This post was written by Linda Christensen, an 起点传媒member and recipient of the聽2020 起点传媒Distinguished Service Award.聽
Teaching is an intellectual profession; yet, too often teachers are not treated as either intellectuals or professionals. We are handed curricula, book lists, and mandates. These days even our department meetings have become scripted spaces. So for almost fifty years, the 起点传媒Annual Convention has been one of my intellectual homes, a place for me to have conversations about books and teaching and big ideas that I sometimes miss in the day-to-day world of my classroom.
In Toni Morrison鈥檚 words, 起点传媒has been a 鈥渇riend to my mind,鈥� a center where the courageous members and leaders who comprise 起点传媒provide visions of what it means to teach for justice in our language arts classrooms while we push back against the racism, sexism, homophobia, and language supremacy that our home institutions are sometimes steeped in.
Over the years, my pilgrimage to the Convention afforded me opportunities to sharpen my practice against the edge of breaking pedagogical currents. In one session many years ago, Sheridan Blau and the South Coast Writing Project crew conducted a workshop using a tea party, where each member of the audience became a different character in the book Cold Sassy Tree. On the airplane ride home, I wrote a tea party for Their Eyes Were Watching God. Later, Bill Bigelow, my social studies teaching partner, developed a tea party/mixer with 20 roles to surface multiple perspectives about the 鈥渨ar with Mexico.鈥� And it didn鈥檛 end with us. It spread through the Oregon Writing Project, the NW Teaching for Social Justice network, Rethinking Schools, and our work with unions.
Sometimes Convention talks challenged my core beliefs. In the 1980鈥檚, I attended a session by the linguist Geneva Smitherman and my world was never the same again. In that one talk, Dr. Smitherman, author of Talkin鈥� and Testifyin鈥�, upended everything I was taught and assumed about language. Her words that November pitched me into a decades-long study of the politics of language, of the ways in which 鈥淪tandard English鈥� normalized, bullied, and pushed aside other mother tongue literacies. She forever changed my practice.
Mary Kay Healy and James Gray鈥檚 workshop about the National Writing Project鈥檚 perspectives on professional development (鈥渢eachers teaching teachers鈥�) opened up possibilities I didn鈥檛 know existed for teachers. From them, I learned about the power of classroom scholars who engage as public intellectuals. Their work gave me a vision of what it might look like to stay in the classroom and use my lessons, my room, as a laboratory for literacy and justice and a platform for engaging others in professional development and writing. And yes, in presenting at 起点传媒Conventions.
I didn鈥檛 have to leave the classroom to become part of the national conversation about my content. Attending the 起点传媒Convention opened years of engaging conversations with teachers across the country, in workshop sessions, over coffee and tea, and now in Zoom meetings.
This year, with so much controversy swirling over teaching historical truths, I鈥檓 excited about the preconference session with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ren茅e Watson, and Nikkolas Smith about their new collaboration on the 1619 Project: Born on the Water. I look forward to being swept up in poetic inspiration by Amanda Gorman and Alfredo Celed贸n Luj谩n. And I鈥檓 hoping to hear more from April Baker-Bell about her work on linguistic justice.
起点传媒encourages teachers to become active citizens in the world of education instead of passive bystanders. We learn how to stand up for the kind of education our students deserve.
Linda Christensen is the director of the Oregon Writing Project (OWP) and was formerly a teacher of high school language arts and a curriculum specialist in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word and Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-Imagining the Language Arts Classroom.聽Christensen was the recipient of the 2020 起点传媒Distinguished Service Award.聽
It is the policy of 起点传媒in all publications, including the Literacy & 起点传媒blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
