Professional Development, Reflection

NCTE Reflections Part Three

Gareth Hinds delivering the Sunday keynote

I reflected on Friday and Saturday at this year’s NCTE conference in previous posts. This post is my final reflection on Sunday’s events.

Session K started before the Sunday Keynote. I attended K.06: Public Rhetoric: Agency, Voice, and Mission in the Public Sphere, a roundtable discussion. The session included three roundtable discussions. I rotated among tables led by Jennifer Ansbach, Debbie Greco, and Camille Marchand. Jen discussed the shifting nature of language in the news, Debbie discussed memes as visual rhetoric, and Camille discussed using primary source documents (letters) to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. Great first session!

After session K, Gareth Hinds delivered his keynote. I created a Storify to document my own tweets and capture highlights from other attendees.

I especially enjoyed seeing Gareth’s early work.

I captured a bit of video as he did a live demonstration, too.

I enjoyed Jim Burke’s session L.18: Seeing and Hearing Each Other through Nonfiction: For the Good of Kids and Country as well. Jim shared his resources and expertise. One big takeaway from his session:

We need to think about our students as users and design accordingly.

I couldn’t stay for all of session M because I was afraid I’d be late for my own session, but it was amazing. M.08: Breaking the Classroom to Prison Pipeline. The title might have been a bit misleading as it was really more about seeing our students and social justice. I was curious about the session because its leaders were Linda Christensen and Dyan Watson. I knew that Linda Christensen has done a lot of work in social justice in education. I recently ordered two of her books to read. It was a really great session with opportunities to write and turn and talk. I left it a few minutes early to hustle across the convention center for my session.

I presented N.18: Representing, Rendering, and Respecting Diverse Lives and Labels with Ruth Quiroa and Leah Panther. My topic was digital storytelling.

One more minor complaint: NCTE made a deal with the GO Shuttle shared van service, and it was a great discount. Unfortunately, as far as I could determine, the latest shuttle to the airport on Sunday left at 3:00 PM, which was in the middle of the last session. I tried lying about when my flight left to see if there were any later shuttles, and I couldn’t find any. Obviously, this means anyone taking advantage of the great shuttle deal had to leave early. I doubt this is NCTE’s fault, but I wonder if they took it into consideration when they made the deal with Go Shuttle. It was about three times as expensive for me to get an Uber ride to the airport, as I couldn’t take advantage of the shuttle deal. The last session of the last day is hard all the way around, but I felt bad for my fellow presenters who had prepared great presentations. I am glad I have friends who came to my session at the end of the conference on Sunday at the end of the day.