Beyond Silos: Justice-Minded Conversations and Collaborations Across Contexts and Spaces - 5

• In Event: Beyond Silos: Justice-Minded Conversations and Collaborations Across Contexts and Spaces

Abstract

Panelist5 is a certified school media specialist and grant writer with a focus on adolescent literacy working in a public middle school with an 80% ELL and 100% Title I population.
Panelist5 is a practitioner who actively works to implement sustainable and systemic changes, building readers and leaders through collaboration with teachers and community-based organizations. Panelist5’s work to help students grow critical social and emotional skills, support gender choice with access to information, and address student trauma through the creation of collaborative media projects.

Panelist5’s experience celebrates cultural diversity to advance academic growth and co-create a caring and balanced world in a state that has established a reputation for censorship and book banning. Perspective and examples of collaborative partnerships to be shared include a funded grant implementation of converging areas of research (Osher et al., 2017) with small collaborative groups of students developing solutions to real-world issues, then creating them in Minecraft for education, and daily surveys on students’ individual dashboards asking them to assess themselves and their teammates on 15 categories of measurable Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) criteria. SEL is now referred to in Florida as Skills for Life and Learning (SLL) as SEL was deemed politically charged. Evidence-based practices were guided by student interests and facilitated for them across disciplines and silos, including a school-wide AI Media Literacy Project. (222 words)

Author

• April Leach, Literacy Unleashed: Designs for Integrated Learning