During a post-WLU Literacies for All Summer Institute TAWL meeting, a second year WLU participant commented that she was beginning to feel more and more a part of the larger WLU learning community and characterized her experiences as energizing. These conference reflections initiated a larger conversation about the sources of energy teachers turn to in order to continue their engagement as active, dedicated learners and educators—mentioning the importance of being part of common experiences & conversations, opportunities to creatively infuse their passions into teaching, and the need for holistic educational practices that connect with what we know about students, literacy, and learning in the 21st century.
These comments punctuate the importance of furthering our visions for schools and students as more than individuals committed to the profession but as a WLU community that thinks together during conferences and beyond. We’ve set a goal for ourselves as a board to share our thinking, reading, learning, questions, wonderings with you throughout the year by posting monthly blogs. It is our hope by sharing our current thinking that we spark connections, critiques, and conversations that generate the energy for our work throughout the year.
As another school year begins, we invite you to reflect back on this Summer’s Literacies for All Summer Institute and consider how your experiences will inform the moves and decisions you make in the year to come. We encourage you to connect with a TAWL group, find one or two or three like-minded colleagues (in your school, city, town, or via electronic communication) to talk about the issues that matter to you most and the possible actions. Our small Chicago TAWL community has opted to reconnect with young adult literature and consider how our literacy practices and engagement with such texts speak to the changing nature of literacies and literacy learning in schools. We hope that it provides us with the energy that we need to do our best work with students. We invite you to take up an inquiry for the coming year, think and learn with others, and see where our collective work can take us.
Best wishes for an engaging year of learning,
Katie Van Sluys
