Teaching Writers Speak: Recent Episodes
Toronto Writing Project
Teaching Writers Speak is for educators, researchers, and creative folks like us who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large. We chat with teachers, professors, community educators, and researchers to better support one another as teachers of writing, our students as writers, and our work as scholars in the field of critical literacy. Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast produced by members of the Toronto Writing Project (www.torontowritingproject.com).
How can we as teachers, researchers, and activists make ourselves visible and vulnerable on the page? And what happens when we disagree with the past versions of ourselves that we encounter once we’ve committed our choices to writing?
These are some of the questions at the heart of our conversation with Dr. Mollie Blackburn. Mollie is a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on literacy, language, and social change, with particular attention to LGBTQ+ youth and the teachers who serve them. Mollie’s also no stranger to Writing Projects like ours: She spent many years as an active member of the Philadelphia Writing Project, and she is a long-time member of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), where she was recently recognized with its inaugural LGBTQ+ Advocacy and Leadership Award. In her most recent book, Moving across Differences: How Students Engage LGBTQ+ Themes in a High School Literature Class, Mollie offers an unflinching portrait of her teaching and advocacy work with young folks. Today she offers insights gleaned from that work over the years and tells us how she’s learned to embrace humility and vulnerability as she continues to think and write about the very human exchange that is teaching and learning.
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project—or TWP for short—is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
This episode was produced by Celeste Kirsh, Velta Douglas, and Ty Walkland. Celeste is our editor and Rob Simon, TWP’s director, is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Doug Freisen.
You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
How do teachers navigate the boundaries between the physical world of the classroom and the virtual worlds of social media, podcasting, and digital composition?
Celeste Kirsh, our guest today, has been tracing those boundaries for over ten years. Celeste is a middle school English and social studies teacher, as well as a blogger, podcaster, social media presence, and now a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Her name will be familiar to any of you who have tuned in to previous episodes of our show, since it’s her editing expertise and technical wizardry that deliver these conversations to your ears.
You might also know Celeste from her own podcast, Teaching Tomorrow, where she riffs on the future of learning with a range of top-notch guests. Today, Celeste shares what it’s like to be an educator who is teaching and learning out loud, in a public sphere, and how she continues to straddle the virtual world and the so-called “real” world as a teacher educator and emerging scholar of digital composition.
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project—or TWP for short—is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
This episode was produced by Celeste Kirsh, Velta Douglas, and Ty Walkland. Celeste is our editor and Rob Simon, TWP’s director, is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Doug Freisen.
You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
How can we carve out our own creative pathways that honour but also push against the boundaries set by the institutions we serve?
Dr. Tara Goldstein, our guest today, has spent an entire career paving her own roads as an academic, playwright, and LGBTQ+ activist. Currently serving as Vice Principal of New College at the University of Toronto, Tara’s decades-long career as a professor, teacher educator, and “performed ethnography” researcher has inspired legions of teachers and community educators to make things better for diverse youth and families.
Tara is also a writer, playwright, and director of Gailey Road Productions in Toronto. Her work sits at the crossroads where “research meets theatre and theatre meets research.” And truly that work is groundbreaking: performed ethnographies like Harriet’s House and Out At School have created space for conversations about gender, sexuality, and schooling where, for decades, there was only silence. Her latest project, The Love Booth and Other Plays, about the American Psychological Association’s removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, will premiere at Toronto Pride in June 2023.
Tara tours us through these and other landmark moments across her extraordinary career in our conversation today and tells us what’s on the horizon as she approaches another milestone: her retirement.
Connect with Tara on Twitter: @GaileyRoad
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project—or TWP for short—is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
This episode was produced by Celeste Kirsh, Velta Douglas, and Ty Walkland. Celeste is our editor and Rob Simon, TWP’s director, is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Doug Freisen.
You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
How can teachers support young students to locate themselves in the world and contend with some of the more troubling legacies that shape our collective experiences?
