It’s Not About Grit: Trauma, Inequity, and the Power of Transformative Teaching

Speaking out against decades of injustice and challenging deficit perceptions of young learners and their families, It’s Not About Grit pulls back the veil, revealing the social systems that marginalize and stigmatize mostly poor, urban students of color and their communities. At the same time, author Steven Goodman, founding executive director of NYC’s highly acclaimed Educational Video Center (EVC) for nearly 35 years, shows the tremendous intelligence, resilience, and sense of agency of these students. Through the students’ in-school and out-of-school experiences, enhanced with a curriculum guide and award-winning video clips from EVC, Goodman encourages educators to make a difference and demonstrates how to create a safe and inclusive school climate where their teaching responds to students’ culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, housing status, and ability. Teachers will use this book to develop a pedagogy of transformative teaching.

“To those of you who are educators, teaching in ‘revolting times,’ under difficult circumstances, working with students who need you as much as ever, this book is a gift and a life raft.”
—From the Foreword by Michelle Fine, distinguished professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY

“This is a vivid and arresting answer to a newly cultish fashion . . . a terrific book and badly needed at this time when ‘grit’ has become the magic word in pedagogic thinking about inner-city kids.”
—Jonathan Kozol, education activist and bestselling author

“This book reads like an absorbing documentary; these are stories that need a public response to match the work of EVC.”
—Deborah Meier, education reform leader

“Nobody knows better than Steve Goodman how to help young people tell their stories and, in the process, empower themselves with research and video skills and an activist sense of justice.”
—Joseph P. McDonald, professor emeritus, New York University