The Maine Council for English Language Arts ( MCELA )
  • Home
    • About
    • Membership
  • MCELA Leadership
    • MCELA Executive Board
    • MCELA Meeting Minutes
    • President's Message
    • Position Statements
  • Member Access
  • Events, Programs, Awards
    • Annual Conference
    • Student Writing Contest >
      • About the Student Writing Contest
      • 2023 Winners
    • Brassil Award >
      • Nominate an Educator
      • About John & Claudette Brassil
      • Brassil Award Past Winners
    • Intellectual Freedom Award
    • Online Book Studies
  • Journal, Newsletter, IDEA Blog
    • Northwords Journal >
      • Access Northwords pdfs
      • Call for Manuscripts
    • Newsletter
    • IDEA
    • News
  • NCTE

IDEA

(Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access)
Members of the MCELA Executive Board created this working group to focus on an important goal: Support Maine educators as they explore ways to develop materials and practices for inclusion, diversity, equity, and access. In particular, MCELA invites educators to think about, discuss, and take steps to address issues related to racism, income disparity, gender identity, environmental justice, equity, genocide, and indigenous sovereignty.

Each month, the IDEA Collective of MCELA will share a resource for educators to explore and consider using in their practice and with their students.

Balancing the Weight of the World

1/5/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
Genius & Joy
In the latest edition of NCTE’s Council Chronicle, Gholdy Muhammad discusses the importance of cultivating genius and joy in our schools. Muhammad writes: “We can see a lot of progress between writing the right standards and pursuits and goals for learning, selecting the right topics and texts, and then really reflecting on what kind of child we hope for our schools to nurture and cultivate.” NCTE members have free online access to the article “How To Find - and Teach - Joy in Our Classrooms.” However, NCTE provides free access to Muhammad’s piece “Cultivating Genius and Joy in Education through Historically Responsive Literacy” in the January edition of Language Arts.

To learn more about Muhammad’s work related to equity in curriculum design, check out her first book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. Also, you might be interested in her forthcoming book, Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning. 

Learning for Justice - Resisting Dominant Narratives

In this hostile learning environment created by censorship and book bans, these LFJ book reviews encourage us all to keep reading—and writing—to counter the narratives that have historically excluded diverse perspectives.

Navigating Challenging Discussions

When teachers want to engage students in discussions about contentious topics, they are often confronted with how to manage civil discourse. NCTE recently published a new guide, Reading, Writing, & Raising Voices: The Centrality of Literacy to Civic Education. This guide highlights the connection between literacy and civic discourse. 

If you seek some concrete tools for yourself or your colleagues, Learning for Justice offers their guide Civil Discourse in the Classroom to provide teachers and students with tools of argumentation and discussion.

Looking for a deeper dive into handling challenging topics? Learning for Justice provides this online course “Youth in Front: Understanding & Supporting Student-Led Activism.” In one session, participants learn effective strategies for asking students to support their stance on an issue. Teachers value these “in-the-moment” approaches to handle potentially controversial and divisive topics.


0 Comments

NCTE Position Statement on the Need for Diverse Children's and Young Adult Books

11/14/2022

0 Comments

 
Looking for more? Check out the NCTE Position Statement on “Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children’s and Young Adult Books.” Also, visit NCTE’s Intellectual Freedom Center for ways to address censorship in your school and community.
0 Comments

Get involved...

11/14/2022

0 Comments

 
Get Involved: In response to the efforts to censor books, NCTE has launched This Story Matters. YOU can help by writing a rationale for a specific book. These rationales help your colleagues and your students access stories that matter!
0 Comments

Report on educational gag orders

11/14/2022

0 Comments

 
Read: PEN America recently shared their key findings of a report about legislative efforts to enforce education gag orders. The authors write, “Educational gag orders are state legislative efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities in K–12 and higher education.” Consider reviewing aspects of this report with your colleagues and discuss how you can take steps to protect yourself, your colleagues, and your community against these insidious attempts to silence important voices.
0 Comments

Resources for Native American Heritage Month

11/14/2022

0 Comments

 
Resources for Native American Heritage Month:

✬ The Abbe Museum, celebrating the Wabanaki people of Maine, provides tours of the museum, classroom programs, and lesson plans in their Educator Hub.  

✬ Listen to the WERU Community Radio archives of their radio programs Wabanaki Windows, Indigenous Voices, and Dawnland Signals. 

✬ Read about Theresa Secord, traditional Penobscot basket maker, her art form, and her advocacy work in her essay for the "What Maine Craft Means to Me" series from the Maine Crafts Association. 

✬ The University of Maine's Resource page on Native American Programs includes Native American information, Wabanaki studies, and a few other resources.  

✬ The Maine DOE has a rich collection of resources on their Maine Native Studies Resources page. 

✬ The National Museum of the American Indian provides student webinars, virtual field trips, lessons, and resources through its Native Knowledge 360◦ Education Initiative. 

✬ The Wisdom of the Elders website hosts multimedia resources, curriculum, events, and environmental and other projects to promote Native American cultural sustainability. 

