About the Liberatory Library
Welcome! I'm so glad you found your way here. We've got so much to talk about, and I’m going to start by introducing myself and the Liberatory Library.
First of all, I'm an educator. I spent the first fifteen years of my career in the classroom. Specifically, the special education classroom. More specifically, a self-contained, multiple-disabilities elementary classroom. That work was foundational to my stance as an educator. It informs how I teach, how I learn about teaching, how I see problems, and how I seek to solve them. I look at the school environment through the lenses of inclusion and accessibility, and I’m always thinking about our learners who need the most support. I loved life in my classroom, and the community we created there, and it was a huge change to shift out of the classroom, but one I was ready for. I became a reading specialist and a literacy coach, and I’m currently coaching in grades K-4 in a public school in central New Jersey. In this capacity, my role shifted to teaching teachers, and working with the elementary ELA leadership team across a large district, and it’s immensely fulfilling. Plus, it still gives me a school “home” and the opportunity to spend time with lots of kids, which is really important to me.
Second of all, I’m passionate about literacy, and books are my love language. This has been the case pretty much for my whole life, and it brings me a lot of joy that my job is to think and talk literacy all day, every day. I regularly find books in my school mailbox without explanation. Teachers stop me in the hall to talk about writing projects and phonics rules and read alouds. Kids think of me variously as their word teacher, THE reading teacher, and, sometimes, The Big Cheese. (Okay, that’s just one kid, and it’s because Jory John’s The Big Cheese was our back-to-school read aloud, but it’s still a delight.)
So, why “The Liberatory Library”? My first steps in this direction started with diversifying my classroom library and book selections, when I became aware of the huge gap in representation in children’s literature. That’s still a central part of my work: I curate lists of fresh, diverse picture books for my teachers throughout the year, and I mostly read middle grade and YA books that I collect and share on my Instagram. Books bring me a lot of joy, and access to rich, authentic, representative books is crucial to kids’ development as readers and as humans.
However, once we start learning, there’s always more to learn if we’re open to it, and soon I went deeper. I was turned on to the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks about liberatory education, and it shifted my focus beyond books and into new pedagogy. In Freire’s formative Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he talks about, among other ideas, teaching as a political, even revolutionary act. Education is never neutral, he writes, it is always for something. Freire’s work informed hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, and this is what so much of my work is grounded in. Literacy as a tool for liberation, mine alongside my students, alongside all of our students. What does liberation mean in this context? Being free, yes. Free from oppression. Being free to become completely self-actualized, and find out who and how you want to be in the world. It means asking critical questions and searching for answers, because, as Toni Morrison taught us, it means that if we’re free, we need to free someone else.
Literacy education and social justice are inextricably linked. Foundationally, learning to read is a civil right, owed to every child. So applying sound pedagogy to effectively teach all children how to read is an act of social justice. Frederick Douglass reminds us, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” This is the foundation, and it’s reflected in the current reckoning with the failures of the workshop model and guided reading to teach enough children to read. In addition to learning the mechanics of reading, children need to learn deep, critical comprehension. Freire talks about reading the words and reading the world; we must teach children to read the words on the page, so that they are equipped to use those skills to understand texts, and use the texts to better understand themselves and the world. As children learn to read the world, we can help them develop a critical lens to question power dynamics and systems of oppression, sharpening their sense of social justice and their role in pursuing it. A liberatory literacy pedagogy includes all of these things.
To go even further, liberatory literacy pedagogy also includes beauty and art and joy and love. While we can’t teach children to love reading, we can create environments in which they can come to love it. We can create loving classroom communities where everyone’s voices are heard, valued, and celebrated. This includes surrounding children with books that reflect them and the world around us, honoring voice and choice, and empowering them to use writing as a tool for communication and expression.
The liberatory potential of an integrated, ecological, pedagogically sound literacy classroom is perhaps my greatest takeaway from my life in my special education classroom, and even though my work and teaching look so different now, I’m glad some of that time is documented here in this blog. Because we lived what I described here. Most of my students had significant needs in the areas of language and communication, which impacted all areas of learning, but perhaps especially literacy. To put it another way, reading was exceptionally difficult for most of them, and generally we don’t enjoy things that are very hard for us. However, we cultivated a robust and joyful literacy community full of kids who loved to read. If you read through the posts here, you’ll find students who couldn’t put books down, who were immersed in complex read alouds, and who saw themselves as authors and produced all kinds of incredible writing. These two truths lived together, and I believe it was because I was able to weave together the art and science of literacy instruction, from the stance of liberatory education. I made sure that they had explicit, systematic instruction in decoding, books to fall in love with, and joy and care and support and autonomy. And it worked. They grew as readers and writers, and as humans. Of course, I’ve learned much more since then, and I would evolve my practice even more if I were back in that space now. But it showed me the promise of liberatory instruction in the literacy classroom, and informs my work today.
So welcome to The Liberatory Library! I hope you’ll find things here that make you think, expand your pedagogy, and fill up your to-be-read list. I’m so glad you’re here with me.
