Friday, November 21, 2025
Placemaking Literacies to Address Climate and Ecojustice Issues: K–12 Teacher Inquiry and Pedagogy-in-Action
11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. | Room 603, Meeting Room Level, Colorado Convention Center
This interactive panel highlights how ELA educators can focus on placemaking literacies to name relationships and knowledge that matter and locate issues within students’ spheres of influence. Panelists will articulate both how to grow educators’ own place-based knowledge related to issues of ecojustice and bring placemaking pedagogies to their work with K–12 students.
Saturday, November 22, 2025
Dreaming and Creating Our Shared Literacy Stories: Multicultural and Multilingual Children’s and Youth Literature
8:15–9:30 a.m. | Room 108/110, Meeting Room Level, Colorado Convention Center
This panel provides literature book recommendations and instructional strategies for using multicultural and multilingual children’s and youth literature. The presenters will share literature books that teachers could use to teach all students about intercultural awareness and language variations and their teaching practices using those books in different in-person and virtual contexts.
Train AI to Coach Young Writers: Learning to Harness and Shape the Remarkable Responsiveness of EdTech AI
8:15–9:30 a.m. | Mile High Ballroom 3B, Ballroom Level, Colorado Convention Center
As a writing coach, AI surprises with its insight into structure, craft, and meaning, its personalized feedback, and its instantaneity. It can help all writers and be transformative for multilingual learners. And AI-generated feedback can overwhelm and culturally flatten. Learn not only how to use but also how to coach AI to be a beautiful, ethical partner—and even an assistant with grading.
Kids Rise Up: Using Literacy Learning as a Vehicle for Civic Action
1:15–2:30 p.m. | Room 608, Meeting Room Level, Colorado Convention Center
What if young children were empowered to not only dream boldly but develop the skills necessary for creating positive change within their communities? Join us to explore how literacy instruction can be used to support students to build empathy, become aware of important issues, engage in productive dialogue, conduct critical research, and take action.
Augmenting Their Voices: Envisioning Dreams of Possibilities Through Culturally Diverse Literature
2:45–4:00 p.m. | Room 405, Meeting Room Level, Colorado Convention Center
As censorship efforts to ban children’s books increase, scripted programs and curricula are expanding in schools. Teachers’ need to critically evaluate and use culturally diverse texts is crucial. We employ the tenets of critical literacy to interrogate sample texts. This presentation shares teachers’ engagement with literature, particularly immigrant and rural African American experiences.
Roundtable: What is a Critically Literate Teacher in the Age of AI?
2:45–4:00 p.m. | Mile High Ballroom 4A/4B, Ballroom Level, Colorado Convention Center
In view of GenAI’s impacts on teaching, critical literacy offers a framework for response that questions emerging policies and practices. In this session, the roundtable facilitators will ask participants to consider the foundations of critical literacy in relation to AI praxis. The session will invite participants to share AI understandings grounded in the localized and (im)material.
Sunday, November 23, 2025
Big Dreams: Fostering Resilience Through Literacy
8:15–8:45 a.m. | Room 406, Meeting Room Level, Colorado Convention Center
Children are coming to school with levels of trauma and stress on scales we have never seen before. Resilience plays a key role in how children cope with adversity. As educators, we can help children develop strong social, emotional, communicative, and executive functioning skills that foster resilience from the inside and the outside—so that they do more than survive. They thrive. Let’s dream big.
The Nostalgia Project: Cultivating Students’ Dreams through Poetry, History, and Human Impact
9:00–10:15 a.m. | Room 304, Meeting Room Level, Colorado Convention Center
The Nostalgia Project is a four-part interdisciplinary unit encompassing language arts, social studies, math, and science that focuses on students as innovators and agents of change. Educators will attain project details in order to empower students to share their stories through poetry, to propose a solution to a community issue, and to collaborate with stakeholders to realize their dreams.
Teaching Asian American Experiences in the Past and Present Through Picturebooks
9:00–10:15 a.m. | Mile High Ballroom 2A, Ballroom Level, Colorado Convention Center
Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the US, and more picturebooks about them in the past and present are being published than ever before. This session brings together elementary educators, teacher educators, authors, and an illustrator to highlight Asian American historical events and contemporary experiences featured in recently published picturebooks.
Roundtable: How Can Literacy Teachers Reclaim the Right to Teach in Ways That Are Responsive to Our Kids, Our Setting, and Our Beliefs?
9:00–10:15 a.m. | Room 107/109/111, Meeting Room Level, Colorado Convention Center
Through roundtables and keynotes, participants will connect with others resisting attacks on teachers’ professionalism. This upbeat session will provide support and concrete suggestions for emphasizing teacher autonomy amid censorship, curriculum bans, and basal adoptions. Participants will strengthen their resolve to oppose one-size-fits-all curricula and nurture communities of practice.