That is one question animating Daniela Bascuñan’s classroom teaching and her work as a teacher researcher. Daniela, our guest on this episode, has been teaching 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade elementary school in Toronto for over twenty-five years. Her name will be familiar to listeners of our little podcast: not only has she been a member of the Toronto Writing Project since its inception, but she planted vital seeds that helped bring this show to life.
Over the course of her career, Daniela’s been seeking ways to invite more of her students’ lives and experiences into the classroom as resources to make sense of how we relate to one another, our histories, and the land we stand on. And, as you’ll hear in our chat today, Daniela doesn’t hesitate to tackle some of the tougher issues that shape those relations, including military violence, residential schooling, and the broader legacies of settler colonialism. One of her goals as a teacher and a scholar is to challenge the “widely believed notion that very young children do not have the capacity to deconstruct [such] issues.”
You can find Daniela on Twitter @isPassingNotes
Link to the article Daniela Bascuñán, Shawna M. Carroll, Mark Sinke & Jean-Paul Restoule
(2022): Teaching as Trespass: Avoiding Places of Innocence, Equity & Excellence in Education,
DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2021.1993112
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project—or TWP for short—is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
This episode was produced by Celeste Kirsh, Velta Douglas, and Ty Walkland. Celeste is our editor and Rob Simon, TWP’s director, is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Doug Freisen.
You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
What might an inviting, inclusive, and altogether more human approach to an adult literacy curriculum look and feel like?
That’s a challenge that Dr. Will Edwards, one of our guests today, has been tackling over many years while teaching academic upgrading for adult learners at a community college in Toronto. As Will tells us, the academic upgrading program, like other adult literacy programs, invites people from across professional and geographical borders, with a range of experiences, histories, and interests, and attempts to funnel that diversity into standard and standardized performance tasks. Will bristled at this model’s “Come in, get educated, get the job, and get out” approach, so he began hosting a weekly reading and writing group where he and his students could slow down, get to know one another, and read and write about the experiences that make them human. That group has now been meeting for over a decade.
Today we’ll hear from some of that group’s founding members, including Will’s former students Ghofran, Karen, Pamela, and Shelley. Together they show us how a vulnerable, validating, and vitalizing community of learners can emerge from spaces that feel anything but. That means that this episode, like the group itself, is made up of many voices. Not only will we get to hear some of the prose and poetry that these folks have been writing together, but we’ll find out how and why they continue finding their way back to this community, even as their paths splinter and take different directions.
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project—or TWP for short—is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
This episode was produced by Celeste Kirsh, Velta Douglas, and Ty Walkland. Celeste is our editor and Rob Simon, TWP’s director, is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Doug Freisen.
You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
How might we move toward more organic practices to support multilingual learners as they write across languages, across borders, and across cultures?
Dr. Amir Kalan has spent over twenty years teaching writing at all levels of education and in many places across the world. Now an assistant professor in the Department of Education at McGill University, Amir continues to challenge the ways second language classrooms often silo and assimilate students through particular genres and rhetorical performances.
Topics covered in this conversation include:
- Using writing as a form of social action
- A short history of education as a colonial / industrial institution
- Why we need to consider more carefully the communities of writing that our students exist in
Amir’s professional profile at McGill
Amir on Twitter
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project––TWP for short––is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
Daniela Bascuñan, Velta Douglas, Will Edwards, Celeste Kirsh, Rob Simon, and Ty Walkland, all help to bring this podcast to life. Our theme music is composed by Doug Freisen. You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
How do we encourage young people to confront the world as it is–warts and all–while also dreaming up possibilities for the world that could be?
Dr. Nicole Mirra, our guest today, tells us that she is first and foremost a writer and a teacher, having taught high school in New York City and Los Angeles for many years. She is also a recently-tenured associate professor of urban teacher education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where her research explores the intersections of critical literacy and civic engagement with youth and teachers across classroom, community, and digital learning environments.
