Review of Get Free: Antibias Literacy Instruction for Stronger Readers, Writers, and Thinkers by Tricia Ebarvia
By Carol Jago
Are you looking for a book to spark fresh conversation in your English Department or PLC? Tricia Ebarvia invites readers to reexamine many practices that we take for granted as beneficial. For example, asking us, many of whom give up every lunch hour and stay long after school to help students, “Whom are we not helping?” That question hit me hard.
Every assertion Ebarvia makes is supported by research. She cites Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking, Fast and Slow in which the eminent psychologist describes experiments where he demonstrated how people were disproportionally and unknowingly influenced by a single piece of information, often the first piece of information presented given to them to solve a problem. I could not help but think about assumptions I had made about students that deserved much greater attention. I know you are thinking about how you have 36 kids in your fifth-period class and a student load of 180, but that doesn’t change what individual students deserve. Ebarvia asks, “How many troublemakers are simply students who are least like us?”
Along with posing questions that challenge the status quo, the book offers an extraordinary list of essays to use as mentor texts for student writing. The extensive list is organized by topics such as: Our Bodies, Ourselves (“The Clan of the One-Breasted Women” by Terry Tempest Williams), Falling in Love (“What We Hunger For” by Roxane Gay), and What Keeps You Up at Night (“Difficult Girl” by Lena Dunham). Ebarvia’s suggestions are excellent and abundant. This is a treasure trove for anyone looking to refresh curriculum.
A fascinating feature of the book is the author’s note on the artwork that appears throughout the text. The artist Gian Wong designed patterns and images inspired by traditional ethnic textiles and Filipino culture. On many pages Maya birds, indigenous to the Philippines, break free in flight.
Get Free is also a practical guide for supporting students as they encounter rich, challenging texts, discovering along the way what they have to say about the provocative ideas of others. A chapter on classroom discussion, “Setting the Table for Radical Openness in Our Conversation,” offers suggestions for navigating choppy waters. I predict that this book will disrupt how you think about your work with students. It did for me.
Carol Jago is a long-time high school English teacher and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and serves on the International Literacy Association board of directors. She is the author of The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis and can be reached at cjago@caroljago.com.
Editor’s Note: If you’ll be traveling to Columbus, OH for the 2023 NCTE Convention, you can see Carol Jago in person at her session on Friday, November 17th at 2:00 p.m.
Please see the recording of Tricia Ebarvia’s webinar for the ERWC Community from 2021 for more information on antibias literacy instruction. You can find the recording in the ERWC Webinar Series.
The next ERWC webinar will be Thursday, November 16th at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time with Marc Watkins, a leading researcher in classroom applications for generative AI. Marc is an academic innovation fellow at the University of Mississippi. In this special webinar, Marc will explore best practices in teaching students AI literacy, AI assistance, and AI aptitude. Registration is free.
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