First of all, I'm an educator. I spent the first fifteen years of my career in the classroom. Specifically, the special education classroom. More specifically, a self-contained, multiple-disabilities elementary classroom. That work was foundational to my stance as an educator. It informs how I teach, how I learn about teaching, how I see problems, and how I seek to solve them. I look at the school environment through the lenses of inclusion and accessibility, and I’m always thinking about our learners who need the most support. I loved life in my classroom, and the community we created there, and it was a huge change to shift out of the classroom, but one I was ready for. I became a reading specialist and a literacy coach, and I’m currently coaching in grades K-4 in a public school in central New Jersey. In this capacity, my role shifted to teaching teachers, and working with the elementary ELA leadership team across a large district, and it’s immensely fulfilling. Plus, it still gives me a school “home” and the opportunity to spend time with lots of kids, which is really important to me.
Second of all, I’m passionate about literacy, and books are my love language. This has been the case pretty much for my whole life, and it brings me a lot of joy that my job is to think and talk literacy all day, every day. I regularly find books in my school mailbox without explanation. Teachers stop me in the hall to talk about writing projects and phonics rules and read alouds. Kids think of me variously as their word teacher, THE reading teacher, and, sometimes, The Big Cheese. (Okay, that’s just one kid, and it’s because Jory John’s The Big Cheese was our back-to-school read aloud, but it’s still a delight.)
So, why “The Liberatory Library”? My first steps in this direction started with diversifying my classroom library and book selections, when I became aware of the huge gap in representation in children’s literature. That’s still a central part of my work: I curate lists of fresh, diverse picture books for my teachers throughout the year, and I mostly read middle grade and YA books that I collect and share on my Instagram. Books bring me a lot of joy, and access to rich, authentic, representative books is crucial to kids’ development as readers and as humans.
However, once we start learning, there’s always more to learn if we’re open to it, and soon I went deeper. I was turned on to the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks about liberatory education, and it shifted my focus beyond books and into new pedagogy. In Freire’s formative Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he talks about, among other ideas, teaching as a political, even revolutionary act. Education is never neutral, he writes, it is always for something. Freire’s work informed hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, and this is what so much of my work is grounded in. Literacy as a tool for liberation, mine alongside my students, alongside all of our students. What does liberation mean in this context? Being free, yes. Free from oppression. Being free to become completely self-actualized, and find out who and how you want to be in the world. It means asking critical questions and searching for answers, because, as Toni Morrison taught us, it means that if we’re free, we need to free someone else.
Literacy education and social justice are inextricably linked. Foundationally, learning to read is a civil right, owed to every child. So applying sound pedagogy to effectively teach all children how to read is an act of social justice. Frederick Douglass reminds us, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” This is the foundation, and it’s reflected in the current reckoning with the failures of the workshop model and guided reading to teach enough children to read. In addition to learning the mechanics of reading, children need to learn deep, critical comprehension. Freire talks about reading the words and reading the world; we must teach children to read the words on the page, so that they are equipped to use those skills to understand texts, and use the texts to better understand themselves and the world. As children learn to read the world, we can help them develop a critical lens to question power dynamics and systems of oppression, sharpening their sense of social justice and their role in pursuing it. A liberatory literacy pedagogy includes all of these things.
To go even further, liberatory literacy pedagogy also includes beauty and art and joy and love. While we can’t teach children to love reading, we can create environments in which they can come to love it. We can create loving classroom communities where everyone’s voices are heard, valued, and celebrated. This includes surrounding children with books that reflect them and the world around us, honoring voice and choice, and empowering them to use writing as a tool for communication and expression.
The liberatory potential of an integrated, ecological, pedagogically sound literacy classroom is perhaps my greatest takeaway from my life in my special education classroom, and even though my work and teaching look so different now, I’m glad some of that time is documented here in this blog. Because we lived what I described here. Most of my students had significant needs in the areas of language and communication, which impacted all areas of learning, but perhaps especially literacy. To put it another way, reading was exceptionally difficult for most of them, and generally we don’t enjoy things that are very hard for us. However, we cultivated a robust and joyful literacy community full of kids who loved to read. If you read through the posts here, you’ll find students who couldn’t put books down, who were immersed in complex read alouds, and who saw themselves as authors and produced all kinds of incredible writing. These two truths lived together, and I believe it was because I was able to weave together the art and science of literacy instruction, from the stance of liberatory education. I made sure that they had explicit, systematic instruction in decoding, books to fall in love with, and joy and care and support and autonomy. And it worked. They grew as readers and writers, and as humans. Of course, I’ve learned much more since then, and I would evolve my practice even more if I were back in that space now. But it showed me the promise of liberatory instruction in the literacy classroom, and informs my work today.
So welcome to The Liberatory Library! I hope you’ll find things here that make you think, expand your pedagogy, and fill up your to-be-read list. I’m so glad you’re here with me.
|
My Bio:
I am a literacy coach, reading specialist, and special educator in New Jersey public schools. I spent the first fifteen years of my career teaching literacy to students with disabilities, and I'm now a literacy coach, working with teachers to hone their craft and develop their practice. I have an MA in Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities & Autism from Teachers College, and an M.Ed from Rutgers University as a Literacy Specialist. And of course, I am also the creator and curator of The Liberatory Library! |
|