By Matthew Jellison and the Instructors at Writopia Lab Each spring we hold a series of professional developments for our instructors that expands our resources and punches in on a specific element of our teaching practice. Last year, we focused on the hard skills and how we can fold grammar and mechanics into workshop holistically. …
By Matthew Jellison We were losing literary bingo when the thought hit us. We were surprised to be losing. After all, Malcolm and I have spent the better part of a decade working in literacy, and Yael about a decade and a half. We are (affectionately speaking) literary nerds. In the office we share, Yael …
By Rebecca Wallace-Segall Within this essay, I examine the ongoing youth literacy crisis in New York City and, along with it, two long-standing, opposing education policies—progressive and traditional—that have sought to address it. I argue that resisting dogmatic adherence to one or the other of these approaches, coupled with teacher-centered professional development opportunities that emphasize …
In the era of Trump’s disdain for the humanities and Secretary of Education Betsy Devos’s unnerving tenure, educators are forced to defend the efficacy of the humanities, while finding new spaces and educational models for the humanities to thrive. Literacy education in America has been compartmentalized into two categories: uniform writing composition instruction or the …
By Rebecca Wallace-Segall, Danielle Sheeler, and Yael Schick As literacy curriculum developers, we enjoyed the New York Times article “Why Kids Can’t Write.” But we were surprised by the limited view it provided into the cultural landscape of literacy education. While the writer acknowledged the importance of the synthesis of personal voice and direct grammar …