To an outsider, the ILA Sparks Lunch may have looked like a comedy club, a puppet show, or even a lively academic lecture. Emceed by Danny Brassell, speakers Monita K. Bell, Kate Messner, Cornelius Minor, Sam Patterson, and Pernille Ripp gave short, dynamic talks that embraced themes of social justice, the importance of fun in learning, censorship, and disrupting the status quo.
It wasn’t Danny Brassell’s first time on stage. His 2012 TED Talk “The Reading Makeover” has been viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube. He has been described as “one of the funniest and most inspirational education speeches of the past five years” as well as “Jim Carrey with a PhD.” His mission? To bring joy back into teaching.
“Happy teachers produce happy students,” Brassell said.
Social justice in education
The audience first heard from seventh-grade teacher Pernille Ripp, who spoke about her experience as a white immigrant, her fear of failing as a teacher, and her journey to founding a worldwide reading movement.
Ripp’s story began nineteen years ago, when she immigrated from Denmark to the U.S. at age 18. With her blonde hair and fair skin, she said she never felt like, or was treated like, an immigrant. It wasn’t until the Trump administration’s travel ban took effect that, for the first time, she feared that she may be not be welcomed back into her home after traveling internationally.
Ripp knew what it felt like to “belong to two nations and yet at times feels lost in both.” Her desire for more global collaboration brought her to where she is today—the founder of Global Read Aloud, a six-week reading project that connects classrooms around the world.
“When I think about global collaboration—it’s because we need to make the world smaller. We need to stop being so afraid of others,” Ripp said. “We need to teach our kids about the outside world or allow them to start experiencing it.”
Monita Bell, senior editor for Teaching Tolerance, built on Ripp’s message as she discussed empathy and identity in the classroom.
Bell pointed to a few powerful examples of microaggressions in school settings, including a Texas school where two black middle school students received mock superlatives that read “most likely to become a terrorist” and “most likely to blend in with white people,” a charter school where students wearing braids face detention and suspension, and the not-so-aptly named Freedom High School, where students need a permission slip to wear the hijab.
Bell reminded the audience of educators of the responsibility of educators to create a safe space—not just physically—but for students to be fully themselves.
"So much of the ugliness we see in the world comes from other people not seeing others as actual human beings," Bell said.
Fun is a serious issue
Sam Patterson, makerspace coordinator at Echo Horizon School, introduced a note of levity to the event when he walked onstage with a special guest: his furry, orange sidekick, Wokka. The puppet helped him talk about “one most serious issues facing education”—fun—in the least serious way possible.
Patterson showed the audience how to use puppetry to teach everything from vocabulary to STEM subjects to Julius Caesar. He showed examples of the videos he produces, in which kids act out their own original jokes using handmade puppets.
Patterson believes the puppets help deliver authentic learning experiences. While his students may not always enjoy the subject area, they do always enjoy the puppets.
“I have to make myself respect their [students] choices. Once I brought fun in, my students made more authentic choices,” said Patterson.
Censorship
Author and banned book champion Kate Messner spoke about the controversy surrounding her recent book, The Seventh Wish, which follows 12-year-old protagonist Charlie Brennan and her family, who—like too many families in the U.S.—are facing the tragedy of opioid addiction.
The week of the book’s release, Messner was disinvited from a school talk and received several disapproving messages from librarians and parents who felt the content was inappropriate. One school librarian explained why she wouldn’t share the book with her students. “For now,” the librarian said, “I just need the 10 and eleven-year-olds biggest worry to be about friendships, summer camps, and maybe their first pimple or two.”
She then read aloud letters written by young readers who, like Charlie, have loved ones suffering from addictions. They thanked her for writing a book that have made them feel less alone and taught them to be brave.
Messner stressed the need for stories that don’t sugarcoat the truth, that validate all kinds of experiences, and that show us how to survive, not to live “happily ever after” but “resiliently every after.”
“Wherever you are, wherever you work, you are serving kids who are living those stories,” said Messner. “When you’re saying that story is inappropriate, you're saying your life is inappropriate.”
Disrupting the status quo
Cornelius Minor, lead staff developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, presented in place of Rusul, who was unable to attend. He ended the event with a call to action for educators build their own disruption “toolkit” for building equity in education.
Minor encouraged educators to ask themselves difficult questions about their practice, community and curriculum, and to bring their answers into the classroom. He discussed literacy as a social and political tool, stressing the importance of applied knowledge.
“If something that I teach a kid only works in the classroom, then it’s not worth teaching. It has to work in the real world. Only applied knowledge is power,” Minor said.
The attendees left the event clutching pages of notes, teeming with ideas and inspiration, and with a renewed sense of what it means to be an educator in the 21st century.
Alina O'Donnell is the editor of Literacy Daily.
