911 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2021
    1. Christopher R. Rogers

      Thank you, Chris, for joining our partner author webinar! We'll embed a link to our conversation with Chris once the video broadcasts live.

    2. Editors’ Introduction

      Welcome to the 2021 Marginal Syllabus. This Editors' Introduction is part of the third Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), with support from Hypothesis.

      Click "Show replies," below, to read more about the Marginal Syllabus.

    3. the worldmaking possibilities of literacies

      What are the world making pedagogies educator communities might design and support?

    4. Curriculum design may thus be centered organically in the rich literate lives and social contexts of the students themselves, rather than merely being manufactured for teachers and transmitted into classrooms.

      The business models and leadership frameworks that support such manufacture and transmission seem to be an oppressive byproduct of disconnected systems. The disposition that we hope to foster among teachers involves a support of teacher agency and decision making that can disappoint those business models and leadership approaches.

    5. healing through poetry.

      How can poetry can be healing? How might teachers find a balance between naming systems of oppression, supporting the healing that is necessary daily, and fostering agency through literacies?

    6. While the show is steeped in science fiction, we recognize the parallels between the experimentation on and police brutality against Black people featured in this drama set in the 1950s and today’s police in(action) and the handling of COVID-19 that disproportion-ately harms Black life.

      The two oppressive forces this introduction is concerned with: policing and the disproportionate harm to Black people during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a weighty backdrop for a journal issue.

    1. “I TEACH MYSELF IN OUTLINE,” NOTES, JOURNALS, SYLLABI & AN EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA

      Maybe relevant for @RemiKalir? Before #IAnno21, stumbled into this because a project @UniLivLibrary/@UniLivPress elected to use @ManifoldApp... instead of @Pressbooks.

  2. May 2021
    1. “tired of reading books about race.”

      In the public layer of this annotated text (login to find the annotatable public layer), colleague Molly Robbins annotates this phrase and writes "I have started wondering if when students say they are tired of reading 'books about race' if they are actually tired of books that do not show joy steeped in a radicalized story?"

      In our author discussion, Ebony responds to this by sharing books about race that are steeped in joy and in radicalizing stories ... see the section of the discussion here:

      https://youtu.be/1ljXV0JlnYM

      To hear more of Ebony's recommendations, follow her on social media https://twitter.com/Ebonyteach

    2. silence and evasion characterized particularly tense moments during both conversations

      As a white male teacher, should I aim to vocal and welcoming about issues of race? My sense is that I should but usually the vocal part is best handled by asserting the importance of authors of color, contemporary and historical.

    3. How might a Black teacher name race and state its importance if his students were reluctant to talk about it?

      I love this inquiry question because it seems to me that it can be revised for teachers to think about the way these dilemma's impact their classrooms, practices, and students.

      A frame like this seems to have a lot of utility for teachers who see navigating discussions of race as a area of praxis. How might a ___ teacher name race and state its importance if students were ___?

    4. 5. ryAn: She’s using it as a sentence enhancer.6. ellA: As a sentence enhancer?

      This seems like a pivotal moment where the student is attempting to articulate a positive rationale for why an author would include the word in a written work.

      Ebony makes the point that teachers can learn a great deal from looking back at their attempts to navigate these types of complex issues. This instance is illustrative, to me, of the power of having these kinds of interactions documented for teachers to think about when they're not having to navigate all the classroom dynamics.

    5. Serena, a White student, named both the race of LouAnne Johnson (“White”) and the race of her students (“Black people,” Line 20). There is much to be said about constraining the conversation in this way within racially diverse, complex classrooms. By relegating a racial slur to the fictional world of Dangerous Mindsinstead of the tangible world outside of the English classroom, the teacher and students could avert conflict.

      I think this is an issue to meditate on. I've heard so many perspectives about the issue of the n-word in texts, and in use in classrooms. The word impacts students differently, to be sure, traumatizing some and silencing many, and schools' efforts to norm its use are fraught with complexity. School rules are places that don't navigate complexity well, but our classrooms must be. Knowing when and how to introduce perspectives like Ta-Nehisi Coates' is more art than science from a pedagogy standpoint. It requires a teacher to "read the room," and "read the school."

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO15S3WC9pg

    6. This recontextualization presents in two different registers of classroom discourse: instructional, which is talk primarily focused on the teaching of specific curricular skills, and regulative, which is talk primarily focused on keeping order, maintaining relationships, and forming identity (Christie, 1999, p. 159). Race talk dilemmas can arise in either register, or both.

      These two registers are interesting to think about, especially as they relate to the implications for teacher planning. What I want to communicate about race, or a text that surfaces issues of race, is a really different consideration than how I want to negotiate norms and support a conversation that ensures a measure of safety for participants.

    7. Whether or not students and teachers attempt to avoid conversations about race, however, race is inescapable.

      Race as an issue is inescapable, now more than ever. Unfortunately, in our schools and curricula, race conversations are very escapable. We have so many ways of slipping out of equity conversations.

    8. Surfacing the complexity of race talk during the teaching of literature is in itself a complex endeavor.

      Again, I'm drawn to the word "complex" because of its repeated use and the way it resonates for me. These issues are complex because the relationship between cause and effect are so unpredictable. The rest of this paragraph does a nice job of illustrating why.

    9. the more complex inequality seems to get, the more simplistic inequality analysis seems to become;

      I was fascinated to learn about these paradoxes. I am always interested when educators and research reference complexity, which this article does quite a bit. To me, complex issues defy "best practices" that often take the shape of prescriptions by the time they get to practicing teachers. Instead, I think that complex issues require safe-to-fail experiments.

      I can reflect on the ways I've created "safe to fail" spaces for me to talk about race with students and for students to share their growing and shifting perspectives about race with each other. I think there are approaches that have felt successful for me, but no recipes that will be guaranteed to work for someone else.

  3. Apr 2021
    1. “We Always Talk About Race”

      Welcome to the 2021 Marginal Syllabus. This article by Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is part of the third Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), with support from Hypothesis.

      Click "Show replies," below, to read more about the Marginal Syllabus.

    1. Traditionally, literacy instruction for marginalized youth has been “data driven” (Neuman, 2016), grammar- and technical skills-focused (Tatum, 2006), and anti-Black (Baker-Bell, 2019), and has lacked the kind of engagement that leads to liberation (Ladson-Billings, 2005). Such approaches are offered as ways to improve the achievement of Black students and close the so-called gap between them and White students (Ladson-Billings, 2006). The opening vignette also reflects several conflicts betwee

      Data Driven Instruction is such a force in schools here in the Denver area where I teach. I've seen instances where schools are so hungry for data that they push out hastily created writing assessments with no real concern for how the writing tasks are presented to the students. When students don't engage or aren't given the time to write as well as they can, the numerical scores the writing earns, lumped together in satisfyingly clean spreadsheets, drive a newfound sense of "urgency" among school leaders to "close gaps." This vicious cycle deficitizes writers and numbs teachers in my experience.

    2. However, when the teaching and learning are examined more closely, it becomes clear that these so-called best practices had little to do with students (or the teacher) engaging deeply with the content—a problem that inspired the line of inquiry guiding this work.

      I think it is so important to interrogate the concept of "best practices." This article does a nice job of contrasting dominant practices or trends in the teaching of English Language Arts with the decisions made by a teacher who wants to foreground writing by writing with students. The author's stance is all the more important because she's committed to exploring Blackness with her Black students.

