Conceptually Speaking

In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Sara Hildreth, a former high school English teacher and the writer behind FictionMatters, a reading community devoted to a wide-ranging public conversation about literature and the life of the reader. Like many fellow travelers in the world of bookish new media, Sara’s journey toward becoming a “public reader” took off during the pandemic, with her sharing thoughts, analysis, and reviews of literature on Tumblr, Instagram, Patreon, and now the official home of FictionMatters—Substack. It began, however, as an outgrowth of her capstone project at Georgetown University, which wrestled with the importance of teaching fiction in high schools despite mounting pressure to emphasize nonfiction. A question that continues to haunt the field, albeit in new and more pernicious forms in 2026.

Our conversation follows a line of inquiry I’ve been pursuing over the course of this whole season of Conceptually Speaking—what is the relationship between literary studies and the digital? While most of those conversations have been with academics working at the intersection of new media and the humanities, Sara’s work represents another important piece of that puzzle: the appetite for literary and intellectual community completely outside the academy. Over the course of our dialogue we consider the possibilities and pressures of contemporary online reading culture, from the hot-takeification of criticism, to the aestheticization of the bookish life, to the question Sara brings to every book she picks up—what is this thing trying to do, and how successful is it?

Key Concepts from the Episode

Reading as a Visible Practice

• One’s ability to read literature is often misrepresented as a fixed skill and/or a private cognitive act, but serious close reading is an ongoing practice of making predictions, locating patterns, testing possibilities, noticing disruptions, and revising one’s understanding as new evidence emerges. These practices aren’t natural, but have been inherited from previous literary communities.
• When the processes that support comprehension and interpretation remain invisible, students may assume that experienced readers arrive at meaning immediately. Making those processes observable helps reframe confusion, uncertainty, and rereading as evidence of intellectual engagement rather than failure.
• Consider how often students see the process of reading rather than its finished product. What might change if your classroom treated provisional noticing, genuine questions, and revision as central evidence of reading?

Interpretation as Inquiry

• Literary discussion often defaults to judgment: whether a text is good or bad, enjoyable or unenjoyable, worthy or unworthy. These judgments do have a particular role and function, but they can foreclose inquiry when they arrive before readers have identified what a text is attempting to accomplish.
• Close reading experiences invite readers to attend to a work’s purposes, formal choices, historical conditions, genre expectations, and effects. Evaluation then becomes more precise because it rests on an account of what the text is doing rather than on preference alone.
• Examine the questions that organize your classroom talk and writing. Do they invite students to defend an opinion, or do they create room for students to investigate a text’s ambitions, methods, contradictions, and consequences?

Criticism as Conversation

• Interpretation becomes richer when it is understood as a social practice rather than an individual performance. Readers bring different histories, vocabularies, disciplinary knowledge, genre expertise, and lived experiences to a text; those differences can expand what any one reader is able to notice.
• Contemporary digital platforms have created new access points to literary and cultural criticism, but they can also encourage speed, certainty, and the performance of a finished take. A more durable critical culture leaves room for response, hesitation, disagreement, return, and revision.
• Consider what your discussion structures reward. Are students primarily speaking to demonstrate what they already think, or are they expected to listen carefully, take up another person’s idea, and allow their own interpretation to change?

Sara’s project, along with other digital literary communities, carry a utopian kernel that I find especially compelling—the possibility that platforms designed to harvest our attention and extract our data might also sustain serious forms of shared intellectual life. FictionMatters is a readerly hub rooted in reciprocity, intellectual generosity, and the belief that readers from different disciplines, generations, and backgrounds can make richer meanings together than they can alone, even if that work happens online. It is also a standing rebuke of the “Death of Reading” discourse. The fact that there are millions of readers in communities just like Sara’s make it clear that the appetite for close, rigorous, conversational reading was never the scarce resource—the institutional resources required to sustain it were. Here’s to hoping our efforts might make a difference, no matter how small.