In this episode, Dr. Mirra touches on:
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The Digital Democratic Dialogue (or 3D) Project
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The possibilities and limits of empathy
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The big and small moves we can make towards a more just and equitable future
Nicole on Twitter
Nicole's research page
Nicole's books on Amazon
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project––TWP for short––is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
Daniela Bascuñan, Velta Douglas, Will Edwards, Celeste Kirsh, Rob Simon, and Ty Walkland, all help to bring this podcast to life. Our theme music is composed by Doug Freisen. You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
How is technology continuing to reshape how we learn and how we write in schools? And more importantly, what impacts do the intersections between writing and tech have on young peoples’ civic engagement?
Dr. Antero Garcia, an associate professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, has been asking these questions for well over a decade now. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles.
In this episode, we touch on:
- The role of technology / gaming in Civics and ELA classrooms
- The role of hacking in the writing classroom
- Our identities as teachers
How you can find our guest, Antero:
- On Twitter @anterobot
- Blog: The American Crawl
- On Instagram: @anterobot
- Antero's recent publications
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project––TWP for short––is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.
Daniela Bascuñan, Velta Douglas, Will Edwards, Celeste Kirsh, Rob Simon, and Ty Walkland, all help to bring this podcast to life. Our theme music is composed by Doug Freisen. You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.
How does writing, and other forms of cultural production, offer a sanctuary for people to express their emotional lives, especially in a world that doesn’t give everyone an equal chance at being heard?
Dr. Emmanuel Tabi, our guest today, is a multi-talented artist, musician, and writer. He’s spent the past 14 years writing and performing spoken word poetry in and around the Greater Toronto Area. He’s now a new prof at McGill in Montreal where his scholarship continues to explore the emotional lives of Black folks and how those lives are given shape and substance through various forms of cultural production. In this episode, host Ty Walkland and Dr. Emmanuel Tabi talk about how poetry, hip hop, and music inform his scholarship, about healing and social change, and about writing as both a sacred experience and a sanctuary.
Dr. Tabi at McGill
Toronto Writing Project website
How do we build community to support people to write?
We often think of writing as a solitary activity that you do quietly, in your own head, with your own hands, without the influence of others. We sometimes assume that writing just wells up from inside of us and blurts itself onto the page. And often in schools writing is treated and assessed as a solitary intellectual activity rather than being intricately connected to the communities that we build and the people we are in relationship with. These communities and people don’t just contribute to the ideas that we’re writing about, but they create a space for us to be creative, vulnerable, and take risks. And of course, the word community has taken on a new cadence because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are now building communities, in person and online, under new and exceptional circumstances. How will we continue to create spaces that allow people to be creative and to take risks with their words?
In this episode, poets Ashleigh A. Allen and Ben Gallagher speak about their experiences creating communities of writing.
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change in our institutions and in the world at large.
Daniela Bascuñan, Velta Douglas, Will Edwards, Celeste Kirsh, Rob Simon, and Ty Walkland, all help to bring this podcast to life. Our theme music is composed by Doug Freisen.
You can sign up for Toronto Writing Project's upcoming writing workshops and speakers series here.
How do we make space for the stories that children bring with them into classrooms—especially the difficult stories?
Dr. Elizabeth Dutro, our guest today, likens those difficult stories to newly hatched baby chicks—the kind that we cup and cradle in our hands. Each of us carries these difficult stories with us into the classroom. As teachers, we often imagine that our students—the youngest ones especially—are like baby chicks, fragile creatures whose vulnerability must be protected. But Dr. Dutro’s book, The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy,reminds us that children can and do hold space for their own and their peers’ difficult stories, and that their experiences not only matter in school, but that they are essential to school writing. How can teachers honour and invite the innate vulnerability that children bring with them into classrooms? Today Dr. Dutro shares how the literacy classroom is brought to life when we make room for children’s stories to hatch and take flight.
Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change in our institutions and in the world at large.
Daniela Bascuñan, Velta Douglas, Will Edwards, Celeste Kirsh, Rob Simon, and Ty Walkland, all help to bring this podcast to life. Our theme music is composed by Doug Freisen.
You can sign up for Toronto Writing Project's upcoming writing workshops and speakers series here.