    3. In other words, school continues to be an antagonistic place for students of color as curriculum, discipline practices, achievement data reporting, and pedagogies tend to center whiteness and sup-port White, middle-class constructions of what it means to be a “good” student.

      There is so much our schools need to unlearn in order to be the sites of learning and growth we want them to be. This is a heavy but valuable list.

    4. For ex-ample, in an assignment entitled “Remember Me,” inspired by an assignment from Linda Christensen’s (2017) Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, Aire wrote:

      I appreciate the "pedagogical recycling" here. In this case, Johnson is repurposing an assignment she discovered in a professional text in order to research the equity-driven inquiry question driving her practice. It is all the more powerful because of the student work which illustrates to some degree the engagement of the young writers.

  4. Mar 2021
    1. Revealing the Human and the Writer:

      Welcome to the 2021 Marginal Syllabus. This article by Dr. Latrise Johnson and Dr. Hannah Sullivan (congrats on your recent and successful doctoral defense!) is part of the third Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), with support from Hypothesis.

      Click "Show replies," below, to read more about the Marginal Syllabus.

    1. Jennifer D. Turner University of MarylandAutumn A. Griffin University of Pennsylvania

      Watch our NWP CoLab webinar with partner authors Jennifer Turner and Autumn in conversation with Marginal Syllabus readers: https://youtu.be/9tKnAGXVglI

    2. Relatedly, Tamika critiqued the underrepresentation of Black career women in digital spaces. She explained,It was hard finding a Black dancer [on Google]. I was like, “Are you serious?!” Because there’s a lot of Black dancers out there. There’s Debbie Allen who teaches dance, and there’s Misty Copeland. There’s a lot of Black dance figures out there. And I was like, “You guys should update Google for all these Black dancers.”Unfortunately, Tamika’s critique is quite accurate.

      This session was an important fertile ground for this critique. It seems to me that the dream boards shared by Jennifer and Autumn, along with the stories the researchers shared, acted as a counter narrative to the picture created by Google image searches.

    3. Relatedly, while narratives of Black women’s success in predominantly White and male occupations exist, “there are even more narratives of complacency, defeat, and an inability to progress” (emphasis added, Farinde, 2012, p. 332), which may ultimately deter Black girls from pursuing those career fields.

      This establishes a clear need for educators to help develop counter narratives in order to challenge a discouraging picture of the future for Black girls.

    4. The girls seemed comfortable during the design process, often singing along with the artists as they composed on their iPads, and at times laughing while pointing to images on their screens.

      The approach that Jennifer and Autumn used with Tamika and Malia is inspiring. To me it seems like this design session and the conversation that accompanied it really suggest some powerful ways of listening to the dreams of young people.

    5. both their present and future lives

      Noticing this work of making visible both the present and the future alongside each other.

    6. Given the racist algorithmic codes of the internet (Noble, 2018)

      I was thinking about Noble's work too because she begins with the distressing story of searching for "black girls" online and how this started her deeper inquiry.

      Here are a few words from Noble about this book where she surfaces some of the key questions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KLTpoTpkXo

      What are the implications for us as educators? For youth women like Malia and Tamika?

    7. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search EnginesReinforce Racism

      I was thinking about Noble's work too because she begins with the distressing story of searching for "black girls" online and how this started her deeper inquiry.

      Here are a few words from Noble about this book where she surfaces some of the key questions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KLTpoTpkXo

      What are the implications for us as educators? For youth women like Malia and Tamika?

    8. Tamika and Malia employed their critical Black Girls’ Literacies (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016) to question the power dynamics involved in traveling; rather than attempting to enact linguistic privilege as English-speaking Americans, Tamika and Malia acknowledged that they would be visitors in other countries, and they desired to use the communicative practices of the local people

      I noticed this and thought it was interesting; a powerful connection across language and understandings of literacy that has important implications I think for how we relate and interact with each other in the world. Makes me want to reflect on the how Black Girl Literacies, in particular, might underscore and highlight these connections and the implications for shifting power dynamics in schools.

    9. we conducted this inquiry by drawing upon a rich panoply of experiences anchored by our professional and personal lives, a shared commitment to conducting humanizing researc

      I really appreciated hearing from the authors about their research and the ways that their own lives interact and intersect with this work. Join us for a broadcast of this discussion on March 2nd via Facebook.

    10. we (the researchers) shared our own career dream boards with the girls

      I love that Jennifer and Autumn also created their own boards and shared them with Tamika and Malia. The questions that followed are a lovely example of the power of doing this.

      Writing alongside each other, and sharing our writing, is a powerful way to support literacy learning and dialogue and a core writing project practice. It is powerful to see this practice within the research here.

    11. Tamika understood that her future lay not solely in her raw talent, but in her ability to deeply understand the literacies in her field of interest; she knew that dancers have a shared language and understanding of how the body moves, and that in order to exist in that world, she must have that same understanding

      Here is another important statement about literacy learning that stood out to me in the way it reaches beyond text as well as school boundaries; what are the implications for us as literacy educators?

    12. n her ability to deeply understand the literacies in her field of interest; she knew that dancers have a shared language and understanding of how the body moves, and that in order to exist in that world, she must have that same understanding

      Here is another important statement about literacy learning that stood out to me in the way it reaches beyond text as well as school boundaries; what are the implications for us as literacy educators?

    13. shared our own career dream boards with the girls

      I love that Jennifer and Autumn also created their own boards and shared them with Tamika and Malia. The questions that followed are a lovely example of the power of doing this.

      Writing alongside each other, and sharing our writing, is a powerful way to support literacy learning and dialogue and a core writing project practice. It is powerful to see this practice within the research here.

    14. we conducted this inquiry by drawing upon a rich panoply of experiences anchored by our professional and personal lives, a shared commitment to conducting humanizing research

      I really appreciated hearing from the authors about their research and the ways that their own lives interact and intersect with this work. Join us for a broadcast of this discussion on March 2nd via Facebook.

    15. within multimodal space

      This focus on the multimodal spaces where youth, and specifically Black Girls, engage is essential as it again pushes us to think across the spaces where youth create - many of which are outside of school - when considering what we mean by literacy learning and literacy teaching in the first place.

    16. Black adolescent girls’ creative potential for dreaming and futuremak-ing is inextricably connected to their Black Girls’ Literacies.

      A powerful linkage here that makes me consider the ways literacy education is connected way beyond the school and throughout one's life.

  5. Feb 2021
    1. which explains that Google’s algorithms reflect the racialized and genderedbiases of the programmers rather than providing a level playing field for all ideas, values, and identities.

      Another excellent text resonant with both Tamika's critique and Noble's book is Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology. The book's first chapter, for example, details the automation of anti-Blackness and the intentional engineering of inequity that produces--in returning to Tamika's case--the racialized invisibility of Black dancers. And there's a powerful pedagogical implication here, too, given the ease with which Google Images has become the default archive used to support multimodal teaching and learning activities. As educators guide students to search via Google Images when making a digital collage or dream board, do educators also guide complementary discussion about what images appear, what images are excluded, and why?

    2. For teachers to acknowledge all the ways Black girls learn and communicate information, they must first come to understand these varied forms of literacy that exist outside of hegemonic narratives of who is literate and what constitutes literacy.