Links:

• FictionMatters — Sara Hildreth
• Reading in Public — FictionMatters
• FictionMatters Book Club — Patreon
• @fictionmatters — Instagram
• “Love’s Work: The Generic Pleasures of Romance” — Anna Kornbluh
• “Three Theses on the Literacy Crisis” — Becoming Literary

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In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Christian Moore Anderson — veteran biology teacher and author of Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn’t Enough—to complicate the conversation about cognitive science and teaching. Like me, Christian has felt frustration at the canonization and commodification of a handful of concepts from cognitive psychology being treated like they are THE science of learning, as opposed to a collection of (somewhat) useful theories. His fantastic book draws on a much wider and deeper set of thinkers and theories to articulate pedagogical approaches that are both intellectually rich and incredibly applicable to every day practice. His two rules—meaning is enacted and cannot be transmitted, and a student’s capacity must at least match the complexity they face—provide the foundation for how we can “teach meaning” in more generative ways.

Key Concepts from the Episode

Meaning Cannot Be Transmitted

• Communication provokes the construction of meaning rather than moving it between minds. What a word does inside a learner depends on the associations already available to them, which places a hard ceiling on what any explanation can accomplish on its own.
• If meaning must be constructed, the teacher’s real leverage lies in the conditions under which students construct it. Dialogue then becomes structurally necessary, since it is the only means of discovering what students have actually made of what was said.
• Consider where your practice treats a fluent explanation as evidence that learning has occurred. What would have to happen in the room for you to know otherwise?

Meta Content teaches students how to attend to content

• Every act of teaching works at two levels. In addition to making meaning about content students also absorb ways of attending to it: what counts as a question, what deserves notice, what makes an answer satisfying, etc. This second curriculum operates whether or not anyone names it.
• Ways of perceiving are inherited from disciplinary communities rather than invented by individual teachers. That inheritance relocates a teacher’s authority from institutional position to disciplinary participation, and it makes modeling an act of rendering a shared way of seeing visible.
• Consider what your discipline has trained you to notice that a newcomer would walk past. How might you externalize that perception instead of the conclusions it produces?

Learning as Becoming

• We are constituted by the conversations we take part in. Learning a discipline expands the range of conversations a person can enter and the moves they can legitimately make once inside, which is a larger claim than the accumulation of content.
• Capacity must match complexity. A broad disciplinary education is necessary because each discipline supplies a distinct way of perceiving, which students can then use to understand our rapidly changing world. Access to academic discourse therefore becomes a question of equity rather than one of career preparation.
• Consider which conversations your teaching equips students to enter, and which it quietly closes off. What would it take to make the rules of your discipline explicit enough that students could carry them elsewhere?

What I keep returning to from this conversation is Christian’s insistence on intellectual honesty about “rule sets.” He has no objection to the #EduCogSci crowd building a set of rules about what makes good instruction; that is what all of us do. The objection is to presenting a constructed rule as a law of the universe (e.g. compressing a real distinction between novices and experts into the sixty minutes of a lesson, then using that compression to justify a fixed sequence of instruction). There is a lot more at stake here than social media beefs. When these constructed rules get laundered into what the public and/or profession believe is settled science, they become legislation, inspection frameworks, and mandated lesson structures, as teachers in England and Australia can attest and as the science of reading statutes are beginning to demonstrate here. What gets narrowed is not just method but perception itself: what a teacher is permitted to notice, what they perceive the purpose of education to be, and ultimately which conversations students are equipped (or not) to join.

Links:

• christianmooreanderson.com
• Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn’t Enough — Christian Moore Anderson
• Evidence-based educational movements are actually games —Christian Moore Anderson
• There is no such thing as “THE science of learning” —Nick Covington & Michael Weingarth
• New Right 2.0 Teacher populism on social media in England —Dr. Steve Watson

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Episode Description:

In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Joseph Allen Boone, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Southern California, to discuss his new book from Columbia University Press, The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife Across the Arts. According to Boone, we are living through a second Melville revival. The first, in the 1920s, was engineered by critics who pulled Melville out of obscurity and streamlined him into an American answer to European modernism. Our current renaissance is being driven by artists working in painting, collage, performance, musical theater, video, fiction, and more besides. 

