Find a supporting conversation on Educator Innovator's Connected Learning TV, where Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia discuss connected teaching, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), and visions for the future of democracy: https://educatorinnovator.org/webinars/re-imagining-youth-civic-engagement/

Find a supporting conversation on Educator Innovator's Connected Learning TV, where Linda Christensen talks with a group of educators about bringing students’ own experiences, talents, and social contexts to the fore in the classroom: https://educatorinnovator.org/webinars/critical-literacy-and-our-students-lives-2/

Find a supporting conversation on Educator Innovator's Connected Learning TV, where Joseph Kahne talks in depth about some of these findings and implications for educators: https://educatorinnovator.org/webinars/educating-for-democracy-in-a-partisan-age/

In January 2018, The National Writing Project, Educator Innovator and Marginal Syllabus invite you to annotate the Declaration of Independence, along with Danielle Allen’s chapter, "Night Teaching," from Our Declaration (re-published with permission). In her book, Allen reflects on the purposes of democracy after a close reading of The Declaration with her night class students, who bring their own experiences to the text. If you don't catch the annotation this month, her chapter will remain on the Educator Innovator blog, so you can join the convo at any time.

@remikalir and @onewheeljoe had a great convo with Linda Christensen, Andrea Zellner and @dogtrax about what this looks like in their classrooms and about how annotation can help facilitate collaboration within and outside the classroom, as well as conversations about pedagogy and beyond, in this CLTV broadcast: https://educatorinnovator.org/webinars/critical-literacy-and-our-students-lives-2/ It goes live Tuesday December 5th at 4 pm Pacific.

This article was originally published in March 2017 in Vol 24, Number 3 of Voices from the Middle and is used with permission from the National Council of Teachers of English.

We're thrilled to feature this piece as part of this month's annotation, and I personally love how Linda weaves this personal anecdote into a powerful conversation about the big picture of teaching for social justice.

Yes, and as simple as it seems, these relationships are what drive education and schooling but are the critical piece that we (school reformers, parents, etc.) tend to forget about.

Nice.

This piece showed up in my FB feed recently, and I can't help but wonder if this same applies to teaching...that we cannot rescue anyone at the margins, but if we stand together at the margins, we are all rescued. http://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/03/28/father-greg-boyle-i-thought-i-could-save-gang-members-i-was-wrong

Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. From Brownwyn LaMay, Personal Narrative, Revised: Writing Love and Agency in the High School Classroom. New York: Teachers College press. Copyright © 2016 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

Find out more/purchase the book at TC Press.

Lovely piece in the Times this week about surveillance of African Americans (official and otherwise) and how artists are responding by using multimedia to take on the question of what it means to be surveilled more generally, for all people? I think it really speaks to this idea of using storytelling to cope and create counter-narratives. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/arts/dance/claudia-rankine-will-rawls-surveillance.html?smid=fb-share

These connections seem even more profound in light of the recent legislative attempts around a travel ban and reports of DACA-protected students being deported.

This chapter was written before widespread public concern about "fake news" and "alternative facts." To be sure, there is a clear and credible threat to young people who are surveilled and danger when young people's digital footprints are under such scrutiny. I wonder if there is equal danger, though, when there is an absence of diverse voices in our online lives--in the kinds of social, cultural, and political silos and echo chambers that exist on social media.

I do wonder to what extent these discursive mechanisms will take a back seat during the Trump era. There has been a remarkable resurgence of "traditional" participation (calls to Senators, Representatives, etc. - though muchof it employing new technologies).

This is beautiful! Sometimes it's so easy to get bogged down by style, form..grammar, errors, that we do not see the points being conveyed. And good teachers do support students in building their voices, their lines of communication.