      This necessary "call to action" echoes the scholarship and advocacy of Dr. April Baker-Bell (a previous Marginal Syllabus partner author) whose recent book Linguistic Justice introduces and argues for an Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy that "must 1) center blackness; 2) confront white linguistic and cultural hegemony; and 3) contest anti-blackness."

    3. Brown Girls Dreaming:

      This article is shared openly as part of the 2021 Marginal Syllabus

      Anyone is welcome to publicly annotate this text and share annotations that spark conversation and deepen collective inquiry. In doing so, please consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy. Also, please remember that discussing educational equity may be a challenging and new experience for some people.

      We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    4. Brown Girls Dreaming:

      Welcome to the 2021 Marginal Syllabus. This article by Dr. Turner and Dr. Griffin is part of the third Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), with support from Hypothesis.

      Click "Show replies," below, to read more about the Marginal Syllabus.

  6. Dec 2020
    1. We posit that the acceptance and reproduction of anti-Blackness in in-school (through school discipline disproportion-ality, tracking, etc.) and out-of-school spaces (as ev-idenced in unlawful arrests and mass incarceration of Black communities) have contributed to the hy-perpathologization of Black people.

      As schools are obsessed with data, this contention seems well supported by all kinds of data. I'm thankful that this piece provides guidance about how to take on the inequities that persist in schools in the form of curricular biases and practices rooted in white supremacy.

  7. Nov 2020
    1. Rascuache Technology Pedagogy: Making Do with a Confluence of Resources

      Extend the conversation from this session: Join us in an annotated conversation on readings related to Cruz Medina's session, including:

      A great example of multimodal rascuache thinking from Cyrus Dudgeon:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K9ngh8XFFU

      Need help getting started with social annotation? See a short guide to engaging in events with Hypothesis social annotation.

    2. Literacy with a Public Purpose: Leveraging Multimodality, Equity, and Civic Engagement in the ELA Classroom

      Extend the conversation from this session: Join the Marginal Syllabus community in an annotated conversation on readings related to this session.

      Need help getting started with social annotation? See a short guide to engaging in events with Hypothesis social annotation.

    3. Teaching English Education across Modalities through Digital Literacies

      Extend the conversation from this session: Join the Marginal Syllabus community in an annotated conversation on readings related to this session.

      Need help getting started with social annotation? See a short guide to engaging in events with Hypothesis social annotation.

    1. Social Annotation and an Inclusive Praxis for Open Pedagogy in the College Classroom.

      This is a fantastic article, published in a journal that includes social annotation as core functionality.

    2. Strategies to Author Annotation as brave Writing

      Great resource for shaping "brave writing" experiences for educators and/or students.

    3. “the messiness of meaning- making”

      And when meaning making is not messy, by means of what process is it "cleaned up"? This has me thinking that "ordered" or "clean" learning is maybe always less, or at least less authentic, learning.

      "Pile of Covered Books" by Ryan Adams

    4. this article in the 2019– 20 LEARN syllabus
    5. Annotation, as critical writing, is a literal, symbolic, and social means of re- marking upon and speaking truth to power.

      This has me thinking about how social annotation performs a kind of "estrangement" that maybe breaks down boundaries between the creation/publication and the reception/reading of texts when words from the authors and readers intermix in the same experience.

    6. Annotation is first draft thinking.

      oh! Annotation is brave because it is "first draft thinking"!

    7. a wider com-munity of people out there that cares about equity and is ready and willing to engage in talking about it seriously

      Just heard this from another MS participant too: finding a community of other people out there who share my experience and concerns when that is sometimes hard to find "locally".

    8. It also means that my annotations are in the paths of others and I need to consider that, forcing me to add context and consideration to my own notes.

      Epiphany! Social annotating while reading brings to READING a stance I try to have when WRITING: considering an audience. Do I read differently when my annotations mean my reading has an audience?

    9. Hypoth-esis

      Hypothesis is deeply supportive of the Marginal Syllabus community and activities!

    10. advance a marginal counternarrative to conventional profes-sional development

      I wasn't expecting this third meaning for "marginal"...and its unexpectedness maybe illustrates its power: finding ways to advance professional development/community learning in environments that may not support the exploration of specific views and topics.

    1. He cites as a success story a 2018 incident in Maryland where a high school student killed an ex-girlfriend, injured another boy and then shot himself fatally as he was fired on by an SRO.

      This is a success story? Two dead, another shot and the SRO also firing shots?

    2. Federal data analyzed by the American Civil Liberties Union shows millions of students, especially students of color, attend schools that have police officers, but no nurse or school psychologist.

      How can this be seen as anything but an imbalance in priorities? If schools are so dangerous that their security has to be a higher priority even than student mental or physical health, we have a much bigger problem than police in schools can fix.

    1. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.

      I ask my students to respond to reading using Says Means Matters charts. I like them as a flexible tool that provides an opportunity to speak to the text's relevance to their lives. Here's an example of how I model the practice.

  8. Jul 2020
    1. I let them know that I expected confusion while we practiced, and I promised that once we learned how to do them, the writing circle sessions would become a valuable part of our writing workshop classroom

      I love this modeling of allowing it to be less than perfect and embracing that these are skills to be learned through failing and refining our skills, rather than something that is perfect right away. Tolerance of confusion is such an important skill (for many grown-ups, too!).

    1. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.

      As a white woman, I have appreciated conversations that require looking at whiteness to understand racism and to support being anti-racist: https://educatorinnovator.org/marginal-syllabus-2019-20-november-whiteness-is-a-white-problem-whiteness-in-english-education/ … This article talks about a second wave of whiteness studies which has intrigued me and I note that I still need to learn more about.

      What does it mean to me to be white? How does that inform my identity? And what danger am I willing to put that identity in? How do I hold dearly to that identity? Why?

  9. May 2020
    1. First, everywhere she looked students were acting like adolescents. “I look around and we are how they describe adolescents. Until someone can prove me wrong that we’re mature, headstrong people, I’m going to believe that [the conventional view of adolescents] is what we are” (individual interview).

      This student is pushing back on the content and the critical lens. It is interesting that Sarigianides saw her as "resistant."

    2. As the White, middle-class, female researcher of this study, I also held to stereotyped views of adolescence when I taught middle school and high school English.

      I appreciate the stance Sarigianides takes and the scholarship behind it. She is surfacing negative stereotypes about youth and deconstructing them with youth. There is a layer of complexity to this work in the schoolhouse, too. Adults and teens interacting in schools have to negotiate norms across a range of interactions and power dynamics. How does her position as a professor and researcher give her a necessary distance from the daily interactions? Does that distance obscure her view of teens?

    3. critical literacy scholarship writ large begins with premises of youths’ assets

      This is an important consideration in instructional design. What are some ways we can build on youth assets in our teaching?

    4. For example, Nicole, who would end the year writing her se-nior thesis on the discrimination of adolescents, shared how her pastor and other adults at her church spoke about adolescents as though they were all the same

      This strikes me as a powerful example of agency in the way that Nicole seems to take on this charge beyond school and bring these ideas and her thoughts to her larger community context.

    5. what would happen if teachers more systematically shared the history of the concept of adolescence directly with students? How might that understanding affect students’ literacy studies and conceptions of themselves and the world?

      Such provocative questions. I think the connection to literacy studies is particularly interesting vis a vis the use of YA Literature in classrooms; also from a Writing Project perspective I'm interested in this work from a youth writing experience too.