Our conversation works through why Melville has been “having a moment” as it were. Part of the answer he offers is thematic, since a novel that already contains globalism, extraction, ecological collapse, and racial encounters will feel resonant with our current moment despite when it was authored. The larger part, however, is shaped by its form. Moby-Dick opens with a dictionary page, moves through etymologies and epigraphs borrowed from the commonplace book tradition, drops in a sermon, a Shakespearean soliloquy, a play script, legal affidavits, and parodic scientific taxonomy, and absorbs the whole media explosion of the 1840s and 50s along the way. Boone calls this aesthetic hybridity, and it is one the reasons Melville is legible as a companion to artists who work in our era of pastiche, collage, mashup, and remix. We also get into the pedagogical stakes, including an inspiring call for more arts integration and multimodal approaches to teaching canonical works.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

Aesthetic Hybridity

• Melville’s formal promiscuity could be seen as an exploration of the way form shapes content, which is the same question contemporary multimedia artists are asking about their creative use of diverse media and materials.
• Boone borrows the counterpane scene as his governing metaphor. Ishmael wakes unable to distinguish the crazy quilt from Queequeg’s tattooed arm, and that indistinction, where the parts refuse to resolve into a pattern but cohere anyway, describes both Melville’s method and the work being made from him.
• Consider how you might bring aesthetic hybridity into your classroom. What different mediums and materials could you bring into the patchwork quilt of your own curriculum?

Literary History as Afterlife

• The reason literary history reads as dead is that we treat it as exclusively retrospective. Boone’s counterclaim is that it is also progressive, continually reconstituted by whoever is currently reading and remixing it.
• The project of extending a text’s afterlife cannot be accomplished through genuflection and submission. Instead, readers and creators should see themselves as participating in an ongoing production or a work and its related legacy.
• Consider what it might look like to have your students participate in the ongoing production of a text’s literary afterlife. How might you balance scaffolding their ability to engage with the text and giving them agency to take it new places?

Gaps as Sites of Inquiry

• Absence functions as invitation. Melville gives Mrs. Ahab two sentences in the whole of Moby-Dick, and artists have built collage cycles, a stage production, and a novel out of that gap. Reading what is not present can be a powerful act of critical framing and reading.
• The same logic drives the queer readings of Pierre, where James Creech’s criticism, Maurice Sendak’s illustrations, and Elizabeth Schultz’s reading of a broom closet in the plates each produce something that is in the text and not in the text at once. Creative and critical readings provide us with the ability to construct new narratives that complicate the legacy of traditional works.
• Consider the gaps that exist in the literary works that you teach. Who is not featured or mentioned? Who appears briefly and why? How can you invite students to explode those glimpses into something bigger?

Regular readers of Becoming Literary will recognize some of my favorite throughlines. This is a conversation about how we can move beyond treating canon as a collection of revered, pedestal placed texts and start treating it as a site of debate and dialogue. It is an invitation to see hybrid interpretive work as a legitimate mode of literary knowledge production, and an opportunity to move the field forward without leaving its past behind. I hope you enjoy the episode and answer its call!

Links:

The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife Across the Arts

Dr. Joseph Allen Boone’s Website

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In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Karis Jones, Sarah Jerasa, and Rabani Garg, friends of the show and the team behind the award-winning #HackYourStack initiative, to talk about what it actually means to teach digital and networked texts and cultivate literacies in the plural. #HackYourStack started as a play on NCTE’s Build Your Stack initiative and as a response to its Critical Media Literacy Task Force’s call for more practical digital and multimodal resources for teacher educators and practitioners. Over the course of several years’ worth of conference hangs and Zoom calls, we eventually developed a Notion database of educational resources organized by different modalities (video essays, fan fiction, hip-hop, TikTok, webtoons, gaming, podcasts, digital storytelling). Each Notion card contained curated scholarly research, mentor texts, and teacher-facing instructional materials all in the same place. It is truly a one stop shop for all things multimodal composing—analogue, digital, and otherwise.

