Leigh Patel and Shawna Coppola

episode 33 to the classroom podcast

February 12, 2024

Jennifer Serravallo:

Welcome, Dr. Leigh Patel. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Leigh Patel:

Thank you so much. I'm so pleased to be in conversation with you, Jen.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I was so inspired by your post titled, "What I Learned from Debating The Science of Reading more than 20 years ago is Still True." Early on in the blog post you write, "As I've been following the science of reading, I've been amazed and disturbed at the absence of what research tells us about place, race, and culture." And then you mentioned that often the fields of sociology, anthropology, social geography, are left out of conversations about research informed instruction. So I thought we could start off by just talking about that. What are we missing out on by not including the scholarship from those fields?

Leigh Patel:

Yeah, thank you for that question. I mean, in a word, we're missing context. Basically, we're missing the context of where people live, what's accessible in their area. We're missing the context of what has been taken to be, to use one example just coming out of a baby shower yesterday where it was a beautiful idea. Instead of cards just bring books instead. I'm like, oh, that's great. And that also really dovetails into this idea that reading aloud to children and that snuggle time is one of the secure ways that children would become literate. And that is not true, but that's true, but it's not the only truth that's absolutely impactful and important, but it's not the only route to literacy. And so in thinking about Jen, the words that you, thank you again for reading the essay or the blog entry. Yeah, we're missing context. There's so many things we can't get away still from the fact that our teacher profession is largely white female, upper middle class, I think middle class, we kind of have that for a while, but that blip is out and very monolingual. And that could be monolingual academic American English, but it also, it just means that for children who are coming from homes where they don't speak academic American English with their parents, that their educators are facing a really tough challenge. And most of our speaking as an education professor at our schools of education, we tend to acquiesce to what do children need to be proficient? But we rarely ask what do teachers need to be able to meet students' needs? For me, that's all in context.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Thank you. That's really helpful. And one of the things I love about your post is that you weave stories that just really help bring a lot of these points to life. And of course, I'm going to link to the post in the show notes, so I encourage people to go read the full story. But I'm wondering if as an example, you could talk briefly about your story with Brandon, the eighth grader, because I think that that story really helps to bring this problem with context or lack of context to life.

Leigh Patel:

Thank you. I appreciate that. So I had been teaching language arts for a number of years at a middle school. I kept taking courses at the mid seventies, not very attractive, very large public school, public university down the street from where I taught middle school. And there was a reading clinic there. So in the course of being certified and taking the courses to become a reading specialist, one of the requirements was to be part of this reading clinic. And I said to the professor who was running it, because I had taught high school and middle school also initially scared me, but then I was like, oh, they're all shorter than I am. But then by the hall I was like, ah, they're all taller than me now. But still, that was my safety zone was middle school students, high school students. So I asked this professor, would you pretty pretty pleased not pair me with a young child? And she gave me one of the most valuable gifts in my life is she did that. But she paired me with a person who was an eighth grader at the time, Brandon, who the word illiterate was in lots of his school records.

And I was lucky to know from a young age, and I think there's something in there about being the daughter of immigrants, I've always known that people are always literate in many, many ways. So to say that somebody is illiterate is usually lifting up written language. And so they're illiterate in written language. And in that essay, one of the stories that I find still really resonant is when other teachers were telling me about Brandon, because I asked him of his teachers and he can't read. And I said, I bet he can read the look on your face when you say that he can't read. So with Brandon, it was just an amazing educative space for me. He grew also and he was an amazing collaborative maker of knowledge and what counts as reading and how we go about this thing, how we go about it.

When Brandon is in eighth grade, he does not want to be reading baby books. It's insulting to him. He's had that insult for a number of years. Upon other insults, it matters that he was a black young person. It matters that he's a black man today. All of that matters because he experienced school as a place where he would be measured, mostly inadequate, behind, remedial, at risk, a lot of the verbiage that we use. So having the reading clinic as a space where he and I got to interact on a weekly basis and design what would be good for him with the goal of him. As you know, Jennifer, having read the essay with the goal of him, he wanted to no longer be embarrassed at school. It was embarrassing to him. And I still think now what an amazing thing that is. The way we socialize boys and men not to have emotions, for him to express that and how, well, he reminded me back when I used a book that he said, that's a baby book.