      In the discussion we had with Sophia, she talks about this more, ie. how there is a genre of YA Lit that is really written primarily by adults. And the tensions inherent in that and questions this raises. While still loving much about YA, it seems like a really important thing to raise.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqWd5ouAud0&feature=emb_title

    6. advocate for a re-imagining of adolescence in English teaching

      Highlighting this kind of advocacy work related to what we can see the youth thinking and talking about in this article; really interested in the ways youth can take action here too.

    7. Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides

      Our thanks to partner author Sophia Sarigianides for contributing to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus! Dr. Sarigianides' bio is included at the end of this article.

    8. Performative Youth

      Annotation is a form of conversation.

      Using Hypothesis to read socially and publicly with other people is a unique learning opportunity.

      We urge Marginal Syllabus participants to share annotations that spark conversation and deepen our collective inquiry.

      Consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy.

      Author annotations that open spaces for other people and multiple perspectives.

      Please remember that discussing educational equity - and, specifically, topics that may be perceived as debatable or incompatible with personal experience - may be a challenging and new experience for some Marginal Syllabus participants. We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    9. If you are joining a Marginal Syllabus conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    10. Welcome to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus and our May conversation! This is the seventh article we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN." Our reading is part of the second LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.

  10. Apr 2020
    1. support the literacy practices that young people already have but that are often hidden in the shadows

      Chris Rogers's tested out his Morlocks analogy for underground writers in our Educator Innovator webinar. 2 minute, must-watch clip. https://youtu.be/NCRaLMIKKSQ

    1. limn

      Antero Garcia and I have authored a book about annotation titled "Annotation" that is forthcoming from the MIT Press. We reference this speech by Morrison in the beginning of our chapter that examines the ways in which annotation provides information. Here's the opening of that chapter:

      "In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 'novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import.' In her Nobel Lecture, she noted how language, whether spoken or written, can limn, or describe and detail, life. Derived from the Latin illuminare, meaning to 'make light' or 'illuminate,' limn has been used throughout literary history to generally describe—and convey the literal illustration of—a manuscript. One affordance of annotation is that it enables readers and writers to limn, or describe, their texts. In doing so, how does such annotation provide information?"

    2. Toni Morrison Nobel Lecture

      If you are joining an annotation conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    3. “Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.” In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement. One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?” Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive. The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know”, she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

      What stands out to you in this story?

      What does that mean to you?

      Why does this matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

    1. How Long is Never?

      If you are joining an annotation conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    1. On the History (and Future) of YA and Speculative Fiction by Black Women

      If you are joining an annotation conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    2. I grew up watching X-Men, Star Trek, and The Secret World of Alex Mack. I also loved reading the Animorphs series, as well as anything written by Ray Bradbury. However, the YA speculative novels published last year would have been unfathomable to young me, a dream that seemed too far-fetched to ever exist. If I saw a Black girl in a story at all, we were depicted as suffering from a life of slavery, enduring racism and fighting for our civil rights, living a life of poverty and struggling to survive, dealing with psychological trauma and physical violence, or disappearing into the background as a wise-cracking secondary or tertiary character. I was never the hero, the zombie slayer, or the magic wielder. I was not allowed to have that dream.

      What stands out to you in this reflection?

      What does that mean to you?

      Why does this matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

    1. individual privilege (which has been readily on display as the crisis unfolds), while also questioning pervasive inequities of American schooling (and if this somehow comes as a surprise, read this and this).

      These chaotic situations amplify the inequities that are there every day.

    1. One White student explained, “The conversations added a little bit of a weird mood to the classroom, but they changed us as people.” While we feel the results were positive, we recognize that our positions as White women likely influenced the reception from our students, who mostly looked like us, and therefore our positions contained privilege in themselves.

      This "weird mood" is probably the mark of consequential work that will help open the eyes of White students and also open communication channels between these kiddos as they move on to high school.

    2. As one White student attempted to argue that some stereotypes are “nice,” such as that all Asians are smart, a student in the class who identified as Asian rebutted this, sharing that he did not want to be thought of as smart because of his race, but rather because he was, in fact, smart.

      This sounds like a safe and necessary conversation for both students. I want this for White students- the chance to know that their preconceived notions can be hurtful. This allows them to be allies rather than be defensive about their misconceptions.

    3. Because we worried that students would dismiss Quinn’s struggle as cowardly and insist naïvely that his position wasn’t as difficult as it seemed, we engaged students with questions : Why is it so difficult for Quinn to speak up? What will he gain by doing so? What will he lose? How is Quinn able to stay silent—what protects him?

      This questioning highlights for students the pressures they're under that they might not be conscious of. What a great use of a text, showing students how they probably find it challenging to do the right thing and stand up against oppression.

    4. Providing colored markers for each student, we labeled four posters around the room:nPrivileges you have by attending this schoolnPrivileges you have as a resident of this townnPrivileges you have from being “you”nPrivileges you have from being a teenage

      I appreciate the insight into classroom practice. This is an activity I can adopt and adapt.

    5. Our community had recently, and within one week’s time, donated thousands of dollars for each student in the middle school to possess a Google Chromebook.

      This is something for students to be grateful for, and a privilege for them to unpack. This is something worth collectively making meaning of.

    6. We must focus on the systems at work and how those serve to benefit people in power at the detriment of others. Some educators have noted the import of such work, especially with privileged students (Swalwell, 2013), whose role in dismantling racism is key if we hope to effect change.

      This stance makes such a powerfully positive assumption about students' ability to grasp and respond to contemporary issues of inequity.

    7. Ashley s.boyd■jAcindAmille

      Our thanks to partner authors Ashley Boyd and Jacinda Miller for contributing to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus!

    8. Classroom

      Annotation is a form of conversation.

      Using Hypothesis to read socially and publicly with other people is a unique learning opportunity.

      We urge Marginal Syllabus participants to share annotations that spark conversation and deepen our collective inquiry.

      Consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy.

      Author annotations that open spaces for other people and multiple perspectives.

      Please remember that discussing educational equity - and, specifically, topics that may be perceived as debatable or incompatible with personal experience - may be a challenging and new experience for some Marginal Syllabus participants. We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    9. If you are joining a Marginal Syllabus conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    10. Welcome to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus and our April conversation! This is the sixth article we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN." Our reading is part of the second LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.

    1. Marginal Syllabus

      The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.

      The 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus is titled "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN" and was co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis.

  11. Mar 2020
    1. California Common Core State Stan-dards and California English Language Development Standards.

      important that this youth-led participatory action research was aligned with and supported by more formal curricular standards (state, federal)

    1. If English educators increase the conceptual demands of writing without supportive feedback loops, they might unintentionally (re)create dehu-manizing pressures for their students.

      The feedback loop here is important. In this case the adequacy is in large part due to the stance of the teacher. This written work, according to Everett, was ungraded. It also involved a teacher who was "geeking out" with metaphors while asking students to take risks while writing metaphors. There is a lot of support and safety in this loop.

    2. Rendell’s refusal could easily have been Shawn’s chosen mode of refusal because Shawn’s Honors English class, which he reported receiving an “A” in, failed to adequately equip him with rigorous academic and critical literacies—and Shawn entered school with a deep love for reading and writing. What might this mean for students who “don’t know their abilities” yet?

