ILA Next Secondary Pathway (ages 15+)

Current debates about "technology addiction" and "excessive screen time" place educators in a bind. On the one hand, educational expectations demand that we teach with technology, while on the other hand, we know we must attend to our students' emotional and intellectual development. In this workshop, we will explore empathetic, intentional approaches that help students protect their privacy, maximize their attention, pop their filter bubbles, and understand the ways knowledge is created and circulated in a digital world. With practical teaching tips and suggested text sets to spur dialogue, we will develop our own alert, intentional stance, discovering ways in which we can teach with digital diligence.

With the growing cultural and linguistic diversity of students comes the need to include culturally diverse literature in the curriculum in order to reflect students' cultural experiences and broaden and challenge their perspectives. In this workshop, participants will explore a rubric designed following an extensive analysis of the language found in national and state standards across the United States, which revealed inconsistencies in how cultural diversity in literature is constructed. Participants will explore how to use the rubric to select appropriate, high-quality multicultural literature, and will also discuss multiliteracy pedagogy and how the texts can be used in the classroom.

This workshop will begin with an overview of reasons adolescents struggle with academic text and content comprehension. Sharon Russell will guide participants in focusing on questioning and text structure strategies that help make text accessible for students with low literacy proficiency. With Judy Miller, participants will focus on the use of interactive notebooks to help students learn to read like scientists, historians, mathematicians, and literary experts. There will also be an opportunity to engage in text analysis and disciplinary literacy methodologies.

This workshop overviews three different ways adolescents engage with digital interactive media, such as apps, games, and social media platforms. We will explore some guiding principles to better understand, assess, and support students' critical engagement with these new media forms, and we will close by exploring practical approaches to teaching about critical digital literacies within existing English language arts curriculum and state standards.