Rethinking ELA: Centering Student Voice, Identity, and Imagination

Combined Session (Overview)
Rethinking ELA begins with creating meaningful space for students to explore who they are, what they believe, and how they make meaning of the world around them. Through authentic writing, multimodal literacy, imagination, and community-engaged practices, this session offers pedagogical moves that center student voice and identity while strengthening critical thinking and social-emotional learning. Participants will engage in hands-on, collaborative activities and leave with concrete strategies and adaptable resources for making literacy more purposeful, creative, and equitable.

Session 1: I Believe: The Power of Students’ Beliefs
In this session, I plan to present a lesson that gives students opportunities to share their beliefs and thoughts on the world through a variety of genres. This encourages students to write authentically and encourages them to not rely on AI to think for them. These genres promote social-emotional learning. Some of the genres covered would include: I believe poems, This I Believe (the podcast), Moth stories, Mortified, and TED Talks. Students value these lessons and hold onto them. Through these exercises, they learn to value and reflect on their thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories, opinions, and beliefs. I will share not only the impact on the students and the beauty of what they create through these genres, but I will share the lasting effects of giving the students these opportunities. I will provide examples, templates, and more with my peers, so that they can take what I have and construct their own lessons. The product is a snapshot of students’ lived beliefs at a particular moment in their lives. It can also help students with critical analysis and identifying, respecting, and understanding beliefs that may be different from their own.

Session 2: Reimagining ELA: Centering Identity, Imagination, and Innovation in Literacy Classrooms
As educators in English language arts, we teach during a time influenced by significant social shifts and advancing technological development. Amid these changes, students’ sense of themselves as readers remains foundational to their long-term relationship with literacy. Studies show that as students advance through grade levels, their interest in reading often diminishes, especially when instruction emphasizes discrete skills at the expense of personal connection, imagination, and authentic meaning-making. If we approach the future of ELA with intention and possibility, we must consider how our classroom practices influence students’ perceptions of their own capacities and identities as readers, writers, and communicators.

Grounded in sociocultural perspectives on literacy, identity formation, and learning, this session encourages educators to reconceptualize ELA classrooms as spaces of creativity, possibility, and affirmation. Participants will engage in hands-on, collaborative activities that demonstrate adaptable instructional approaches, including:

• Multimodal literacy projects that invite students to reflect on their reader identities while drawing from their lived experiences and creative preferences.
• Instructional redesign strategies that pair children’s and middle-grade literature with digital platforms to deepen imagination and analytical thinking
• Community-engaged literacy practices that position reading and writing as tools for inquiry, civic awareness, and meaningful contribution

Participants consider the role of imagination as a catalyst for innovation in ELA instruction and examine how intentional pedagogical changes can reshape students’ perceptions of themselves as readers. The session concludes with concrete strategies, reflection protocols, and actionable ideas for cultivating literacy spaces where reading is experienced as purposeful, creative, and enduring.