Nawal Qarooni is an educator and writer who works in education spaces to support a holistic model of literacy instruction. She and her team of coaches at NQC Literacy work with teachers and school leaders to grow a love of reading and composition in ways that exalt the whole child, their cultural capital and their intrinsic curiosities. She is the proud daughter of immigrants, and mothering her four young kids shapes her understanding of teaching and learning. Nawal’s first book about family literacy with Heinemann is forthcoming in 2023.
Rebekah O'Dell is a full-time classroom teacher in Richmond, Virginia. She is the author of Writing with Mentors, Beyond Literary Analysis, and A Teacher's Guide to Mentor Texts. She is a founder of the popular Moving Writers blog and YouTube channel Mini Moves for Writers.
Catherine Hernandez (she/her) is an award-winning author and critically acclaimed screenwriter. She is a proud queer woman who is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian descent and married into the Navajo Nation. Her first novel, Scarborough (Arsenal Pulp Press), won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript; was a finalist for several awards including Canada Reads 2022. Her children’s books include M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book (Flamingo Rampant) and I Promise (Arsenal Pulp Press). She wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Scarborough, produced by Compy Films and levelFILM, which was nominated for 11 Canadian Screen Awards and won 8 including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her second novel, Crosshairs, (HarperCollins Canada, Atria Books US, Jacaranda Books UK), was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and made the CBC's Best Canadian Fiction, NOW Magazine's 10 Best Books, Indigo Best Book, Audible Best Audiobooks and NBC 20 Best LGBTQ Books list of 2020. She is currently working on a few television projects and two novels.
Misty is a seasoned facilitator and certified concept-based teaching consultant with over 20 years of teaching experience. As the founder of Pop-Up Studio and author of the best-selling Pop-Up Studio book, Misty champions a creative approach to education. She empowers teachers of all kinds to integrate concepts, inquiry and play into multimodal studio spaces at a kitchen table, around a microscope, under a tree, across a classroom desk-- anywhere really! Spanning dozens of countries and thousands of learners, Misty’s research and practice support a global movement to ‘pop-up’ curriculum with hands-on experiences that inspire meaningful, memorable, and merry learning.
Shawna Coppola has been a public school educator for over two decades. Certified as a literacy specialist as well as a K-8 educator in the state of New Hampshire, Shawna is a sought-after speaker and a consultant with The Educator Collaborative, a literacy think tank & professional development organization. She has written two books about writing for teachers and is currently working on a third about anti-oppressive literacy education.
Trevor Aleo is an English teacher, the ELA lead for Team LTT, and a co-author of Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World. His research interests include teacher professional learning, multimodal composition, and exploring the intersection between disciplinary literacy and new literacies within English Language Arts. He holds a BA in English and an MAT from James Madison University and is pursuing a doctorate in Learning Design and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also serves on the AERA Writing & Literacies Graduate Student Board.
Paul W. Hankins is a classroom teacher, artist, and poet with over a decade of experience in working with students seeking college credit in composition and communications. He has unique yet standard-based and rigorous approaches to the presentation of ELA concepts. His bent toward creative, multimodal expression for both himself and his students result in student products that stretch the idea of what it means to respond to writing invitations within the learning community.
Garreth Heidt has taught middle and high school students for the better part of 30 years. His curricula develop skills in critical viewing, question formation, civil discussion, problem finding, and problem solving. He currently teaches English Lanugage Arts to Gifted and Talented sophomores near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is also the Lead Learner and co-designer of his high school’s innovation and social entrepreneurship space, NOVA Lab.
Garreth has spent time teaching and developing classes at the middle school, high school, and college level. He is a graduate of Temple University with a degree in English and a Masters in Curriculum, Instruction and Technology. His work has appeared in School Arts, A Gathering of the Tribes, the Industrial Designers Society of America, The Design Learning Network, Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, and in a forthcoming book on experiential learning in museums. He blogs infrequently on his own sites, Only Connect (www.onlyconnects.wordpress.com) and Innovation Lab (pvhsnovalab.com).
He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Association of the Delaware Valley, Design-ed Coalition, the Design Learning Network, and is the former Director of Learning for the Educational Design Consultancy, Form & Faculty (www.formandfaculty.com ).
This session will explore the idea of land literacy from an Indigenous Perspective.
Including: Understanding and experiencing connections with the land is fundamental to Indigenous Knowledge.
Intended Outcomes:
develop their own relationships with the land
interact with their environment and community
engage in authentic experiences
develop an understanding and appreciation of different relationships with the land
view the land from a holistic, interconnected perspective
Questions posed will include:
What is the geology of the land where I live? What are the actual soil types? What plants and animals might have existed here before humans began to make their mark? What were the historical uses of this land before settlement? How have precipitation patterns changed in recent years, and if they have what effect has it had on the land?
Target Audience: Gr 6 - 12
The summer institute focus on The Stories We Tell: Expanding Our View of Literacy, encouraged us to create a session about how autobiographical narrative inquiry can support teachers to bring their life experience alongside the outcomes they are teaching. The centrality of experience, story, knowledge, and identity in this inquiry process, connects with the pedagogies that First Nation, Métis, and Inuit peoples have drawn on since time immemorial to educate their children. In our session, teachers will work through a process of autobiographical narrative inquiry where they attend to past and present experiences in their lives that connect with general and specific outcomes in the English Language Arts K-9, and other elementary Programs of Study in Alberta. Teachers often tell us that this process increases their knowledge and excitement; they also tell us that when they use this process of autobiographical narrative inquiry with children, that children are more deeply engaged in their learning.
We know books can be mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors as explained by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop. This session will include specific book titles and groups of books that would help students explore their identities and their place in the world. Curricular outcomes related to all strands of ELA will be included to show how to use this broad approach to 'story' while accomplishing many curricular outcomes along the way.
Why vocabulary? We will take part in some high-yield vocabulary and language activities. These activities can be used across each subject and multiple grade levels.
Adam Browning is a director of learning with Palliser School Division who is passionate about literacy and language learning.
An introduction to computational thinking and Coding with the Scratch platform. Participants get to code a project to help them understand how Scratch works, and how they can introduce it to their students (in Math or ELA)
Sue Mylde is an educator with several years’ experience in different aspects of communication, STEM and education. In the classroom, Sue enjoys bringing Coding to life teaching both block- and text-based languages like Scratch and Python. She encourages her students to find their own answers to "How can we make a difference in our world?" - and for students to explore their own learning through this lens. Sue enjoys being curious and facilitating knowledge sharing for teachers and students around the areas of digital citizenship, computational thinking and our global world. She has been delivering PD for teachers through the Calgary Regional Consortium (CRC) and presenting at Alberta Technology Leaders in Education (ATLE) Conferences. Sue is most excited about spaces where technology meets pedagogy and is an advocate for balance in today’s increasingly digital world. Sue currently teaches at Rundle College.
Read excellent books and turn them into exciting art projects! From dinosaurs to Three Billy Goats Gruff to a Jan Brett study, any great book can become a drama or art project! Come away with fun interconnected art and drama lessons for 12 books that you can use this school year!
The ELA classroom is often a place of remembering. This is particularly the case when it comes to personal or autobiographical writing. In this session, I explore ghosts as a construct for memory in student autobiography and memoir. I share a unit I designed wherein students examine the concept of ghosts: how they function and what they tend to signify in literary texts and autobiographical writing. I invite teachers to consider this account as just one example of how we might engage and support student-writers as they reflect upon the significance of memory and personal experience during moments of loss or grief.