instructional practices around literacy that characterized the work of a community based arts program designed for urban adolescents. Two primary sources of data were collected: field notes on approximately 35 hours of instruction spread across seven months and interviews with the program's staff and students. Four distinct instructional episodic structures were observed: explicit instruction, collaborative or individual c…
Inspiring Academically Talented High School Students to Consider Teaching Careers in Urban Schools
Narrative Significations of Contemporary Black Girlhood
This article examines how Black girlhood is constructed through fiction. The following research question guided this study: How do writers represent the heterogeneity of urban teenage girls in school-sanctioned African American young adult literature? Five popular narratives that exemplify the contemporary lives of urban African American female pre/teenage protagonists represent the data. Utilizing a Black feminist epistemological framework coupl…
The Nuances and Complexities of Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance and Social Justice
Mathematics is not a race-neutral subject. Access and opportunity in mathematics for students of color in the United States continue to be limited. While a great deal of attention has been given to increasing the number of underrepresented minority students in the mathematics pipeline, there is little consideration of who they are as learners or the context in which their mathematics learning takes place. We argue that culturally relevant instruc…
There Ain't No Accounting for What Folks See in Their Own Mirrors”: Considering Colorism Within a Sharon Flake Narrative
This article describes a study of both textual and reader response analyses of The Skin I'm In by Sharon Flake. Because gender and race constitute central themes in the narrative, Black feminist thought and feminism undergirded the textual critique. Critics' reviews, scholarly articles, and published author interviews also supported the textual analysis. Data were triangulated with excerpts from female student responses to the text and, specifica…
Reading representations of themselves: Urban youth use culture and African American textual features to develop literary understandings
S This article describes a qualitative research study that explored how a middle school case‐study class read and responded to “culturally conscious” African American children's books (Sims, 1982, p. 49). First, I relied on literary analyses conducted mainly by Sims (1982) and Harris (1995) to identify African American textual features contained in three African American children's books. Second, using several theories from reader response critic…
Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990
Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990, by Wayne Glasker. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 238 pp. $34.95, hardcover. Reviewed by Wanda M. Brooks, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) during the late 1970s, Wayne Glasker found himself in the midst of a gro…
The Nuances and Complexities of Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance and Social Justice
Mathematics is not a race-neutral subject. Access and opportunity in mathematics for students of color in the United States continue to be limited. While a great deal of attention has been given to increasing the number of underrepresented minority students in the mathematics pipeline, there is little consideration of who they are as learners or the context in which their mathematics learning takes place. We argue that culturally relevant instruc…
Reading representations of themselves: Urban youth use culture and African American textual features to develop literary understandings
S This article describes a qualitative research study that explored how a middle school case‐study class read and responded to “culturally conscious” African American children's books (Sims, 1982, p. 49). First, I relied on literary analyses conducted mainly by Sims (1982) and Harris (1995) to identify African American textual features contained in three African American children's books. Second, using several theories from reader response critic…
The Classroom is a Reflection of the Real World: Black Women Urban Teachers’ Activist Pedagogy and Leadership
This article utilizes narrative inquiry and a Black feminist lens to explore the political and social justice orientation of Black women educators and their commitment to students in urban schools. Three Black women teacher leaders explain their pedagogy and leadership during a period of heightened sociopolitical tension, including racial violence and legislative censorship. Analysis of semistructured interviews revealed three themes: (1) facilit…
Reading, Sharing, and Experiencing Literary/Lived Narratives About Contemporary Racism
This qualitative case study explores the literary/lived interpretations and experiences of middle school girls attending a book club located in an urban public school. We examine how the girls’ responses to depictions of racism in the novels read reveal the ways in which they understand and/or experience racism in their own lives? We ground this research in critical race theory. Our inductive analytic process yielded the following three themes: (…
Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990
Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990, by Wayne Glasker. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 238 pp. $34.95, hardcover. Reviewed by Wanda M. Brooks, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) during the late 1970s, Wayne Glasker found himself in the midst of a gro…