Over the course of our dialogue, we get into the differences between EdTech and (what I referred to in a previous article as) MADTech, what it looks like to treat young people as knowers rather than casualties of a never ending “literacy crisis,” and why a total retreat to RETVRN pedagogies misreads the post-literacy problem entirely. There are even some cringe confessionals about times where Karis and I tried and failed to be cool young millennial teachers before we learned about more responsive and participatory ways to invite youth culture into our classrooms. This is a conversation long in the making considering the work we’ve put into this database, various workshops, and even a Special Issue with the Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE) journal. The culmination of which was our receiving the 2025 English Language Arts Teacher Educators’ National Technology Leadership Fellowship award. We hope you have as much fun listening as we did recording.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

Affordances and Limitations

• Every medium makes some kinds of meaning possible and closes others off. The pedagogical work is asking what a medium opens up and how communities build practices through and with its affordances.
• “Schoolifying” these practices by turning them into worksheets or templates tends to strip out the exact thing that made it worth borrowing in the first place: the audience, stakes, and network.

Youth as Knowers & Doers

• Rabani’s framework treats young people’s out-of-school literacies as knowledge rather than deficit, which changes what the adult in the room is actually there to do.
• Applied to the “literacy crisis,” this reframes the panic as a measurement and framing problem without discounting its concerns entirely. Kids are reading and writing constantly; school just hasn’t counted the forms they’re doing it in.

The Post-Digital Classroom

• Drawing on Jandrić and Rowsell, the digital becomes another embedded layer of meaning-making, sitting alongside the analog rather than above it.
• The payoff is a classroom that neither fetishizes nor demonizes the screen. The analogue becomes a deliberate choice rather than a nostalgic default. Screens are for creative communication, not content delivery

What AI Can’t Do

• The cheating panic pushes teachers toward blue books and handwriting. The episode argues for the opposite move: composing that demands presence and audience—podcasts, video essays, made within and for real communities.
• Persona, voice, and embodiment don’t replicate the way a five-paragraph essay does, which makes multimodal genres a harder thing to fake and a more honest picture of what a student can actually do.

Regular readers of Becoming Literary will recognize quite a few throughlines: the convergence of new media and the humanities, postdigital aesthetics, English teaching, and cringey millennial humor. 

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In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Al Filreis, the Kelly Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, and the creator of ModPo—a free massive open online course about experimental poetry that has drawn some 435,000 students from 179 countries. Our conversation, anchored in his recent book The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, explores how ModPo became a genuinely thriving pedagogical community in a landscape of ghost-town MOOCs, and what that achievement reveals about the relationship between open texts, open platforms, and democratic forms of teaching and learning.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

Openness as Pedagogy

• The reciprocal relationship between open texts, open forums, and open-ended interpretation
• Why poems that resist settled meaning are better vehicles for democratic learning than poems with knowable answers
• How communal interpretation can be deepened rather than diluted by scale when the pedagogical architecture supports it

The Affordances of Poetry

• The idea that a poem is not fully a poem until it is received, read, and responded to in community
• How the individualist architecture of higher education — grades, degrees, career pipelines — works against the communitarian impulse that makes reading meaningful
• Why poetry’s perceived marginality makes it an ideal site for reimagining what education can be

Against Technological Determinism

• Rejecting both EdTech’s promise that platforms will save education and the moral panic that says we need to unplug entirely
• The access question that gets erased by anti-digital backlash: for whom is unplugging even an option?
• What it means to insist on a utopian digital pedagogy without being naive about the platforms that host it

The conversation makes a compelling case that progressive digital pedagogy is not a contradiction in terms. At a moment when both the EdTech industry and its loudest critics seem to foreclose the possibility of deep, humanistic learning online, Al’s work with ModPo stands as a living counterexample. His conviction that poetry only matters when people read it together, and that digital platforms can be sites for that togetherness, left me feeling genuinely inspired about what teaching with and through technology can still look like.

