COSEBOC is pleased to announce the publication of Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success by our colleague and good friend, Dr. Chris Emdin. A revolutionary new educational model that encourages educators to provide spaces for students to display their academic brilliance without sacrificing their identities.
Dr. Chris Emdin, presenter of the January COSEBOC virtual event in our Equity: Front Center and Fulfilled series, builds on the ideas introduced in his New York Times best-selling book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood.
Learn more or buy your copy on paper or audiobook via these links:
Reviews of Ratchetdemic
Ratchetdemic is a timely and essential resource for teachers, parents, and whoever else needs this compelling and accessible and above all absolutely refreshing take on pedagogy. Here’s to more and more classrooms being filled with learning, healing and joy.”
—Jacqueline Woodson, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner for Brown Girl Dreaming
“Christopher Emdin reminds us of the importance of nurturing and celebrating the identities of all young people. Ratchetdemic will inspire a new generation to be their authentic selves both within and beyond the classroom. It is the written form of what our music aims to do.”
—GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan
“Ratchetdemic reminds us of the skills and power that our students and teachers walk into the classroom with, how we need to honor those skills and that power, and the responsibility we have to our community. This is a must-read, rooted in demands for justice that our classrooms deserve.”
—DeRay Mckesson, activist and host of Pod Save the People
“Chris Emdin has done it again. Ratchetdemic, a modern answer to Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 Mis-Education of the Negro, pushes the boundaries of what school should be. While the current schooling enterprise propels us into the role of Woodson’s psychically deadened, self-loathing ‘Negro’ who seeks to exterminate Black students’ authentic selves in the name of ‘education,’ Emdin instead asks that we free ourselves from the mechanistic, decontextualized lessons we’ve been trained to deliver and transform our education to embrace the real identities and experiences of Black (and, indeed, all) youth. While this book is politically and pedagogically revolutionary, it is really about igniting joy—in our teaching and in our students’ souls. Welcome to ‘Ratchetdemia’!”
—Lisa Delpit, author of “Multiplication Is for White People” and Other People’s Children
“What Christopher Emdin offers in Ratchetdemic is not only a call for us to uplift the rigors of bringing our full selves to the epistemological foundations associated with the pursuit of educational justice; it is also an invitation to explore the ancient truth that being a little ‘ratchet’ can be healing for all of us.”
—Monique W. Morris, author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools