Welcome to Becoming Literary!
Reimagining how we teach language, literature, and literacies one stack at a time
“A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own.”
-Maxine Greene
Becoming Literary
Education is a process of becoming. It's a site where we engage in the acts of interpretation, representation, and communication that shape how we understand ourselves and our world. This is not a process that ends once we're handed a diploma. Unlike schooling, education does not have a finite end point.
As it happens, I'm starting this Substack a mere week after defending my dissertation, and I am as hungry as ever to keep exploring. After over a decade teaching high school English, writing a best-selling book on curriculum design, delivering professional development around the world, and spending four years researching the intersections of critical, digital, and literary literacies, I think I have a lot to share. More importantly, I know I still have a lot to learn!
To that end, Becoming Literary will be a space where I hope to engage in public scholarship and shared sensemaking about teaching, literary studies, literacies scholarship, pop-culture, philosophy, aesthetics, and more alongside fellow educators, scholars, and literary nerds.
Each week, I'll explore questions central to contemporary education and literary studies:
Theory & Research
How do students remix aesthetic practices from their digital lives to produce literary knowledge?
What emerges when we put literary theory in dialogue with youth culture?
What are the latest trends in critical sociocultural research, affective neuroscience, and literary studies, and why do they matter for English educators?
Practice & Application
How can students navigate between disciplinary and digital discourses?
How can educators help their students effectively take up the practices of literary scholars to interpret texts?
How can teachers and researchers collaborate to bridge the theory/practice divide?
Philosophical Musings
What does it mean to live the good life of teaching?
What role should aesthetic education play in helping students design new social futures?
How might we better navigate and understand our current moment of polycrisis?
Posts will range from concrete classroom applications to broader meditations on education, aesthetics, popular culture, and critical theory. Subscribers will receive practical tools they can use tomorrow and provocations they can wrestle with for a lifetime. I hope you'll join me on my journey to reimagine how we teach language, literature, and literacies in secondary spaces.
Subscribe today to stay on top of all my articles, resources, and content. Next week, we'll take a deep dive into what it means to become literary.
Stay curious!