Humanizing (multi)literacy teaching: a starter kit to renewed hope

Amidst standardized testing pressures, zero-tolerance discipline policies, and increasingly distressing news headlines, this article seeks to encourage teachers that want to be and feel more human in their work with students with practical, classroom tools. It’s a starter kit of sorts that has allowed the author to move beyond the inevitable institutional status quo and toward a renewed hope through “armed love” (Freire, 1998, p. 41). It begins with a brief exploration of humanizing literacy practices and continues with two deceptively simple but potentially transformative tools: naming students and expanding definitions of literacy.