Thursday, November 19
Beyond ELA: Disciplinary Literacy, Foundational Skills, and Critical Inquiry in Middle School at Community Lab School
1:00–2:15 p.m. | 115-C, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Middle school can be challenging for students who continue to struggle with foundational reading skills. This roundtable highlights a community lab school model where all content-area teachers share responsibility for disciplinary and foundational literacy through inquiry, collaboration, and Science of Reading–informed, critical instruction.
Stories of Possibility: How English Language Arts Teachers Reimagine Learning across Contexts
1:00–2:15 p.m. | 202-B, 200 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
This panel showcases how reciprocal relationships between teachers and teacher educators can push instructional boundaries across elementary, secondary, and youth prison-school contexts. Audience members will explore innovative pedagogies, reflect on their experiences, and share strategies for uncovering possibilities for justice-oriented literacy practices in their own classrooms.
Friday, November 20
From Recipe to Remix: Chaos Cooking and Innovation in the Writing Classroom
12:30–1:45 p.m. | 115-A, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Experience the “sensory bustle” of kitchen-inspired lessons with presenters including English teachers and an award-winning cookbook author. This session explores how chaos cooking translates to chaos writing: both honor foundational techniques while encouraging improvisation. Participants tackle a “Mystery Basket” challenge, applying culinary innovation strategies to student writing in an AI era.
Imagining Beside Emeriti: Inspiring Students to Engage
12:30–1:45 p.m. | 118-C, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
If teachers only taught, the profession would stagnate. The best teachers also learn. In this session, three retired teachers share what they learned from more than 100 years of teaching. They were inspired by literature, professional leadership, and literacy publications to imagine how their students could deeply engage in writing, reading, and inquiry.
Conferring with Artists, Writers, and Storytellers: Imagining and Inspiring through Dialogue
3:30–4:45 p.m. | 103-B, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Grounded in Reggio Emilia principles and Paulo Freire’s liberating pedagogy, this session reimagines conferring as a dialogic practice with writers, artists, and storytellers. Rather than a banking model of instruction, conferences become spaces of mutual inquiry where educators and children co-investigate ideas, meanings, and possibilities through the hundred languages of expression.
Saturday, November 21
Youth Truth: Examining Trends and Imagining Possibilities for Teaching with Young Adult Nonfiction
11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. | 204-B, 200 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Young adult nonfiction is one of the most innovative categories in contemporary YA literature, including subcategories like youth-authored nonfiction and graphic memoir. This interactive session invites attendees to reimagine YA nonfiction as story-based nonfiction about, for, and even by young adults through teaching applications, examples, and a celebration of this inspiring genre.
Reimagining Read-Alouds through Trilingual and Multimodal Pedagogy
1:15–2:30 p.m. | 105-A, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Do you want to learn strategies and resources for teaching literacy with trilingual students? The panel will model a trilingual read-aloud and share multimodal activities, including oral narration, gestures, visuals, and collaborative talk. Participants are invited to join the discussion and leave with culturally responsive literacy practices that challenge English-only norms for young learners.
Motivating Students with Homegrown Writers: Building Pride and Inspiration while Countering Negative Stereotypes
3:30–4:00 p.m. | Room 121-C, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Identity-based motivation matters most where cultural stereotypes limit students’ beliefs about who gets to be a reader or writer. West Virginia’s free Voices of West Virginia digital archive inspires pride, creativity, and student voice while offering a powerful, adaptable model for other states.
Incorporating Multilingual Songs in Literacy Education
4:15–5:30 p.m. | 124, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
This panel provides literature recommendations and instructional strategies for using multicultural and multilingual songs in literacy education. Presenters will share practices in K–12 and college contexts and multilingual songs and literature books that teachers can use with all students to promote intercultural awareness, language variations, and multiliteracy development.Come and sing with us.
Stories, Not Souvenirs: Writing and Teaching Global Picturebooks without an Outsider Lens
4:15–5:30 p.m. | 106-AB, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Picturebooks set outside the US are often framed through an American or outsider “tour guide” lens. In this panel, contemporary picturebook creators share strategies for writing and teaching global stories that center character, relationships, setting, and text features—resisting cultural flattening and offering concrete, classroom-ready approaches to anti-exoticized literary study.
Sunday, November 22
Building Empathy in Literature through Centering Student Experiences
9:00–10:15 a.m. | 109-A, 100 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Discover actionable strategies for inspiring empathy in secondary ELA by centering student experiences and leveraging diverse, culturally responsive texts. Panelists share ready-to-use lessons, rubrics, prompts, and organizers that support belonging, academic rigor, and joyful engagement for all learners, including ESL students, so literature becomes relevant, reflective, and transformative.
Reimagining Writing Instruction to Cultivate Diverse Students’ Joy and Educational Freedom
9:00–10:15 a.m. | 203-A, 200 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Language Arts’s “Writing Matters” column authors will address elementary writing that illuminates authentic purposes centering cultural, historical, and linguistic equity for diverse learners. Presenters will offer critical perspectives on how to write the self as abolitionist practice, integrate culturally and historically responsive writing, set conditions for joyful literacy, and translanguage.