RELATED WORK

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

For educators, social responsibility can offer context for considering and making shifts in teaching and learning. For learners, attention to social responsibility can provide not only context but also purpose, motivation, and meaning.

An educator study group that focused on social responsibility served as both inspiration and support for my work with reading shifts. Our particular study group began our collaborative study with an inquiry question that was relevant to our institutional context. We asked, “In a democracy, what are the responsibilities of privilege?”

Below are some artifacts from our collaborative work, including research outcomes and other impact. Also linked are presentations we have made related to the topic of social responsibility.

ARTICLES

Grassroots Growth: The Evolution of a Teacher Study Group (link)

The Community Read as a Vehicle for Infusing Social Responsibility into the Curriculum (link)

BRANDING; INCREASING IMPACT

Our study group developed a logo/brand, which we also copyrighted. With grant funds, we disseminated our logo across our district and beyond. Every educator in our school district was given an over-sized postcard bearing this card with the question on back “What is social responsibility?” We encouraged people to display these postcards and were delighted by the presence of the logo across the district and the associated impact of this presence.
With small grant funds, we purchased branded merchandise (“merch”), including tote bags, coffee mugs, key chains (shown above), bumper stickers and more. We distributed this merchandise to interested educators. We also used some of the merchandise as prizes for contests we ran, including a contest challenging educators to submit examples of curriculum/instruction that infused social responsibility into the curriculum. For a time, our grant funds allowed us to own an Internet domain, where our intention was to engage other schools in the type of activity that drawn interest in our district.

PRESENTATIONS

June 2012 Montclair State University Network for Educational Renewal (MSUNER) Spring Conference  (Montclair, NJ), “Incentivizing Staff Involvement with Infusing Social Responsibility into the Curriculum”

Oct. 2011 National Network for Educational Renewal Conference (Hartford, CT), “Increasing District Interest in Social Responsibility via a Community Read”

Nov. 2010 NCTE Annual Convention (Orlando, FL), “Reading & Writing as Acts of Awareness-Raising, Advocacy, and Activism: Infusing Social Responsibility into the High School English Classroom and Beyond”

WRITING INSTRUCTION

Writing is inseparable from reading, of course. For more than 35 years, I have been a teacher of writing at high school, undergraduate and graduate levels. My high school teaching has included four years of Creative Writing, along with AP Language and Composition and AP Literature and Composition I served as the Chair of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Achievement Awards in Writing Advisory Committee and as a member of the Editorial Review Board of English Journal. I have served as a journal editor (of New Jersey English Journal) and as the coordinator of a state-level annual writing contest.