Teaching ELA in the 21st

    Let's face it: digital literacy has become ubiquitous to everyday life, whether it's creating a post for social media, writing an email to a colleague about a current project, or submitting paperwork digitally to a new doctor's office. In many ways, digital composition and the way we connect with those around us online has become so ingrained into everyday life, we can sometimes forget the ways in which we use it. I struggled for days on how to begin this blog post, stumped on any experience of digital composition outside of my monthly posts to social media--all the while composing emails to coworkers and the parents of my students, creating quizzes on Google Forms, and creating interactive vocabulary practice sets on websites like GimKit and KnoWord (try them on your own, if you dare). In fact, I did not realize how much digital literacy had permeated my daily life until my father called me on my lunch break as I attempted to write this post. My digitally illiterate ...

 Hello everybody! There are most likely many new viewers here (unless I convince friends from the original iteration of my blog circa 2022 to come check out what I've changed), but this blog is currently changing gears a bit. It's original title was "Blogging the Journey from Student to Teacher" and to my delight, I am now a fully grown teacher upon returning!! So, if you're new and you are taking Currins 547 in Spring 2026, everything above this post will be my work for this semester; scroll below this post only if you dare (which upon my posting of this, I have not yet).

     Zines Talk!: How Visualization Can Support Student Understanding             As a visual culmination for the work I have done with zines as a mode for unlocking adolescent literacy, I have created my very own zine titled Zines Talk . As I reflected on the texts I curated for a potential zine-based unit in my future teaching , I noticed there was a glaring lack of full, print-based zines. In fact, the only zine I had included until in the teaching of this unit was meant to scaffold students’ understanding of another non-zine text. In response to this, I decided to create my own print-based zine about two significant publication topics that created vast communities in the history of zines and the endless potential zines have to create more communities.                When I began to conceptualize this zine, I decided I wanted to focus on real, historical movements that have been made ...

 Introduction     This text set is built around understanding zines and their impact on the communities surrounding them. I curated this text set with my current field students in mind, high school sophomores in American Authors II at Rufus King International High School. These students are currently in the Middle Years Program, which is meant to prepare them to take IB English courses in their junior and senior years at Rufus King. The current students in American Authors II have shown a good amount of interest in reading a young adult novel in our last unit, where we read Poet X  by Elizabeth Acevedo. To keep the students interested in and connected to the unit about zines, I have chosen another young adult novel, Moxie  by Jennifer Mathieu, to be a central text in guiding our unit on zines. This YA novel will hopefully give students more relatable, concrete ideas of how zines impact and create culture; furthermore, this novel was recently adapted into a ...

  Zine a shortened form of the term "fanzine"   a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images  has roots in the informal, underground publications that focused on social and political activism Introduction to Inquiry Blog Topic     As you may have gathered by the above definition (provided by University of Texas Libraries ), I am considering exploring zines as the topic for my inquiry blog. I have been fortunate to learn a bit about the production and background of zines through a couple of courses I have taken at UWM; however, I am increasingly interested in the role they can play in demystifying adolescent literacy through the versatility the format provides. As mentioned in the third portion of the definition, zines are rooted in underground publication that push for social change and activism. These roots provide an amazing pathway for the cosmopolitanism aspect Christopher Edmin lays out in equity literacy. Zines are...

 Welcome (back) to my Blog!      Hello! My name is Kimberly Winston and I am in the fourth and final year of my undergraduate degree! I'm majoring in Early Adolescence-Adolescence English Education, which means I will be certified to teach ELA for grades 4-12. I am currently student teaching at Rufus King International High School with sophomores in Mrs. Bishop's American Authors II classes. When I finish my time at UWM, hopefully in May 2023, I hope to apply everything I have learned in teaching ELA in and MPS high school.     I am excited to add to my blog with the posts I will be creating for Currins 545. As you may have noticed on my blog, I initially created this blog for Currins 547 which is another class I had with Candance. As I add to this blog, I definitely want to learn more about refining how my writing is affected by the online format. In creating this blog post, I was inspired to think about how I can adapt my writing to better fit blog conven...