Disorderly Contexts: ELAC Conference 2024

Safetyism, cancel culture, and feeling ‘on eggshells’ around sensitive topics can bring classroom activities and discussion to a screeching halt. How can we hold space for challenging topics, authentic literature, and examining multiple views, while offering our students a high level of interaction? Paradoxically, it is only when we feel safe that we can take risks. Supporting students means going beyond helping them build resiliency; becoming antifragile thinkers and doers means moving towards skilled connection-building and practicing effective discourse. In this session, I’ll share strategies and hands-on interactive practices developed through literary and methodological research. You’ll try out and gain activities developed in and for high school classrooms, designed to help teachers encourage and promote learner engagement, multi-perspective critical thinking, and supportive sharing, between students and with parents and other stakeholders when using uncomfortable and brave texts. Classrooms offer a uniquely safe space, a space we can hold space for our learners taking up the challenges of literacy. If not here, then where? This session offers ideas of ‘how’.