1. Please share a bit about your professional and personal journey to literacy and education.
Sometimes I see the path as an accident, and other times as inevitable. I majored in English at UCLA, and wasn't sure what I was going to do with that degree, but all I wanted to study was literature, so that's how I chose the major. After college, I had two jobs in a row in offices—one a medical/legal office (strange, I know), and the second in a real estate management office. I was bored out of my mind. Then, over the summer, I needed to move back home to co-host a family member visiting from out of the country, and I needed a summer job, which turned out to be teaching. I was teaching SAT verbal courses and middle and high school literature courses to mostly Korean students in an academy meant to support students' work in schools. I was not a great teacher that summer, but was bitten, hard, by the teaching bug and that launched me.
But it didn't launch me into certification. When I went to my professor for a letter of reference for graduate school, he convinced me to apply to Ph.D programs in literature, if you can believe it. And, as a first-generation college student, I listened to any advice I received. So, I began doctoral studies in literature at UC Irvine where I lasted four years, and only because part of my fellowship included teaching an undergraduate course each quarter, which I loved. Alongside my doctoral studies, I kept teaching at the Korean academy, which I did for ten years. But I was not happy with my doctoral program, so I dropped out of it after completing all my coursework. It was the best decision I could have made.
Next, I applied for an emergency credential and got a job at my old middle school in Southern California, where I taught alongside my math teacher, whose retirement speech I gave. I loved this job and would have happily retired there. While there, I was completing my certification at CSULB, where, more than one professor asked me, "Have you ever considered getting a doctorate?" Not this again, I thought. But as it turned out, my life plans shifted a bit and I was looking to move to NYC for personal reasons, so again, seemingly by accident, I applied to doctoral studies, but this time in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Oh, and this time it stuck.
I lucked out an earned one of the full-time teaching positions while at TC, teaching five courses a year at the MA level, while completing my studies. It took me longer to graduate, but it meant I got to spend years of time supervising student teachers in NYC schools in four different boroughs; and I got to learn alongside very, very bright MA students.
And this earned me my current position at Westfield State University, a small, public university in Western Massachusetts. And I feel very, very lucky to be doing this work alongside bright, bright teachers, many of whom are first-generation like I was.
2. What do you see as primary concerns and/or celebrations in literacy right now?
I am very concerned about political efforts—successful efforts—to stymie the progress around antiracist (AR) ELA garnered as a result of a build-up of atrocities during the pandemic which included George Floyd's murder. Teachers who are ready and who want to do AR work are terrified about losing their jobs, getting targeted by parents or others in the community, not having administrative or collegial support to do what they know is right and needs to happen.
The celebrations are that teachers are far, far smarter than scripted curricula, and threats of sending "stormtroopers" into schools to ensure that teachers are abiding by anti-CRT legislation. Subversive teaching is not new to a profession that has been here before.
3. What message, in sum, would you share with teachers from your work at present?
My research and teaching right now focuses on antiracist ELA strategies, and strategies that help teachers name and address classism in literature and in lives. While antiracist ELA strategies have gotten more attention of late than they have in generations, ELA teaching remains class-blind, and this, too, needs to change. My message to teachers comes straight from the dialogues that I am currently transcribing from my university teaching and research about social class and about race and racism: students come alive when they are challenged to take up previously silenced discourses and content, they feel dignified in being trusted with difficult content, and they desire to be part of these conversations and to feel equipped to make a difference.
4. Please tell us about your texts, Letting Go of Literary Whiteness and Rethinking the "Adolescent" in Adolescent Literacy, as well as any other titles or links to work you'd like to share.
Rethinking the "Adolescent" in Adolescent Literacy and "The Youth Lens" article that preceded it, as well as a string of research articles that I wrote and co-wrote (with Robert Petrone & Mark Lewis) all came out of recognition of my own blind spots around adolescence. While in my doctoral program, I picked up Lesko's Act Your Age!, which exposes adolescence as a cultural construct, and I knew that I was implicated in thinking through adolescent stereotypes. At the time, I was teaching a YAL course at the MA level, so I brought in these ideas to see how teacher candidates responded to them, and we saw the relevance of this critique right away.
With Letting Go, my ignorance preceded my reading and scholarship. I already knew that I didn't know how to address race and racism effectively in ELA, especially for my primarily white teacher candidates. It was the result of wishing for a way to figure this out that my collaboration with Carlin Borsheim-Black began. We both knew about effective ways to teach and to work with students of color, but not how to do that in white-dominant contexts. That's what we set out to figure out together, and the result is all in our book, and in our recent 2022 article, "High Fidelity", published in English Education.
While I continue to work on antiracist ELA practices, mostly through an ongoing study with in-service teachers after they've taken AR coursework and share about and troubleshoot together about what to do with the in-school challenges they face, I am also working on addressing social class in the ELA classroom. If addressing race in ELA has been mostly silent in schools except in schools with a majority population of students of color, even fewer schools are sites where teachers are addressing social class as content, as a way to interpret literature and their lives. Part of the problem, in my view, is that efforts to focus on class have relied on Marxist understandings of social class. These are useful as a critique of capitalism, but not as useful for most texts that are not directly taking on a critique of capitalism (e.g., Animal Farm, The Hunger Games). What has been useful to me and to teachers with whom I am working is understanding social class through a cultural approach, one that focuses on what it feels like to live classed lives under capitalism. What teachers are realizing is that tons of literature focuses on social class—think Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, anything by Dickens—but the ways in which most of us know to address class is to name the class standing of the characters, and move on. What I am working on is populating our vocabulary with the ways in which class is felt, class difference is emotionally responded to. This approach gives us many pathways for deepening our engagements with literature that already evokes class, but even more, gives us avenues for understanding our own lives, suffering that is class-based. I already co-guest edited a special issue of English Journal with Amanda Haertling Thein on social class in ELA in March 2022 (https://library.ncte.org/journals/ej/issues/v111-4), and I am now writing up one of my studies on this topic. I am very, very excited about this work and how it might help teachers help students develop more critical muscle around social class.
5. What do you envision on the horizon for the future of literacy education?
Jason, I am amazed, still, that I see things on the horizon of my own scholarship still. I don't presume to see ahead to the field at large. I just tackle the problems that stare me in the face, the problems I see my students and teachers in the field facing, to help make schooling and learning ELA a better experience for all students.