From the Book to the Board of Education

This chapter demonstrates how young adult literature can catalyze student activism when paired with culturally sustaining, abolitionist pedagogy. Centering Shadowshaper and Parable of the Sower , it shows how narratives of Afro-Latine art magic and speculative climate collapse invite adolescents to interrogate gentrification, cultural appropriation, disability, and systemic violence while imagining liberatory futures. The authors—a collective of students and teachers—detail a sequence of practices that foreground community cultural wealth: identity-mapping “tribes,” student-generated “Work It Out Wednesday” dialogues, rigorous weekly essays, and a transformative justice budgeting exercise. Post-reading, an Imagination Project tasks learners with designing equitable societies, linking literary analysis to concrete civic planning. Classroom inquiry extends outward through film nights, a social justice club, board-meeting testimonies, and national conference presentations, illustrating how critical literacy fosters leadership beyond school walls. By integrating rigorous analysis with counter-storytelling and collective action, the chapter argues that curriculum grounded in students’ lived experiences dismantles White normativity and cultivates empowered, justice-oriented scholars.