Endorsements for the Book

Living our ideals and values around being anti-racist caregivers to young children and families means as practitioners, we have to do our own reflective work in the right way. Dr. Marva Lewis and her colleagues have created a powerful tool to help us do just that in their groundbreaking workbook, Reflective Practice Through a Racialized Lens: My Hero’s Journey. With compassion, it unapologetically centers race and the racialized contexts we live in. They invite the reader to peel back layers of our social conditioning to arrive at a place where we are whole and healed so that we can hold space for the children and families who need our love and support.

Zaretta Hammond Teacher Educator and Author Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Rigor and Engagement (Corwin, 2015) 

Reflective Practice Through a Racialized Lens: My Hero’s Journey takes theory and brings it into practical real life. The authors take us on a heroic soul journey of healing across the intergenerational epigenetic landscape. In Vivo present day traveling across this difficult terrain is made possible by guided storytelling and shape shifting the narrative into one of healing. I am grateful that in this work the authors include healing for victims as well as perpetrators of historical trauma, as a way to restore the collective soul of the human family. May the sacred be restored in Beauty.

Dr. Eduardo Duran 4 Winds Indigenous Healers

In a society with increased divisiveness, racial and interpersonal disharmony, and political intrusions into every facet of our lives, we struggle to find sanity and integrity in our lives. Reflective Practice Through a Racialized Lens by Lewis, Colson, Durlak, and Smith provides valuable tools for finding our own integrity and for working with others. The workbook uses guided exercises, personal examples, and lessons. One learns how to systematically reflect and interpret emotional reactions, traumas, and immediate and life-long encounters in one’s life, especially those involving race and intersectionality. The lessons provide a means of dealing more effectively with others and reconciling incomprehensibilities in life. Linkages between experiences, emotions, and cognitions are better understood. They also promote more effective means of helping children and families to develop their own awareness and understanding. I highly recommend this workbook. It has something for everyone and just not human welfare professionals. It makes an important contribution.

Dr. Stanley Sue Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Psychology University of California, Davis and Palo Alto University

Your new Workbook, Reflective Practice through a racialized lens: My Hero's Journey, is an honest, practical, and popular tool for Infant Mental Health professionals. In addition to reflexive work, the Workbook can serve as a vital roadmap for practitioners working with and promoting mental health among young children and their families.

Dr. Charles Figley Tulane University Traumatology Institute

As a privileged white male, social justice often feels abstract and out-of-reach. How can I really make a difference? Enter this powerful, poetic, inspiring and challenging workbook. If we are to disassemble racism, we must slow down and look inward even as we engage and reflect with others, particularly those we supervise. The time is now: our hero’s journey awaits. Seize the wisdom within these pages and build a better, more open and aware, you.

Dr. Neil W. Boris Circle of Security International

Submit an Endorsement

If you’ve read Reflective Practice Through a Racialized Lens, and had a positive experience, we’d love to know about it! Please send your endorsement to us via the form below.