✬ The First People website has a collection of nearly 1400 Native American Legends. 

✬ NCTE's Read Write Think resource provides a database of searchable lessons for teachers, such as Making Connections to Myth and Folktale: The Many Ways to Rainy Mountain. 

✬ PBS Learning Media has a vast amount of videos on the topic of Native Americans. 

✬ Annenberg Learner provides free resources for K-12 educators, including the Native Voices section of the American Passages series. 
0 Comments

Poetry Month

4/3/2022

3 Comments

 
To celebrate National Poetry Month, we offer resources to encourage engagement with diverse voices through poetry. We also offer a range of resources allowing you and your students to access these materials: digital, print, audio, and video! Check out these diverse ways to include all learners in celebrating poetry.

Read, Write & Listen: In celebration of 25 years on National Poetry Month, The Telling Room has created an anthology of poetry by Maine students.  A New Land celebrates life in Maine while offering diverse perspectives of youth from a variety of countries. Last year, every Maine high school library received a free copy of this anthology, and the Telling Room has created a toolkit for teachers to bring these poems and writers into the classroom. The Telling Room site provides a PDF of the poems and links to Check out these resources and let MCELA and let colleagues know how you used this anthology and the resources.

Write: Wondering how to bring the writing of poetry into your classroom? Try this resource - Poetry in Schools. This guide for teachers allows you to create your own unit of poetry and to learn about new ways to inspire students to hone their craft. Check it out!

View & Listen: Check out this spoken word performance from Abdul Ali, where he reads his piece “System is a ‘Chess Game’”. From Maine Kids VOICE: “Abdulkadir Ali is an Ethiopian-American social activist, who brings his voice and experience to advocate for racial and criminal justice here in Maine. From human rights to community leadership, Ali is working to address issues that continuously occur in silenced communities caused by systematic oppression.”

View & Listen: ICYMI - Check out the Maine Poetry Out Loud Finals from April of 2021. Watch and listen to Maine students bring alive familiar and newer poetry. If you are a high school teacher, consider how you might participate in future POL competitions. Of course, any teacher can host their own celebration of the spoken word!​

Looking for more? Check out the NCTE Position Statement on “Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children’s and Young Adult Books.” And NCTE Verse.
3 Comments

Women's History Month

3/1/2022

1 Comment

 
The IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) Collective focuses on an important goal: Support Maine educators as they explore ways to develop materials and practices for inclusion, diversity, equity, and access. In particular, MCELA invites educators to think about, discuss, and take steps to address issues related to racism, income disparity, gender identity, environmental justice, equity, genocide, and indigenous sovereignty.Each month, the IDEA Collective of MCELA will share a resource for educators to explore and consider using in their practice and with their students. 

In honor of Women’s History Month, IDEA offers a link to the National Women’s History Alliance, where you can find more information about the 2022 Women’s History Month theme “Providing Healing, Promoting Hope” as well as classroom resources. We also offer the poem “Responsibility” by Grace Paley, a poem that asks us to consider the value of looking at the world through the eyes of women, and we invite you to share this with your students and let us know what happens.

Responsibility by Grace Paley

It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
….more here

Looking for more? Check out the NCTE Guidelines for Affirming Gender Diversity through ELA Curriculum and Pedagogy ​
​
1 Comment

Introducing the IDEA Collective

2/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Introducing the IDEA Collective
Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access for Teachers of English Language Arts

Members of the MCELA Executive Board created this working group to focus on an important goal: Support Maine educators as they explore ways to develop materials and practices for inclusion, diversity, equity, and access. In particular, MCELA invites educators to think about, discuss, and take steps to address issues related to racism, income disparity, gender identity, environmental justice, equity, genocide, and indigenous sovereignty.

Each month, the IDEA Collective of MCELA will share a resource for educators to explore and consider using in their practice and with their students. This month, we invite teachers to explore the Samantha Smith Challenge, a program based on Maine artist Robert Shetterly’s work in Americans Who Tell the Truth. Not ready to take on a project with students? Consider exploring the materials and resources at Americans Who Tell the Truth as a way to introduce to students the people from history and in the world today who raise their voices about issues related to justice and equity.
0 Comments

    Author

    The IDEA Collective

    Archives

    January 2023
    November 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
Photo used under Creative Commons from C*T*M
  • Home
    • About
    • Membership
  • MCELA Leadership
    • MCELA Executive Board
    • MCELA Meeting Minutes
    • President's Message
    • Position Statements
  • Member Access
  • Events, Programs, Awards
    • Annual Conference
    • Student Writing Contest >
      • About the Student Writing Contest
      • 2023 Winners
    • Brassil Award >
      • Nominate an Educator
      • About John & Claudette Brassil
      • Brassil Award Past Winners
    • Intellectual Freedom Award
    • Online Book Studies
  • Journal, Newsletter, IDEA Blog
    • Northwords Journal >
      • Access Northwords pdfs
      • Call for Manuscripts
    • Newsletter
    • IDEA
    • News
  • NCTE