Description: A blog about reading, writing, teaching and the joys of a literate life
Shortly after the last blog post I wrote, schools around the country began to shut down as the coronavirus upended both our country and our lives. But while the pandemic has been shockingly disruptive, it’s also exposed all sorts of inequities that need to be addressed. Fortunately, though, I’ve found a few silver linings, one of which is collaborating with the wonderful educator and author Maria Nichols on a handful or new projects. What you’ll see below is a repost of a guest post Maria and I were invited
Like many of you, we began hearing rumors last March that schools might shut down because of a virus sweeping over the country. At that point we couldn’t begin to imagine the full scope of the disruption, devastation and death the pandemic would bring, but we each did begin to find emails in our inboxes postponing or cancelling work we had scheduled—and at some point, in an attempt to make sense of what was happening and to know that we weren’t alone, we reached out to each other and began a journey of thou
In those first early days, huddled together on Zoom, we talked about supporting teachers and schools as they moved to virtual learning. But we’d scarcely settled on meeting dates and tentative questions to explore when our world erupted again with the murder of George Floyd, which shook us out of our “how do we support literacy as we know it,” focus and led us instead to listen to voices like Bettina Love, who talked about abolitionist teaching, and Sonja Cherry-Paul who challenged us with these words: