Inextricably Connected, Yet Seemingly Unrelated Ideas—#SOL22, Day 1

Almost a decade ago when I discovered this community of teachers who write, I was warmly welcomed into a family of educators who have shaped my practice in remarkable ways. Returning to the Two Writing teachers blog this year feels a bit like coming home. Colleagues from all over the country nurture our shared humanity by opening up a space where we feel seen, validated, and affirmed. I’m deeply grateful to be back for thirty one days of writing, and I can’t wait to embrace our new slicers who will be forever changed by this experience. 

As the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge approached, three seemingly unrelated ideas began to percolate—bubbling, oozing, and permeating the corners of my mind.  

Literacy can serve as a weapon of oppression or as a tool of liberation.

Constrained foundational literacy skills need to be taught to mastery.

Text structure provides freedom within form, guiding us as writers and readers.

While the dreary winter months unfolded, I found myself pondering each of these professional challenges simultaneously and in isolation. Like a leaky metal bucket full of punctured holes, these concepts dripped, dribbled, and spilled across the landscape of life. I serve students and teachers in grades K-4 as a literacy coach in Texas, and each time I encountered these loosely associated notions my pattern seeking brain frantically searched for a through line. Unfortunately, my mapmaker heart has yet to connect all the dots. 

So across the month of March, I’ve decided to write my way through each of these possible theories. Perhaps the quandary around text structure can be the framework for each blog I compose. Writers must make decisions about how they will organize  information and ideas. My hope is that  by reading the entries of others I’ll learn new ways to arrange and rearrange my meandering thoughts. Perhaps I will use some traditional nonfiction text structures such as description, sequence, and problem/solution. Or maybe I’ll play around with multimodal writing techniques and explore digital text features like sound-bites, gifs, and still images. 

Because I spent three-fourths of my twenty year career in public education as a forever-fourth-grade teacher, my journey into primary literacy has been full of fits and starts. While the resurfaced Reading Wars rage alongside an ongoing global pandemic, I’ve been offered the opportunity to craft our district’s kindergarten curriculum. Words like eye-opening, mind-boggling, and thought-provoking seem insufficient to describe the steep learning curve I continue to navigate. 

Most importantly, I have a deep desire to continue traversing the difficult path of understanding how literacy can be wielded as a weapon of oppression and can also be the key that opens doors to social mobility, opportunity, and freedom. Early literacy skills and text structure feel inextricably connected to liberal education, and as I try to make sense of how our collective history has led us to this moment, I will contemplate the intersectionality of classism, racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism.

A few books I’ve either read, am currently reading or plan to read that are shaping my journey.