Check out more of Al’s work here:
The Classroom and the Crowd
ModPo
PennSound
Kelly Writers House

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In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Alexander Manshel, English professor at McGill University and author of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, to explore the under discussed history of the high school English classroom—a space that is simultaneously the most influential literary institution in America and the most overlooked by literary scholars. Drawing from his recently published article “High School English and the Making of American Readers” and his forthcoming book High School English: A History of American Reading, our conversation traces how the interpretive practices we take for granted in English classrooms (like reading for character, reading for theme) were shaped by specific historical forces, from Cold War anxieties to the rise of New Criticism. Xander and I wrestle with what it means that these inherited methods quietly structure not just how students read, but how they understand themselves in relation to each other, society, and the very idea of America.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

High School English as Literary Institution

• The high school English classroom as the place where more people read more literature more often than anywhere else—and yet largely ignored by literary scholars
• A persistent gulf between secondary and post-secondary English educators, despite shared students, shared problems, and a shared intellectual tradition
• How testing regimes and institutions like the College Board have come to mediate (rather than facilitate) cross-institutional dialogue

Genres, Methods, and the Pedagogy of Individualism

• Reading for character and reading for theme as products of post-WWII Cold War imperatives and New Criticism, not timeless defaults
• How the high school canon, from Catcher in the Rye to 1984, consistently frames literature through the lens of “individual versus society”, functioning as a pedagogy of individualism

The Canon Revisited

• Despite decades of canon war debates reshaping university syllabi, the most-taught texts at the high school level have remained remarkably stable
• The case for a living, evolving canon rather than an abolished one: these shared texts function as a national literary mythology with real cultural and political power
• How the canon wars at the university level has tended to elevate writers of color primarily for works set in the historical past, effectively disincentivizing studying the works of authors writing about the present

Continuing the trend of this series, our dialogue explores the structural issues plaguing English education (particularly testing regimes, standardization, and institutional isolation) that have narrowed what English can be, while insisting that the discipline’s shared texts, practices, and people offer a power we have yet to fully seize or realize. For teachers who want to know more about the history of their discipline and its methods, and for literary scholars who have yet to reckon with the place where most reading actually happens, this conversation offers both a historical accounting and a call to collective action. We hope you’ll join us in our quest to seize the means of curriculum! (T-shirt incoming).

High School English and the Making of American Readers (article — open access) How The Great Gatsby Took Over High School (New Yorker article)
Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (book)

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In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Jeffrey Lawrence, professor of 20th and 21st century American and Latin American literature at Rutgers University and author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño and the Spanish-language novel El Americano. Like me, Jeffrey has found himself intrigued by recent developments on Substack, where a growing literary scene is raising questions, debating issues, and engaging in conversations that don’t fit neatly into traditional academic venues. Our dialogue moves between the institutional structures that shape literary studies, the surprising public appetite for serious engagement with the humanities online, and what it might mean for secondary English education to reconnect with its disciplinary roots.

Key Concepts:

Public Humanities

• The distinction between community-engaged public humanities and public-facing writing that still operates through prestige networks
• What it means to invite people into a discourse rather than simply making that discourse more visible
• How Substack has opened space for a literary culture where thousands voluntarily participate in serious criticism outside the credentialing structures of the university

Disciplinary Fragmentation

• The silos within English departments (literary studies, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, etc.) and how those divisions shape what reaches K-12 classrooms
• How methods from rhet-comp and cultural studies seeped into secondary English education while literary studies seemed to turned inward
• The historical decline of cross-pollination between MLA and NCTE, and what that separation has cost both fields

The Canon Question

• The difference between treating the canon as a fixed inheritance and treating it as a living tradition that can be renegotiated in each moment
• Why refusing to engage with questions of canonization has its own costs — including leaving students without the tools to participate in, critique, and renew long-standing intellectual communities
• Framing canon formation not as culture wars but as an ongoing disciplinary practice students can and should be invited into

