Teaching ELA in the 21st

 How did we get here?     In today's world of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Generative AI galore, we are immersed in the wonder of "writing" that can be produced with the entering of a short prompt. When ChatGPT came onto the market in November 2022, I was about to begin my final semester of my bachelor's degree in Secondary English Education. As I entered my full time student teaching the following spring, students I had gotten to know first semester who had rarely turned in writing assignments began to turn in full length essays, always well-written but with an uncanny tendency to deviate from the expectations of the assignment that were explained and scaffolded in class.  Outside of the classroom, I saw many posts online about people experimenting with talking to AI chatbots; at the time, I imagined those chatbots like the robot pictured above: a cute, helpful friend who had a knack for writing. In the early days of seeing AI seep into the English classroom we began discus...

This semester, I am fortunate to venture back into the world of working with writing coaches, exploring how providing feedback to student writing can shape them as writers and deepen their sense of how their writing communicates their ideas. I am even more fortunate to bring my students along, which one of my students phrased as being "guinea pigs for the writing coaches to learn about being teachers." While my sense about giving feedback to student writing has changed immensely from the first time I was a writing coach since I now offer regular feedback to students from the teacher role, as I step back into the role of writing coach I'd like to reflect on my literacy journey that has brought me to where I am today. I read all of those books! When I think of all the experiences that have shaped my enjoyment and understanding of literacy, I am transported back to my love of reading as a middle and high schooler. Nearly all of my highest achieving students are reading other...

    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 ...