      Our failure to approach Black male students with an asset focus and an inquiry stance probably contributes to the number of students who turn their backs on school, or understandably walk away when schools oppress them.

    3. To explicate this point, Kinloch, Burkhard, and Penn (2017) raised an important question: “When school is not enough, how might students learn to cultivate their literacies, nurture their spirits, and chart their own trajec-tories within out-of-school spaces?”(p. 36)
    4. critical literacies”—the ability to not only read and write, but also access texts to understand the relationships be-tween power and domination that underlie and inform those texts (Bishop, 2017; Freire, 1970; Morrell, 2002)

      These kinds of literacies help us challenge and change systems. I'm struck by the way schools trumpet the successes of students like Shawn, which allows them to maintain the status quo, even as students like Shawn decry the injustices they face at school.

    5. Freire (1970), an influential critical literacy scholar and philosopher, developed a powerful metaphor, banking education, to theorize inequality in teaching and learning. Banking education, Freire argued, positions teachers to treat students like empty containers to be filled. “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories [ATMs] and the teacher is the depositor” (Freire, 1970, p. 72).

      I'm struck here by two things:

      1. She's empowering oppressed learners and rejecting notions of pedagogy that position students as receptacles to be filled.
      2. She's diving deep into metaphor while teaching with metaphor.
  12. Feb 2020
    1. “Untold Stories”:

      Annotation is a form of conversation.

      Using Hypothesis to read socially and publicly with other people is a unique learning opportunity.

      We urge Marginal Syllabus participants to share annotations that spark conversation and deepen our collective inquiry.

      Consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy.

      Author annotations that open spaces for other people and multiple perspectives.

      Please remember that discussing educational equity - and, specifically, topics that may be perceived as debatable or incompatible with personal experience - may be a challenging and new experience for some Marginal Syllabus participants. We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    2. Sakeena Everett

      Our thanks to partner author Dr. Sakeena Everett for contributing to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus! This is the second time that Dr. Everett has joined the Marginal Syllabus as a partner author, having previously done so during the 2017-18 Writing Our Civic Futures syllabus - please also read her co-authored article, and the associated annotation conversation, about pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy. Dr. Everett's bio also appears at the end of this article.

    3. If you are joining a Marginal Syllabus conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    4. Welcome to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus and our March conversation! This is the fifth article we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN." Our reading is part of the second LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.

    5. Black males already have voice, so English educators cannot give them voice

      YES.

    6. Metaphors We Live By

      I loved reading this book. I read this book during my Red Cedar Writing Project Summer Institute, in 2005. It is not a stretch to say that it absolutely changed the way I saw the world. It was the lens through which I considered everything.

    7. He at-tended all 20 hours of the video-recorded classroom sessions. Plus, he and I had three intensive interviews (193 minutes) across Phases I and II. Each interview was audio-recorded, and later transcribed and coded for themes. In Phase II, I spent an academic year working with Shawn beyond We Choose to Learn (his senior year in high school) to trace the consequences of his metaphor. I visited Shawn’s school, Urbantown High School, which afforded me opportu-nities to meet some of Shawn’s teachers, administrators, and friends, as well as students he mentored. I also collected data in the form of a follow-up interview, observations, field notes, and reflective memos. Informed by multiple sources of data acrossacademic spaces (We Choose to Learn and Urbantown High School), over time(July 2013 to June 2014), I triangulated the data to enhance its rigor and complexity. Triangulation allowed me to authentically center Shawn as a writer and focus on his writing development with metaphor.

      This is SO. MUCH. DATA. Incredible research described here!

    8. I realized he helped me to see differently

      This is the best when it happens <3

    9. Appendix B

      Should we crowdsource links to the readings included in Appendix B?

    10. Researching and teaching metaphor

      I am connecting to this due to my background in Educational Technology teaching and research: the metaphors we use when discussing technology can be really instructive and fruitful, and there is a whole thread of Ed Tech research that involves metaphor.

      All of that to say: metaphors aren't just an "English" thing and I completely agree they are much more than a literary device.

    11. Consequential writing is writing that is intentionally developed by, for, and with communities. It concurrently cultivates both academic and critical literacies of historically marginalized communities in a way that encourages justice-oriented action, which ensures that community members actively shape community goals.

      Consequential Writing:

      • developed by communities
      • developed for communities
      • developed with communities
      • encourages justice-oriented action
      • community members actively shape community goals

      (I had to slow this down for myself to get a sense of it before I could go on. This term is new to me.)

    12. transferability (Bhattacharya, 2017; Steinberg & Cannella, 2012)

      For more on this notion, this website had a good overview:[(https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/qualitative-validity/)] "Transferability refers to the degree to which the results of qualitative research can be generalized or transferred to other contexts or settings. From a qualitative perspective transferability is primarily the responsibility of the one doing the generalizing. The qualitative researcher can enhance transferability by doing a thorough job of describing the research context and the assumptions that were central to the research. The person who wishes to “transfer” the results to a different context is then responsible for making the judgment of how sensible the transfer is."

    13. Literacies are so dynamic, and they are difficult to capture on standardized exams.

      YES.

    14. Tuck called for research that reimagines how findings might be used by, for, and with communities.

      This reminds me of the shift from discussing the 'achievement gap' to the 'opportunity gap.' I wonder how this phrase meets the standards that Tuck is laying out for us here? For more: click here [(https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/09/09/achievement-gap-opportunity-education-schools-students-teachers)]

    15. It felt as if the school put more money into our security system than into our educa-tion.

      This resonates with me. I remember feeling this way about the school in which I taught as an early career teacher.

    1. Engaging in fostering an enduring love for place reveals and expands spaces that allow people to be participants in an optimistic endeavor.

      Love this sentence .... it captures the heart of this piece, for me

      "Engaging in fostering an enduring love for place reveals and expands spaces that allow people to be participants in an optimistic endeavor."

    2. would

      Interesting, the verb tense here. It caught my attention that "would" is used instead of "will" and maybe that is due to the way the prompt has been framed. Would suggests maybe. Will suggests happening.

    3. Nick

      I love reading these kinds of student reflections, where they grasp the larger picture of the art they are creating, and the purpose for creating the art. Their journal writings can surface important thinking and learning.

    4. Grover Washington Jr.

      Groove ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90NiJ5WI9cU (adding some soundtrack to the margins)

    5. Filipiak

      More from Danielle is published at the NWP The Current. She also curated this collection Textual Power on Our Own Terms: Remixing Literacy in Out-of-School Spaces

    6. raise Song for the Day,
    7. Praisesongs

      Trying to learn more about Praisesongs as a concept

    8. Youth ex-amining their city across multiliteracies activities and lived experiences invite ways to reimagine details of their worlds; in turn, youth giving particular attention to meanings of space and place build new conceptualizations of futures of their city. New understandings of well-known locations emphasized by youth as important to nurture and critique are thus invited, and begin to form.

      This seems an important passage here, an anchor to the project

    9. We thought about who represents Detroit and how we represent ourselves as Detroit.

      Is this a nod to the power structure? Who has political capital and agency and who does not? The first step in enacting change is noticing the disparities ...

    10. composing their city

      This phrasing intrigues me, in how music and composition offers another way to view, and maybe appreciate -- or maybe be more critical, too -- of a place that is often to familiar to really notice anymore. I am thinking of how we give our students some creative distance from where they are, in order to see it anew. Maybe then, to make change.

