This session will discuss the findings of a three-year dissertation study about the reasons for and rhetoric surrounding book challenges and bans. The presentation will discuss how this rhetoric interrupts culturally responsive teaching practices and silences marginalized voices. This session will also present effective ways of discussing these challenges with stakeholders.
Blog Archives
Exploring Our Literacy Histories in Verse: Using Poetry to Cultivate Humanity, Content Knowledge, Community, and Craft
Much has been written about students’ and pre-service teachers’ fear of poetry; heck, there’s even a scientific name for the fear of poetry: metrophobia. Thankfully, there have been some great books to guide teachers and teacher educators in suffusing their classrooms with positive poetry experiences—books like John O’Connor’s 2004 Wordplaygrounds and the new Whispering in the Wind by Linda Rief and A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers by Pindyck and Vinz. And yet, it can be hard to make sufficient time for poetry in high school and methods courses, where teachers and teacher educators are often bound by curriculum and time constraints. The presenter will describe her project to infuse both her high school classroom and, later, her writing methods course with poetry in an attempt to create fear-free poetry experiences—as well as to capitalize on poetry’s power to enhance content knowledge, collaboration, communication, and creativity. In the process, she will outline a literacy autobiography assignment she has done with high school and college students which enlists writers in creating snapshots of their most formative literacy experiences: engaging in writing workshops, reflecting on the implications of their and peers’ experience, and celebrating each other’s voices through publishing parties. Attendees will be invited to share some of their own literacy experiences and play with poetry as well.
The Perfect Match: Coupling Groundbreaking Texts with Revolutionary Pedagogy
As ELA teachers, we know the power of a great book to captivate students’ minds and hearts. By thoughtfully selecting and presenting texts that grapple with issues of race, identity and justice, we can ignite students’ curiosity, empathy and critical consciousness. But we can’t stop at just putting diverse books in students’ hands – we must also equip ourselves with the pedagogical tools to guide them through meaningful engagement and reflection.
In “The Antiracist ELA Classroom,” I laid out a vision and roadmap for transforming our English Language Arts classrooms into sites of antiracist education and empowerment. But how do we bridge the gap between theory and practice, between the pages of a professional book and the lived realities of our classrooms? In this session, I’ll book talk some great texts coupled with ready-to-implement anti-oppressive, antiracist instructional strategies.
Handling Heavy Texts with Care
| Many of the most frequently taught works of literature include death, trauma, and other topics that can feel daunting for new teachers to approach in the classroom. Focusing on a literacy methods course with a fieldwork component in Chicago Public Schools, this presentation explores how pre-service teachers learn to navigate teaching literature with heavy content. With Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat as a focal text, the presenter will share classroom strategies that help teachers reflect on their teaching philosophies and design lessons that balance paying attention to social-emotional needs and building literacy skills. |
Engaging Scholars through Counterstory and Connection
As education consistently adapts to the ever-changing landscape of the field and its student population, teachers and administrators are acknowledging the necessity of diverse curriculums as part of culturally relevant and responsive practices. However, we argue that this has been implemented to varying degrees of success, especially texts related to the Asian American Pacific Islander and Desi American (AAPIDA) community. As the United States continues to grow its racial diversity, the literacy opportunities within the education system need to represent it. We will report on the unique perspectives that teachers of color bring to the professional space as it comes to curriculum and instruction from our own personal experience as teachers within the AAPIDA community as well as research. We will offer a discussion about how counterstory narratives empower scholars and promote empathy across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups and challenge ourselves to view all stories with complexity, nuance, and compassion. We will examine successful ways to conduct authentic moments of cultural connections and discuss how well-intentioned practices may result in inauthentic or exacerbate systems of harm for scholars. We will offer and report on practices that we have done to enable student discussion surrounding how their identities interact with the various systems while centering counterstories, authentic connections, and tending to the social and emotional needs of scholars.
Empowering Students Through the Use of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
Culturally responsive teaching stresses the importance of connecting students’ identity and lived experiences to the classroom in order to enhance their learning. With book banning and curriculum censorship at an all time high, students feel powerless. They feel as if their voices don’t matter, often leading to the question “Why do I need to know this?” By understanding the communities from which our students come, we are better able to create engaging lessons and find literature that all students can relate to. Creating a welcoming and culturally responsive classroom will decrease student apathy and, in turn, increase student engagement. Not sure how to get started? This session will provide you with a multitude of resources, ranging from beginning of the year “Get to Know You” activities to giving students voice and choice on literature.
ELA & AI: The Obstacle Course of Future Pedagogy
Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is disrupting, if not overthrowing, five thousand years of human communication, encompassing the entire existence of the English language. ELA educators must clearly understand the role genAI will play in our classrooms and adapt to technological trends in a vigilant yet open manner.
This session will highlight numerous areas of genAI and how they correspond with English education. Additionally, the presentation will discuss and question our current understanding of genAI and how that affects our understanding of what it means to educate students.
One of the main goals of the presentation is to critically examine the correct role for genAI in ELA education and tangle with the philosophical implications of this moment, and seek the middle ground between accepting all technological innovations without thought and living in a neo-luddite, sequestered classroom space.
“Picturing” Socially Just Research Writing
As we are navigating “contentious times” in the ELA field, a high-interest and non-threatening approach to moving our students towards engaging in social justice issues is using diverse children’s picture books as a jumping-off point for students to choose topics for required research papers. We encourage teachers to use a mentor text to lead students through the process of engaging with diverse picture books for children, critically examining the texts that capture their attention, and then using a single text to lead their higher-level research and study of visual media. This approach is a highly motivating and non-threatening way to engage students in important discussions, concerns and eventual research about culturally diverse topics. Teachers will come away from this session understanding the research that supports a move towards this type of unit, as well as with practical tools and lists of texts to use immediately in their lessons.
It Does Happen Here: The Literary and Cultural Roots of American Authoritarianism
It hardly seems arguable that U.S. national politics have, for nearly a decade now, veered in a decidedly and intensified authoritarian direction. That nearly half the nation seems to crave autocratic rule and repression is not, in fact, a brand new development. Despite the fact that prominent trailblazers in American literary study such as F.O. Matthiessen defined American literature precisely by its strong democratic impulse and individualist spirit, one finds from even a cursory study of the U.S. literary tradition a powerful and canonical anti-democratic politics—relentlessly so. In the works of such writers including T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner, one finds unapologetic supremacist values. Even the romantic individualism of Emerson and Thoreau endorse autocratic behavior, eschewing the rule of law that is a key principle of democracy. This seminar invites us to scrutinize closely as teachers of literature what values we are transmitting to our students as we teach U.S. literature, reflecting on how the institution of literary study itself has participated in creating our current national condition.
Culturally Responsive Teaching Standards, Practices, and Resources for the HS English Classrooms
In March of 2021, the Illinois State Board of Education adopted a set of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards for the purpose of better preparing future teachers to create culturally rich spaces and curricula that are welcoming and supportive for all students. While the new standards are an important tool for teacher education programs, there does not seem to exist a similar set of standards for practicing teachers in Illinois. While research suggests that culturally responsive teaching is a practice of many high school English teachers regardless of a required set of standards, we wanted to determine the extent to which this is happening using the CRP standards as a lens for teachers to consider the ways in which they are already embracing culturally responsive practices.
Specifically, our session will first share the results from a survey and interview with several high school English teachers in Illinois about their perspectives on and teaching habits related to the CRP standards. Then, we will share a repertoire of resources that we have curated and created to support teachers in their continued implementation of the CRP standards and culturally responsive practices in general.