Conceptually Speaking

Complaining about the theory-practice divide in education feels a bit cliche, but there’s a reason why it’s a constant source of conversation and consternation in classrooms, conferences, and academic journals. As someone with their feet firmly planted in both worlds, I’m always excited to connect with other educators who can bridge that divide—and my guest today is an exceptional example of just such a person. Shawna Coppola is a literacy specialist, educator, and author of the recently released Literacy for All: A Framework for Anti-Oppressive Teaching from Routledge. Shawna’s framework is a pretty incredible distillation of a lot of literacy scholarship that informs my work, research, and conversations on this podcast. Our conversation today walks through each of its key principles, and while it’s an expansive dialogue, Shawna’s commitment to more liberatory approaches to literacy teaching is a throughline across the episode. Whether you’re a classroom teacher, administrator, or a professor working with pre-service teachers, this episode has a ton to offer. Enjoy!

https://shawnacoppola.com/
Literacy for All: A Framework for Anti-Oppressive Teaching 

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According to the late Octavia Butler, ”God is Change and in the end, God prevails.” Though Butler passed in 2006, her words resonate deeper than ever. And while she’s no longer able to chart out fantastical journeys across the stars, the philosophy that structures her work is one of the principle inspirations for adrienne marie brown’s book, Emergent Strategy. I won’t try to define the scope of Emergent Strategy in my introduction, but at its essence, it’s an orientation, stance, framework, and spellbook for organizing and facilitating change. My guest this week, Jeffrey Austin, is a literacy consultant with Wayne, RESA in South East Michigan, has been using adrienne marie brown’s work to facilitate team meetings, structure professional learning, and support educators across his district. It takes us the whole of the episode to unearth what emergent strategy is and how it might look in an educational context, but Jeffrey’s brilliant explanations and examples were incredibly powerful and tangible. In fact I think this might be one of my most useful episodes yet for educational leaders and organizers. There are a number of reasons for this, but principle among those is the fact that Jeffrey doesn’t just offer platitudes about changing educational systems. He embodies it. If my intro has you curious, consider this episode your primer for diving into the world of Emergent Strategy. Enjoy!

Jeffrey's Blog
Emergent Strategy (Book)
Literacy Essentials: Disciplinary Literacy (6-12)

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What if I told you there’s a magical place where young people spend hours upon hours discussing, sharing, creating, and theorizing about their favorite books? What if I told you that place was TikTok? Or, more specifically, a corner of TikTok known as BookTok. Well, that’s what this week’s episode is all about. My guest this week is Dr. Sarah Jerasa, Assistant Professor of Literacy at Clemson University in the Department of Education and Human Development. In addition to being a friend of the show and fellow member of the Writing and Literacies Special Interest Group, Sarah is currently researching the impact of BookTok on reading, writing, and creating content about literature. Far from being a random trending topic or flash-in-the-pan hashtag, the discourse on BookTok has already proven to have a major impact on the publishing industry and features millions of book lovers connecting over their most loved and loathed books. Considering the popularity and influence digital spaces have on literacy practices, Sarah believes (and I agree) it’s high time English teachers begin to consider how we can expand “what counts” as literacy in academic spaces. Even if you have no idea what a "For You Page" is or is generally anti-social media, this episode still has some worthwhile food for thought about the relationship between academic literacies, youth literacies, and the future of English Language Arts.

https://www.sarahjerasa.com/
https://twitter.com/saraheconroy
BookTok 101: TikTok, Digital Literacies, and Out-of-School Reading Practices

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This week I’m lucky enough to be in dialogue with two educators and authors whose work I’ve admired for quite some time. Rebekah O’Dell is a classroom teacher and author of Writing with Mentors and Beyond Literary Analysis and Matthew Johnson a high school English teacher and author of Flash Feedback. In addition to being dynamic teachers and insightful authors, they also design powerful professional learning experiences for fellow educators. In fact, this summer they, alongside friend of the show Angela Stockman, launched a new venture called Camp Rewrite: A digital campfire where English teachers across the country can gather to view PD videos from Rebekah, Matt, Angela, and a slew of other fantastic voices in the ELA world. It’s a fantastic example of how professional learning can be more authentic, non-hierarchical, and participatory. However, our conversation will go beyond this one event! More broadly, this is a dialogue asking big questions about the future of post-COVID pedagogy, professional learning, and even the discipline of English. Enjoy!

Links:
camprewrite.substack.com
Rebekah's Twitter
Rebekah's Site
Matthew's Website
Matthew's Twitter

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https://www.buzzsprout.com/1073776/support

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There’s no shortage of authors, consultants, and coaches discussing the importance of culture when it comes to learning, especially literacy learning. However, I can’t think of any that brings the same level of depth, nuance, and accessibility to that work as this week's guest. Nawal Qarooni is a literacy coach, writer, specialist in family literacy, and author of the forthcoming book Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Exalting Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care. Nawal’s work invites readers to think expansively about how we define students, families, and literacies. As you’ll soon hear, she doesn’t talk about culture like it’s a buzzword or checklist, but rather like a journalist or ethnographic researcher.

