Submitted by: Jane Belton

For our last two meetings of the 2020-2021 year, we focused on examining our writing pedagogy and practices through an anti-racist lens.

Grounding Questions

• How do we / might we use writing practices to disrupt White Supremacy and harmful hierarchies?
• What does “polished” work mean?
• How do we talk with students about the relationship between the kinds of writing we do and “education as the practice of freedom” (bell hooks)?
• What writing practices do you want to question, trouble, or stay curious about? 

On 5/26, Megan A. and Anna G. shared two practices to inspire and generate discussion.  Megan shared her work using mentor texts in the 5th grade, and Anna shared her “Index Card Essay” process and assignment, both of which disrupt traditional hierarchies and ideas of “polish” within writing.

On 6/2, Ileana led us in a discussion of multimodal writing practices, sharing work she has done in response to In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharp and Esther Ohito’s article, “The creative aspect woke me up”: Awakening to Multimodal Essay Composition as a Fugitive Literacy Practice.”

We identified a few goals for next year’s work:
1. Planning a retreat for next year and/or doing a Bard-style teacher collage workshop inspired by In the Wake and Esther Ohito’s article.
2. Continuing our discussions about writing practices and transforming them into concrete actions.
3. Further examining our biases in language and assessment practices.
4. Tracing the ways we have been leaders in DEI work past to present and sharing it in a broader way; thinking about what we still need to work on.

At the end of the meeting we each reflected on the work we have done, the challenges we are finding along the way, and the support we hope for. Here are the responses in full.  I’m including our responses to the final question below:

In what ways and in what areas are you hoping that Kalil can support the department’s work next year?

• I’m hoping he can be a channel for students to communicate to us some things they might need; I’m hoping he will let us find opportunities to share the good work we’ve done with other departments and build a culture of inclusive teaching practices at our whole school.
• Though I won’t be here next year, I think Kalil is in a unique position to be able to survey/interview our students about their experiences surrounding discussions of race in the classroom. He’ll be new to them and new to us, and I wonder if they might share with him information that none of us would capture in the same way if we asked.
• It would be great to trace the development of our work in racial and gender justice from the last 20 years. I think it would be productive to look at this through the lens of a transformative teacher activist stance that the department has taken towards our pedagogies for a long time. Given that we are entering our centennial, it would be great to do this institutional memory work for the benefit of our department members both new and established, our colleagues in the larger school, as well as our students and their families. If possible, it would be great to trace this work back even further beyond the last 20 years. We have so many archives of this work in terms of papers, photos, videos, etc.
• I hope we can continue examining specific writing units, and I hope Kalil can be a part of those conversations.
• It would be nice to have him join a meeting or a retreat with us and learn with us or teach us.