Defending the Humanities

• How the defense of the humanities can be seen as being too intramural and why that hasn’t worked
• What genuine heterogeneity might look like in literary studies, and why public platforms may offer something the academy currently does not
• The gatekeeping mechanisms that constrain academic publishing and hiring, and how they limit the range of voices and methodological commitments in the field

In what’s quickly becoming a theme in these conversations, we also discuss how the people best positioned to connect literary culture to a broader public (high school English teachers!) have often been alienated from it through regimes of high stakes testing and curricular standardization. For educators who share that sense that something essential has been lost in the way English is taught and structured since the neoliberal turn within K-16 education, this conversation offers both a diagnosis and a provocation. 

Jeffrey’s Substack

Anxieties of Experience

El Americano

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In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Dan Sinykin and Dr. Johanna Winant, editors of the new publication Close Reading for the 21st Century. While close reading is a foundational practice in literary studies, it’s also one that remains notoriously difficult to define. Dan and Johanna explain how they set out to do the “impossible” task of defining the term, ultimately framing it as the practice of paying attention to a passage of text to account for its meaning and argue how it works.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

The Five-Step Method: Dan and Johanna emphasize the distinction between close reading as a verb (the messy, non-linear process of thinking) and close reading as a noun (the polished genre of writing). To help students master the “noun,” they anatomize the practice into five movements:

• Scene Setting: A strategic summary that invites the reader in, choosing only the parts of the text necessary to follow the argument.
• Noticing: Stopping on a concrete, “finger-sized” detail that feels strange, unusual, or evocative.
• Local Claiming: Sitting with that detail to make a specific interpretation of how it works within its immediate surroundings.
• Regional Argumentation: Identifying patterns across the entire poem, story, or play to build a cohesive argument.
• Global Theorizing: The final, “wild” moment where the critic connects their argument to broader historical periods, genres, or universal themes.

The Pedagogical Disjuncture: One of the most striking parts of our conversation is the unfortunate gap between how close reading is practiced by professional critics and how it is taught in schools dominated by standardized tests and AP curriculum. While the discipline shifted toward historicism and theory in the 1980s, classroom pedagogy often remains stuck in a zombified version of New Criticism that is shaped by regimes of standardized testing and standardized curriculum. 

Close Reading as a Democratic Practice: Rather than a solitary exercise in theme parroting or symbol hunting, close reading is reimagined as a dialogue between authors, theorists, and critics that unfolds across time and space. When presented this way, close reading functions as a set of tools that students can use to both appreciate and argue about aesthetic objects in ways that make them more attuned to the world around them and connected to those who share their passion for close reading.

Practical Implications

This conversation offers a vital bridge for educators looking to move beyond rote analysis. The five-step method allows students to move from simple observation to global theorizing without making specious leaps. Ultimately, Dan and Johanna remind us that when we ask students to close read, we are asking them to perform a feat of intellectual elegance. By reintroducing the beauty of the genre and treating students as active participants in a scholarly conversation, we can transform the English classroom into a place where students don’t just “do school,” but participate in intellectual and scholarly communities that not only read the word and the world, but intervene in it as well.

Check out Dan and Johanna’s work:

Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century

Dan Sinykin's Website

Johanna Winant's website

The Claims of Close Reading (Boston Review)

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In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Susan D. Blum, a cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist and author of Schoolishness: Alienated Education and Authentic, Joyful Learning. Our conversation centers on a powerful concept that captures much of what constrains contemporary education: schoolishness. Drawing on thinkers from Marx to the Buddha, from school-aged children to sociolinguists, Susan's work reveals how the seemingly natural structures of institutional education are not only artificial but actively work against the joy and meaning that make learning worthwhile.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

Schoolishness and Alienation

• Understanding schoolishness as packaged learning, uniformity, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and delayed rewards
• Recognizing how alienated labor in school means students trade meaningless tasks for credentials rather than engaging in authentic learning
• Examining ten dimensions of schooling that contribute to alienation (including space, time, assessment, etc.)
• Contrasting alienated education with authentic, joyful learning that happens naturally everywhere