As our schools continue to service increasingly diverse peoples with a range of identities, languages, and literacy practices Nawal’s work becomes all the more vital. Moreover, it’s arriving at a time where many of the ideas and approaches related to Equity work in education are either being politicized out of existence or turned into anodyne products and programs to be purchased and consumed instead of embodied and enacted. Rest assured, Nawal’s work is the real deal. Enjoy!

https://twitter.com/NQCLiteracy
NQC Literacy
Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Exalting Home Experiences and Classroom Practices

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This week on Conceptually Speaking, I had the pleasure of chatting with fellow teacher and friend of the show, Garreth Heidt. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of crossing paths with Garret on Twitter, he teaches sophomore English as well as an innovation and social entrepreneurship class called NOVA lab at Perkiomen Valley High School. I met him in the days of teacher Twitter yore before COVID, culture wars, and Elon Musk took the shine off the place. As you’ll be able to tell by our dialogue, Garreth is the sort of veteran teacher who has been blazing trails folks are only now discovering. Our wide-ranging dialogue, which bounces from post-modernism to ChatGPT to The Good Life perfectly encapsulates the depth and breadth of his knowledge as well as his heartfelt commitment to more meaningful education. This episode feels like the exact sort of existential, reflective conversation teachers need to have (or listen to!) after the last few years of mayhem. I hope you enjoy.

Garreth's Personal Blog
The NOVA Lab Blog

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Lately, it feels like the world is both literally and figuratively on fire. As a mere English teacher researcher and content creator, there are times when feel kind of powerless in the throes of political upheaval, culture wars, and social unrest. I’ve always believed English class is a place where students can cultivate the wisdom and discernment needed to create a more just, liberatory future, but I always wish I could do more. Luckily, last summer I stumbled upon the work of Dr. Mark Bracher, an English professor at Kent State University and the author of Literature, Social Wisdom, and Global Justice: Developing Systems Thinking Through Literary Study. Dr. Bracher’s research leverages the latest scholarship from cognitive and neuroscience to develop a systems thinking approach to literary studies that fosters four key cognitive functions: causal analysis, prospection, social cognition, and metacognition. Through the cultivation of these practices, Bracher believes (and I agree) students can cultivate skills and habits of mind that allow them to not only recognize the social injustices within our social, political, and ecological systems but intervene with wisdom, discernment, and empathy. Many of you who know me personally, know I read a lot of books about education. I’m nerdy like that. So trust me when I say, this is one of the most compelling books on English teaching I’ve encountered in a very long time.

Dr. Bracher's website
Dr. Bracher's published works
American Dream(ing) Project Overview (10th-grade unit I co-designed based on Bracher's work)

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How often do you find yourself wanting to hit pause in your curriculum? To slow down and notice more deeply? Read more closely? Maybe even engage in some playful fun? Like most teachers, there are times when I find myself sprinting through the next novel or text set, slipping back into the grips of covering material instead of exploring it. Luckily, my guest today is Brett Vogelsinger, a 9th-grade English Teacher in Doylestown PA author of Poetry Pauses: Teaching With Poems To Elevate Student Writing in All Genres, and a contributing author to Moving Writers. As his book title would suggest, poetry pauses are his specialty, and there are few other teachers I know who are as good at integrating poetry into his curriculum in meaningful, intentional, and powerful ways. Our conversation is a deep dive into the pedagogy of teaching poetry Brett has plenty to share about the powerful ways poetic forms can lead to playful and powerful learning. After hanging out with Brett at NCTE this year, I knew he’d be a great podcast guest. As you’ll soon learn, he didn’t disappoint. Enjoy!

https://brettvogelsinger.com/
https://30gopoems.blogspot.com/

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 As melodramatic as it may seem, I’ll never forget the first time I encountered The New London Group’s A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. After an evening of mindless scrolling in the summer of 2016, I clicked on a fortuitous Facebook post from a fellow English teacher. As I read I became increasingly enraptured. It felt inspiring. It felt fresh. It felt innovative. I assumed it was cutting-edge research. Then I saw the publication date. 1996. Reading that publication date made it abundantly clear educational practice had fallen well behind educational scholarship. It’s a disconnect I notice more and more as I move through my own dissertation. It’s also a lament shared by my esteemed guests. This week I was joined by Dr. Troy Hicks professor of English and Education at Central Michigan University and the Director of the Chippewa River Writing Project and his co-author, Dr. Kristen Hawley Turner: Professor of education at Drew University and director of the Drew Writing Project. Our discussion is coming hot on the heels of their recent publication Digital Literacy (Still) Can’t Wait: Four Questions to Reframe the Conversation around Technology in the English Classroom, a follow-up to their 2013 publication No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can't Wait. Though I’m sure they wish such clarion calls weren’t still necessary, I’m thankful for scholars like them who continue to fight the good fight to bring powerful ideas to practitioners and pose poignant questions about how we use technology in our classrooms. Whether you’re a techno-skeptic or ed-tech enthusiast, Kristen and Troy’s four questions are an invitation for us to use technology in more transformative ways. Enjoy!

Resources:
An Interconnected Framework for Assessment of Digital Multimodal Composition
Dr. Troy Hicks' Twitter
Dr. Kristen Turner's Twitter

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 According to cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff, “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” And that is what today’s episode is all about. On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Matthew Slocombe, a secondary school teacher specializing in educational design and technology and a doctoral student and researcher at the Center for Educational Neuroscience. Matt’s research interests relate to the development of children’s reasoning and the role of conceptual change and transfer in analogical reasoning. Matt and I connected during the early days of COVID while I was working on Learning that Transfers with Julie, Krista, and Kayla and he put us on to some fantastic research into the role of analogical reasoning in conceptual change and learning transfer. And, much to my joy, he helped us realize analogies are so much more than fanciful things used by poets: they are the essence of how we make meaning. So, get ready to accommodate and assimilate some new knowledge into your pre-existing schema and let’s begin.

Center for Educational Neuroscience
Analogical Minds YouTube Channel

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