    11. Verses

      Going off to listen to some tracks from Verses before coming back to read more

      https://soundcloud.com/user-586734206

    12. poem

      There is something powerful and inspiring that a kid of the city still loves the city, and not just does work to support other kids in the city, but writes a poem about it.

    13. White Stripes
    14. Third Man Records
    15. Praisesongs as a performance genre involve what Arntson (2008) described as “instrumental performance, singing, and speech” (p. 30). As Arntson (2008) explained, a “typical performance” (p. 30) of a praisesong involves a “verbal text and the musical patterns performed . . . equally capable of calling to mind a larger text, a shared area of knowledge, or a storyline . . . [involving] actions, events, attributes, and social mores” (p. 31).

      New genres as forms of composition have the potential to recast the writing we ask youth to do in academic spaces. Many new forms are digital, this seems to privilege paper, pencil and music instruments as part of social writing aided by teaching artists.

    16. Examining multiliteracies of youth of color

      This phrasing is so vital because of the way it focuses on the assets of youth. Schools can do a way better job of identifying the strengths of writers by asserting at the outset that they have many strengths.

    17. Multiliteracies Activities as Varied Notions of Spaces and Places

      There is resonance for me here with a previous #marginalsyllabus reading from 2019 titled "Cultivating Urban Literacies on Chicago’s South Side through a Pedagogy of Spatial Justice," by Andrea Vaughan, Rebecca Woodard, Nathan C. Phillips, and Kara Taylor.

      https://educatorinnovator.org/learn-with-marginal-syllabus-april-cultivating-urban-literacies-on-chicagos-south-side-through-a-pedagogy-of-spatial-justice/

    18. This generative naming situates youth as inscribing new meanings of themselves and peers as contributors broadening the possibilities of their city.

      I love the active and creative possibilities in this naming.

    19. galvanizes collective action emphasizing reciprocity as relational

      This focus on relationships in multiliteracy work feels so important. Where are some other places we see these connections being fostered?

    20. In our focus on praisesongs, we addi-tionally extend meanings of Diaspora literacy, and build pointedly on intentional naming by authors of color of praisesongs in contemporary literature

      Important connection back to previous #marginalsyllabus conversations about reimagining literary canons.

    21. Our inquiry of youth of color constructing meanings of spaces and places by composing tributes to their city illustrates how youth enacting multiliteracies envi-sion strengths in their communities.

      Strikes me as similar to taking an appreciative inquiry stance in teacher inquiry.

    22. engaged and complicated notions of spaces and places, and in what ways youth named spaces and places as significant within and across contexts important to them.

      I love these questions as they really honor youth experience and perspective.

  13. Jan 2020
    1. Vaughn W. M. Watson Michigan State UniversityAlecia Beymer Michigan State University

      Our thanks to partner authors Vaughn W. M. Watson and Alecia Beymer for contributing to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus! Brief bios for each partner author are included at the end of the article

    2. Praisesongs of Place

      Annotation is a form of conversation.

      Using Hypothesis to read socially and publicly with other people is a unique learning opportunity.

      We urge Marginal Syllabus participants to share annotations that spark conversation and deepen our collective inquiry.

      Consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy.

      Author annotations that open spaces for other people and multiple perspectives.

      Please remember that discussing educational equity - and, specifically, topics that may be perceived as debatable or incompatible with personal experience - may be a challenging and new experience for some Marginal Syllabus participants. We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    3. If you are joining a Marginal Syllabus conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    4. Welcome to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus and our February conversation! This is the fourth article we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN." Our reading is part of the second LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.

    1. Te a c h i n g for social justice, however, aims to create spaces of inquiry that embody the progress we desire in society.

      Thank you for so eloquently and simply stating this. I think that your distillation of what teaching for social justice means to you might push others to identify the values that are important to them in relation to to SJE. And what a great job you have done at honoring those values in your teaching.

    2. Once a group was ready to film, the entire class would convene to help them record and produce their video

      I love the community and the collaboration here. It is a brilliant way to leverage the collective while also encouraging the individual.

    3. Furthermore, the students had the power to conclude a unit once they felt that they had sufficiently addressed their inquiries

      I am curious as to how this was navigated as a group. What if some students were ready to call it quits whereas others were wanting to go further.

    4. Here are ways to reach author Alex Corbitt:

      Twitter: https://twitter.com/alex_corbitt?lang=en

      Website: https://www.alexcorbitt.com/

    5. he group collaboratively agreed to establish a “safety protocol” in which we immediately pause a discussion and play a lighthearted team-building game. Anyone in the class could initiate the safety protocol if they felt overwhelmed with the content of the course

      Back to design ideas (per my last annotation); what occurs to me here is that because the author focused on procedures first, there was room for the students to ideate as well on the procedures that served them and their needs. This goes hand in hand with designing for developing a community of curiosity and care (and also makes me connect back to Nonviolent Communication)

    6. began the course with a series of procedures.

      I love this. It might be that the idea here is rather than start with the curriculum/assessment (via UbD); you are rather designing using a Design Thinking frame which emphasizes observation and empathy as the first step. After all, we are a community of learners, not teachers of standards.

    7. I felt vulnerable negotiating and navigating the course with my students.

      I appreciate the honesty here ... I wonder if you received any pushback or interest from administrators or parents? Did you have to justify your shift? (I am thinking of schools where the curriculum is mandated a certain way and how to help us all take steps in the direction you are outlining here)

    8. students created an underground zine with poetry and prose

      Any of it online anywhere for viewing?

    9. stuffed copies of the zine into every sixth, seventh, and eighth grade locker

      Ha! Subversive distribution!

    10. At the conclusion of our mental health unit, students created posters that featured a wealth of strategies to reduce stress and anxiety. They hung the posters up in high-traffic areas of the hallway.

      Are these available for wider viewing anywhere?

    11. Next, we curated a list of potential documentaries, articles, and books that could inform our discourse.

      I'm curious about how this discovery and curation of related materials was done by students ....

    12. Some students expressed immediate enthusiasm, while others conveyed hesitancy.

      I can imagine both responses. We're teaching in a time of standardized testing, where our students/children are too often being taught that the right answer is the only answer, so freedom and flexibility feel strange to them. "Tell me what to do" is the underlying mantra. Opening up the classroom to student input and agency (thinking: Project-based Learning) creates excitement in some, and anxiety in others.

    13. My process of reflection and growth happened slowly over the next two years

      This is the power of time and inquiry, and room to reflect. I'm thinking of how hectic and harried a teacher's life can be, and how quickly we lose track of the most important moments. Writing can surface some of those events and give us a bit of breathing room to realistically examine our actions, and how we might make change for the future. (this writing space is what makes NWP sites so important, in my experience)

    14. nd I was responsible

      That's quite a dramatic moment, for sure ... when that realization hits ... it demonstrates the power that the teacher has over what students are exposed to ...

    15. For the next two weeks we discussed ways to create spaces for students to express their voices and identities in the classroom

      This is such important time. I am struck by the focus here on working together as educators to think through how to support what youth need in the classroom in relation to what is happening in the wider society.

    16. My students showed me that activism addresses so many other issues, too

      I appreciate the ways Alex highlights the ways he learns from his students.