Reading representations of themselves: Urban youth use culture and African American textual features to develop literary understandings
S This article describes a qualitative research study that explored how a middle school case‐study class read and responded to “culturally conscious” African American children's books (Sims, 1982, p. 49). First, I relied on literary analyses conducted mainly by Sims (1982) and Harris (1995) to identify African American textual features contained in three African American children's books. Second, using several theories from reader response critic…
There Ain't No Accounting for What Folks See in Their Own Mirrors”: Considering Colorism Within a Sharon Flake Narrative
This article describes a study of both textual and reader response analyses of The Skin I'm In by Sharon Flake. Because gender and race constitute central themes in the narrative, Black feminist thought and feminism undergirded the textual critique. Critics' reviews, scholarly articles, and published author interviews also supported the textual analysis. Data were triangulated with excerpts from female student responses to the text and, specifica…
Narrative Significations of Contemporary Black Girlhood
This article examines how Black girlhood is constructed through fiction. The following research question guided this study: How do writers represent the heterogeneity of urban teenage girls in school-sanctioned African American young adult literature? Five popular narratives that exemplify the contemporary lives of urban African American female pre/teenage protagonists represent the data. Utilizing a Black feminist epistemological framework coupl…
The Nuances and Complexities of Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance and Social Justice
Mathematics is not a race-neutral subject. Access and opportunity in mathematics for students of color in the United States continue to be limited. While a great deal of attention has been given to increasing the number of underrepresented minority students in the mathematics pipeline, there is little consideration of who they are as learners or the context in which their mathematics learning takes place. We argue that culturally relevant instruc…
Inspiring Academically Talented High School Students to Consider Teaching Careers in Urban Schools
Documenting Instructional Practices in a Literacy‐Infused Arts Program: Respecting Pedagogues From the Community
This study examines the instructional practices around literacy that characterized the work of a community based arts program designed for urban adolescents. Two primary sources of data were collected: field notes on approximately 35 hours of instruction spread across seven months and interviews with the program's staff and students. Four distinct instructional episodic structures were observed: explicit instruction, collaborative or individual c…
Multicultural Children’s Literature as a Context for Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance in Urban Schools
Tracing Terror, Imagining Otherwise: A Critical Content Analysis of Antiblack Violence in Middle Grade Novels
This research offers a critical content analysis of three middle grade novels that is substantiated by key concepts within Afro-pessimism, Black critical theory, and Black futurity. Through this framing, we examine significant historic and sociopolitical moments reflected in the novels when Black preteen protagonists are forced to confront racialized violence. Across the set of novels, we outline a distinct pattern of antiblackness—one that chron…
Reading, Sharing, and Experiencing Literary/Lived Narratives About Contemporary Racism
This qualitative case study explores the literary/lived interpretations and experiences of middle school girls attending a book club located in an urban public school. We examine how the girls’ responses to depictions of racism in the novels read reveal the ways in which they understand and/or experience racism in their own lives? We ground this research in critical race theory. Our inductive analytic process yielded the following three themes: (…
Roots and Refuge: A Critical Exploration of Nature in Black Visual Narratives
This article examined the underrepresentation of Black characters in children’s picture books, particularly in natural settings, and its effect on Black children’s relationship with nature. Through an analysis of four contemporary picture books, the study revealed how visual depictions challenge these exclusions and expand narratives about Black engagement with the natural world. Utilizing visual semiotics and the theory of Black Aliveness, this …
The Classroom is a Reflection of the Real World: Black Women Urban Teachers’ Activist Pedagogy and Leadership
This article utilizes narrative inquiry and a Black feminist lens to explore the political and social justice orientation of Black women educators and their commitment to students in urban schools. Three Black women teacher leaders explain their pedagogy and leadership during a period of heightened sociopolitical tension, including racial violence and legislative censorship. Analysis of semistructured interviews revealed three themes: (1) facilit…
Sociology (10 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Pedagogy (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Narrative (5 works) · Critical Race Theory in Education (4 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (4 works) · Mathematics education (4 works)