“Any text is made new with each person’s experience of it. So one way we prepare ourselves to teach a text is to reposition it in the present moment, based on background knowledge students need and connections to contemporary issues relevant to our students.

When we, as teachers, properly contextualize whole-class texts, students then can move beyond seeing any single person’s interpretation of the world as a fixed and perfect thing. Instead, they gradually center their thinking on

• how the text was made
• the author’s noble ambition and the text’s challenges
• how the text influences us
• whether the text gives us useful tools to understand the world or challenges us to respond with tools of our own making” Nicole Walker