    17. I wanted to be proud of my Mistakes and Challenges unit. It seemed to have all the elements of good instruction: culturally relevant texts, deep essential

      This is powerful to me. I appreciate Alex's storytelling and reflection here. His discontent with his own teaching is an epiphany that carries with it a lot of vulnerability. I love how it becomes a springboard for more flexible, responsive approaches.

      It helps me reflect on my own teaching: What are all they times I've wanted to be proud of my instruction but something about the dynamics of it seemed off? As a designer of instruction in my own classroom, what are some times where the inequity of a situation struck me and prompted me to change, even though I had checked many boxes of the elements of good instruction?

    18. Revising Resistance: A Step Toward Student-Centered Activism

      Annotation is a form of conversation.

      Using Hypothesis to read socially and publicly with other people is a unique learning opportunity.

      We urge Marginal Syllabus participants to share annotations that spark conversation and deepen our collective inquiry.

      Consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy.

      Author annotations that open spaces for other people and multiple perspectives.

      Please remember that discussing educational equity - and, specifically, topics that may be perceived as debatable or incompatible with personal experience - may be a challenging and new experience for some Marginal Syllabus participants. We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    19. alexcorbitt

      Our thanks to partner author Alex Corbitt for contributing to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus! To learn more about Alex visit: https://www.alexcorbitt.com/

    20. If you are joining a Marginal Syllabus conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    21. Welcome to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus and our January conversation! This is the third article we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN." Our reading is part of the second LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.

    1. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand.

      "What I am trying to suggest..."

  14. Dec 2019
    1. In each of these examples, Miles Morales: Spider- Man acts as a counter to canon-ical texts to provide students with an opportunity to challenge assumptions about heroes, youth, and schooling experiences

      Scott Smoot -- Word Sanctuary blog -- wrote about his own experiences of using this book to transform his thinking in the classroom.

    2. racebending

      I love this to add to my list of authorial choices. We talk about character arcs and irony and diction and tone; we talk about theme development and figurative language and description; let's add racebending to that list and widen our scope of text analysis; this, I believe, will help teachers, specifically white teachers, see the need for a more inclusive canon.

    3. By offering alternative represen-tations of both the hero and the villain, Reynolds’s text actively works to dismantle racial hierarchies

      I love this as a guideline for text selection. As we think about what texts we put in front of our students, can we accept that a majority of the texts that our students have seen in their educational careers are those that have centered whiteness. And given that, can we consider, when adopting and looking for new texts, how these new texts might work to offer that "alternative representations of both hero and villain." How refreshing would it be to see that as a question on a textbook adoption form?!

    4. Miles is aware that his race and eco-nomic status mark him as an outsider within Brook-lyn Visions Academy, noting that he is from the “part of Brooklyn that Brooklyn Visions Academy didn’t have much vision for at all” (259). Like its real- life counterparts in many urban areas, Brooklyn Visions Academy relies on a dress code that makes White, upper- middle- class culture, attitude, and beliefs aspi-rational (Hatt- Echeverria and Jo).

      So many places to stop here in the reading and discuss with students ways in which they might experience these same things.

    5. Racebending is also important because (re)casting characters using alternative race and ethnicities cre-ates possibilities for popular comics and other “clas-sics” to be told from underrepresented perspectives

      If you haven't started Watchmen yet, you're in for a treat (and a lesson in exactly this).

    6. The multiple and interconnected factors of underfunded schools, police presence, centering of White norms, and harsh punishment result in Black and Latinx stu-dents being forced out of schools and into prison sys-tems, whether directly or indirectly

      The question, for me, that arises here is what does this instruction look like in majority white institutions? As we continue to do this work, we are consistently running into the fact that the narrative we are telling about race in schools and students of color is counter to what our white students have been taught to believe. We are getting anger and resistance--so I wonder if it would be helpful to have students investigate some of these factors within in education in general--but even more specifically in their own communities and schools?

    7. To be young. To be old. To have like, poetry, poetry should be, Shakespeare’s sonnets and it should be by Queen Latifah. Teach comparative literature where you take Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” and Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” and you show young people that nothing is new. This is all a continuum. We are working with tradition. Then they can start to see their place in the things that they’re reading.

      I love this idea of comparative literature--and here it works--Queen Latifah and Maya Angelou--but I think we also have to be careful when making comparisons to ensure that whiteness is not still be centered. In my classroom, my first attempt at "revolutionizing" the canon involved looking at modern versions of revolution (Emma Gonzalez, Christine Blasey Ford, and more) and comparing them to Patrick Henry's Speech in the Virginia Convention. I quickly realized that by centering the conversation around Henry's rhetoric--and showing that "nothing is new," I was also showing that our focus on whiteness as the standard had not changed either.

    8. DisruptTexts
    9. Pairings

      Very valuable to have these kinds of charts .. thank you

    10. #SayHerName

      sayhername, explained -- and the fact that I didn't know what it was says a lot about society (white society) at large, I think.

    11. Ava duvernay
    12. chool- to- prison pipeline
    13. Mr. Chamberlain talks about the Civil War “like this beautiful, romantic thing” and defends slavery as “kind of good for the country”

      Interesting contrast for me, as I am reading The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, in which the teacher is the exact opposite of Mile's teacher.

      “The class was focused on US history since the Civil War, but at every opportunity Mr. Hill guided them to the present, linking what happened a hundred years ago to their current lives. They’d set off down one road at the beginning of class and it always led back to their doorsteps.”

      -- from The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, page 30

    14. Miles Morales: Spider-Man

      As an introduction to the article, you're very welcome to watch a webinar hosted by Christopher Rogers, featuring guest reader Latrice Ferguson, and both partner authors Mario Worlds and Cody Miller. https://youtu.be/qOyMmTrf_yo

    15. “there are other ways of thinking about time, there are other ways of thinking about place and community, what it means to win, be a hero, or save the world”

      Great quote ...

    16. some to fathom

      And often leads to trolls and others pushing back on the racebending initiatives with anger and vitriol -- Another example is Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel --<br>

    17. Black and Latinx students are disproportionately punished within schools when they fail to succumb to those norms by teachers who have not critically examined their own cultural biases.

      Information from a study on this ... you have to go to pages 13-15 to see the charts ...

      Black male students represented 8 percent of enrolled students and accounted for 23 percent of students expelled. Black female students represented 8 percent of the student enrollment and accounted for 10 percent of students who were expelled. Latino male students accounted for 13 percent of students enrolled and 16 percent of students who were expelled. Latina female students accounted for 13 percent of student enrollment and 6 percent of students who were expelled.

    18. Miles Morales: Spider- Man
    19. Subsequently, teachers’ inability to challenge the status and content of the canon emboldens a hierarchy that places White char-acters learning about racism over characters of color experiencing racism.

      This is a good insight ....

    20. In recasting Spider- Man as Miles Morales, an Afro- Latino male, Marvel comics engaged in a pro-cess known as “racebending.

      Changing the race of characters in familiar stories is an approach to equity work in classrooms that I've seen in other texts in the #marginalsyllabus.

      Even Cinderella Is White: (Re)Centering Black Girls’ Voices as Literacies of Resistance is a text about asking students how fairy tales would be different if the characters were from different racial backgrounds.

    21. For the purpose of this article, we will exam-ine how curricular con-siderations such as a devotion to the literary canon and school policies and procedures relating to disci-pline uphold White supremacy.

      The curriculum considerations in schools can be entrenched in district politics and financial considerations. It is vital that teachers weigh the decisions that rest with them which can spark meaningful changes from the classroom level out.