The Naturalization of School Structures

• How institutional forms become "naturalized" and seem inevitable despite being historical constructs
• The survivorship bias of educators who succeeded at the "school game" and now perpetuate its structures
• Understanding that grades, classrooms, and standardized curricula are not universal or timeless features of learning
• Recognizing that learning to walk, talk, and engage with the world happens without curriculum, grades, or coercion

Ungrading Practices & Communities

• The role of social media and digital networks in building communities of practice around alternative approaches
• How the ungrading movement demonstrates organic, educator-led change despite institutional inertia
• The importance of generous knowledge-sharing and making work public so others can adapt it
• Finding colleagues and collaborators across institutions when local support isn't available

Susan's work offers both devastating critique and hopeful possibility. While she acknowledges the massive structural constraints facing educators—particularly contingent faculty with limited time and security—she also demonstrates how networked communities and committed collaboration can support meaningful change. Her approach to working with colleagues emphasizes meeting people where they are, rather than imposing solutions, and offering alternatives when existing practices aren't working, rather than demanding revolution.

For educators feeling trapped by institutional constraints yet hungry for something more authentic, this episode validates both the struggle and the possibility of change. It offers permission to question what seems inevitable while providing concrete examples of how others have created learning experiences that honor both student agency and genuine intellectual engagement.

Check out Susan's work:

• Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest to Learn with Authentic Pride
• Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (editor)
• Dr. Susan D. Blum's Website & Substack

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In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I explore the complex and contested terrain of AI literacy with Dr. Rachel Horst, a digital literacy and arts-based scholar whose framework for understanding entangled literacies offers a refreshing alternative to the polarized discourse surrounding artificial intelligence in education. Drawing from posthumanist theory and futures literacies scholarship, our conversation challenges both techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic narratives while centering creativity, relationality, and critical inquiry in our approach to these emerging technologies.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

Entangled AI Literacy

• Moving beyond skills-based definitions toward messy, relational understandings of literacy
• Understanding AI literacy as interconnected with ecological, data, knowledge-construction, epistemic, disciplinary, political, relational, creative, futures, and algorithmic dimensions
• Recognizing how AI reveals existing entanglements rather than creating entirely new problems
• Embracing uncertainty and fluidity in defining what AI literacy means

Creative Disobedience and Posthumanist Approaches

• Using AI tools in playful, experimental, and "disobedient" ways that highlight glitches and limitations
• Drawing on posthumanist theory to decenter human exceptionalism and explore relational ontologies
• Connecting with indigenous cosmologies and other-than-human ways of knowing

Teaching With, Against, and About AI

• Creating space for diverse perspectives on AI rather than seeking consensus
• Balancing critique with curiosity and experimentation
• Supporting process-oriented, collaborative learning that uses AI to amplify rather than replace human creativity
• Trusting students' innate desire to create and make meaning

Theory as Practice

• Making philosophical and theoretical frameworks accessible and playful for educators
• Recognizing that all teaching involves theory, whether we acknowledge it or not
• Using AI tools to create rich digital artifacts for teaching and learning
• Moving beyond compliance-driven approaches to embrace complexity and emergence

The conversation highlights how educators can move beyond binary thinking about AI to create learning environments that are both critically engaged and experimentally open. Rachel's work demonstrates how posthumanist theory can inform practical approaches to AI literacy that honor complexity while remaining grounded in the realities of teaching and learning.

Rather than treating AI as either salvation or doom, this episode models an (admittedly fraught) third way: engaging with these tools as part of larger conversations about knowledge, creativity, relationality, and the future of education. The discussion emphasizes the importance of creating spaces where educators can explore their own AI literacy in "messy" ways while supporting students in developing critical and creative relationships with emerging technologies.

Connect with Rachel's Work:

• LinkedIn (primary platform for sharing work)
• Substack (for arts-based integration of AI)
• UBC Master's in Educational Technology program
• Entangled AI Literacy Resource (created for educators)

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