Foundations of Literacy

"Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community."  — bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge, 2003. bell hooks, When I was thirteen, I traveled with my family to Mesa, AZ, to cel

For this post, I’m sharing a framework that I rely on as a content strategist to help me identify customer learning needs. I’ve shared this framework in a previous class, and I’m sharing it again to demonstrate how adaptive it can be to whatever the context is. The learning journey framework that I’m walking through today is focused on how we can build writing literacy learning journeys to meet our student needs. I applied various writing strategies from experts, such as Don

I lost my dad on September 18, a day after his 82nd birthday. I was fortunate to spend the last month of his life with him. My sister and I traveled from our homes in California and Montana, respectively, to support my parents through my dad’s final journey. This journey started well before this last month of his life, over eight years ago, with a diagnosis of stage three esophageal cancer. He had several years of remission in between that first diagnosis and his last month.

One of my goals for this blog is to offer perspectives, other than my own, to inspire open dialogue and reflection. Through this exercise, I believe we can build cooperation, collaboration,  and community. To that end, I am using this post to have a conversation about the past, present, and future of English Language Arts (ELA). I offer discussions on the foundation of ELA as an academic discipline, including its prevalent philosophies and challenges.  The perspectives I pres

Our world is inundated with political division, social injustice, cultural appropriation, environmental degradation, and technological disruption. As global citizens, we are facing a multitude of crises, but these crises are also presenting us with an opportunity to resist, rethink, and renew how we move forward as a society and as educators. Especially as educators. Although I do not work in the field of education, I am well-versed in the discipline of Language Arts. I gradu