    1. Still, like my mentor, my principal assumed that any investigation of race required people of color in order to be legitimate

      A common misbelief, I think. How do might we, as white educators, best educate our fellow white educators/administrator about this? Zaretta Hammond talks about the 3rd space when it comes to coaching (which I suppose this is), and asks us to consider what new information, research, experiences, etc. we might put in the 3rd space that will help those with whom we work to revise their understandings.

    2. leave white supremacy undisturbed.

      A great means of interrogating new texts for consideration--in what ways does this novel address white supremacy?

    3. But the expressions can be subtle too. My mentor, intending to be racially conscious, reacted to race by compulsively turning to his students of color. His whiteness, perhaps, was made invisible to him in this way. Instead of grappling with his own race, my mentor, through his teaching in an English classroom, served to affirm that race is always and only about people of color

      This is what white teachers need to acknowledge--even liberals who don't think they're doing harm. We have been so trained to see harm as overt and explicit. When, really, I cringe at the harm I have done simply through the texts I selected and the experiences I centered. A great wealth of resources for teachers starting to do this work is found here: https://www2.ncte.org/blog/2017/08/there-is-no-apolitical-classroom-resources-for-teaching-in-these-times/

    4. whiteness as my problem

      While I fully see my own whiteness as my problem--how do we help white students see this. I think this is where my instruction broke down in a unit focused on The Hate U Give. Some of my white students walked away angry. I don't think I helped them navigate their whiteness in a way that helped them grow.

    5. We discussed conditions of white supremacy in the book and in our daily lives as well.

      And what are books, if not, proxies for exploring our own worlds. This seems to be an ideal way to open students' eyes to a concept they may not have fully considered of named before.

    6. ace always seemed to be about students of color, not about the white supremacist structuring of school.

      This may just be a great jumping off place for our equity and justice team. It would be a nice inventory--How are we talking about race? Whose race are we talking about? How well do we understand our own whiteness? How well do we understand our student's races? We talk often about racial/cultural literacy--but that really means finding ways to study the cultures of our students--not our own cultures, races and practices and how those might influence our students' learning.

    7. whites learn to avoid thinking about whiteness, thereby making it extremely difficult for us to consider white supremacy without first confronting the conditional nature of this racial identity.

      which, in turn, leads to the perpetuation of white supremacy whose existence is secured by the fact that it goes and has gone unnamed even as it shapes Western Civilization.

    8. White people affirm a conception of people of color, identify as antiracist, and no longer have to work to understand white identity in relationship with a white supremacist reality.

      This is a nice summary of the check-out that looking at race solely through a white privilege lens might create--and as noted in a story the author shared in the video--for high school students, specifically, I'm not sure the reaction is that clean--often the result is frustration and anger that often becomes misguided.

    9. The thinking of Ralph Ellison, Mah-moud El Kati, Toni Morrison, Thandeka, and Richard Wright is central to my learning about whiteness

      I would add Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X Kendi to this list.

    10. I’m convinced that white people also need to better understand white racial identity to engage anti-racism.

      What does "white racial identity" even mean? I am white, so I fit this category. I am also a woman, which means there are other biases I am faced with that my male colleagues do not experience.

      I grew up in a small town among a citizenry that was typically middle class, yet I was several rungs below most of them on the socio-economic ladder. How does my "whiteness" in that experience compare to that of my white peers? What about my experience in a small town vs those who grew up in urban environments?

      Identity is a very complex construct and involves so many facets that I find it too simplistic to lump it into "white" vs "people of color." The experience and identity of someone from India is different from that of one from Mexico or Nigeria, yet we can (and often do) call all of those "people of color."

      Are we asking the right questions?

    11. race usually refers to people of color

      Race often DOES refer to people of color. Maybe that is part of the problem? That we define race by color? A couple of years ago, I taught high school American History using race and class as the lenses through which we viewed our history. We began the year with a discussion on race and its definition. After a LOT of discussion and analysis, the students concluded that "race" is not real, but rather a social construct. As is also discussed in these NYT articles: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-is-racial-identity/race-and-racial-identity-are-social-constructs. I wonder whether we should broaden the discussion to the wider issues of diversity, equity and inclusion?

    12. notion of haunting to suggest the past always shapes the present.

      I totally agree with this. Which is why I become enraged when the collective "we" tries to bury the past of our (American) history. In this category I include things like erasing artifacts of the American Civil War. The only way we will be able to heal the injuries is with honest conversations about our history, facing all the ugly AND beautiful truths.

  15. Nov 2019
    1. mARio WoRLdS And HEnRy “Cody” miLLER

      Our thanks to partner authors Mario Worlds and Cody Miller for contributing to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus! Brief bios for both Mario and Cody are included at the end of this article. Also, the entire Marginal Syllabus team would like to congratulate Mario and Cody for winning the Paul and Kate Farmer English Journal Writing Award for their authorship of this article! The award was recently presented at the 2019 NCTE Annual Convention and recognizes outstanding English Journal articles written by classroom teachers - congrats!

    2. Mario Worlds and Cody Miller argue that to disrupt racial hierarchies we must purposefully disrupt the canon of literature.

      Annotation is a form of conversation.

      Using Hypothesis to read socially and publicly with other people is a unique learning opportunity.

      We urge Marginal Syllabus participants to share annotations that spark conversation and deepen our collective inquiry.

      Consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy.

      Author annotations that open spaces for other people and multiple perspectives.

      Please remember that discussing educational equity - and, specifically, topics that may be perceived as debatable or incompatible with personal experience - may be a challenging and new experience for some Marginal Syllabus participants. We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    3. If you are joining a Marginal Syllabus conversation for the first time, or if you are using Hypothesis to annotate for the first time, here are a few useful notes and resources:

    4. Welcome to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus and our December conversation! This is the second article we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN." Our reading is part of the second LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.

    1. Whiteness Is a White Problem: Whiteness in English Education

      Annotation is a form of conversation.

      Using Hypothesis to read socially and publicly with other people is a unique learning opportunity.

      We urge Marginal Syllabus participants to share annotations that spark conversation and deepen our collective inquiry.

      Consider how your annotations might elicit dialogue rather than deliver a soliloquy.

      Author annotations that open spaces for other people and multiple perspectives.

      Please remember that discussing educational equity - and, specifically, topics that may be perceived as debatable or incompatible with personal experience - may be a challenging and new experience for some Marginal Syllabus participants. We welcome annotation that is:

      • Civil. We can disagree. And when we do so, let’s also respect one another.
      • Constructive. Share what you know. And build upon ideas that are relevant and informative.
      • Curious. Ask honest questions and listen openly to responses.
      • Creative. Model generative dialogue. Have fun. Contribute to and learn from the process.
    2. Samuel Jaye Tanner

      Our thanks to partner author Samuel Jaye Tanner for contributing to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus! A brief bio is included at the end of this article, and you can also learn more by visiting Sam's website.

    3. Welcome to the 2019-20 Marginal Syllabus and our November conversation! This is the first article we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN." Our reading is part of the second LEARN syllabus co-developed in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and Hypothesis. The Marginal Syllabus sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. What's "marginal" about the Marginal Syllabus? We partner with authors whose writing is contrary to dominant education norms, we read and annotate in the margins of online texts, and we discuss educational equity using open-source technology that’s marginal to commercial edtech.