Ban Censorship, Not Books
Subtitle
How Teachers, Schools, and Communities Can Fight for Intellectual Freedom
This book provides a practical, research-based road map for educators to navigate restrictive policies and maintain diverse, inclusive classrooms.
Books are being ripped from shelves, curricula redacted, and instruction forbidden at an unprecedented scale. As political polarization turns children’s literature into a proxy for national "culture wars," educators are left navigating sweeping, last-minute changes to their classrooms that threaten the inclusion of diverse voices.
"Ban Censorship, Not Books" provides a vital "bottom-up" challenge to these restrictive policies by spotlighting the firsthand accounts of community members resisting censorship. Grounded in the real-world experiences of Iowa educators who successfully navigated the virulent Senate File 496, author Josh Coleman introduces the Local Resistance Framework (LRF). This flexible model empowers educators by helping them to know the law, understand their specific context, assess risk, and more.
This is a road map for any educator or community member determined to champion intellectual freedom. Through "from-teacher-for-teacher" strategies and discipline-specific approaches for curriculum redesign, this book ensures that teachers can sustain an expansive, diversity-rich environment for their students, even in the most restrictive educational contexts.
Bio
James Joshua Coleman is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
Coleman challenges educational stakeholders—including you and me—to know the law, understand our contexts, assess our risks, locate agency, and act.
From the Foreword by Mollie V. Blackburn Professor, The Ohio State University
'Ban Censorship, Not Books' offers K–12 teachers, university educators, librarians, administrators, and the public carefully researched and clearly presented stories of resistance in response to school-based censorship. Elevating teacher voices and experiences through narratives and case examples and presenting a framework for local resistance, the text attends to the unique realities of Iowa teachers and offers a vision of teacher agency across locations, making the text both deeply contextualized and widely applicable.
Wendy J. Glenn Professor, English Education, University of Connecticut