You told me that we were not going to have to do this. So I think this is some of the magic and what's so hard and beautiful about teaching, like, you're right. Let me take a step back. I violated what we had agreed to, and I will forever or cherish that. Brandon gave me a chance to do that. And it was really a pretty simple problem to solve. It was that I did the more simplistic thing of just reaching for the book that said, this is the level that this person is at. And he said, no, you said you were going to help me not do that anymore. So Brandon was just really such a beautiful story of agency, of wayfinding, of life making and standing strong and what he needed to be true.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah, I love that story too, for how you bring out how every student teaches us things if we're open to listening and open to receiving the lessons that they're teaching us. And I also love the story because it's a great example of one of your other points in the essay, which is that the idea of a singular reading approach is not going to save us, right? That is not what's going to you say "will not save us from racial capitalism, let alone help us build freedom" that was not pulling a book off the shelf, following a script, doing it the same way it's always been done. That's not what helped Brandon. It took you listening, you adapting, you tailoring. So I'd love to hear if you can expand a little bit more upon this idea of how one size fits all is not the way to go.

Leigh Patel:

Yeah, Jen, I honestly believe that most teachers know that deep down. I think that we get socialized in a lot of buying. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. No,

Jennifer Serravallo:

I was going to say I agree. I think it's not teachers that are saying it's got to only be one way or that one way fits all.

Leigh Patel:

Yeah, no, that's more honest researchers who are like, this is the way, this is how you do it, and wow, here's a package that will do that. But I think most human beings know that there's never, a single way is never as simple as a binary of this is right and this is wrong. And I appreciate you bringing up that quote as well. It's a long essay, but that's one of my favorite sentences in it, is that it goes back to context. So to understand Brandon's experiences in school, there's no way of approaching that with integrity, without understanding racial capitalism and how in this nation we've created and been in the business of creating excess, excess to be in detention centers, excess to be in prisons excess, to be in afterschool detention rooms where we've even had the audacity of taking children out of their classrooms and putting them in a hallways because we deemed their behavior is really off.

And that is always racialized, gendered, classed, sexed. It's all enabled. It's all operating at the same time. So the questions that are hard to grapple with is what are the ways they're all interacting in those moments? And that question for me is not about finding blame and assigning blame to a single person or a single entity, but being curious about how we've built these categories and how they interact with each other and the beauty in understanding how racial capitalism works. And Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes this so beautifully and so consistently and somehow with a smile like Ruth Wilson Gilmore's been writing about racial capitalism forever and just smiling when she's talking about it. And I'm like, this is a great thing. Her smile is that because we created it, that means we can change it. So with Brandon and many, many children, especially now that when I was a full-time teacher, which I'm not anymore a full-time K 12 teacher, it's silly for me to even think I would be able to get up at that hour and make words.

But it's a nice fantasy and I'll hang onto it for a little while. So much public space has been privatized and that's capitalism. So much space understands people to be potential criminals and people who just belong by the way that they are read. That's all racial capitalism. So when I have been reading the Science of Reading lots of things, I'll just say echo chambers, spikes, canyons, what I thought, what I was really disturbed by, I don't understand how there's not a context of racial capitalism being spoken about here because it's all taking place within, at least not completely, but at least the structure of racial capitalism and acknowledging that that structure is happening actually gives us more agency to create a space, create a place maybe called freedom and keep creating it where we read and we become literate in many, many ways because it helps us stay human.

I remember one time walking down a street where there were a number of different storefronts. It was a somewhat urban area, and there was a person who I think was maybe a mom person, and there was a younger person who I think was maybe that parent's child person, I don't know. I was making some assumptions and they were standing in front of a shoe store and what I assumed to be the caregiver was asking this child, tell me all the different colors of shoes that you see and what are the different kinds of shoes that you see?

And I thought, wow, that's school right there. That's how school operates is just identify the things, explain it, put it in categories. And that took place within a neighborhood, a district, a community where that shoe store existed and comes from a culture that somehow whoever this caregiver was knew to ask questions that are very common in school settings. Can you list out for me which of these things are similar? Which one is not like the other ones? So there are some children because race and class are so intertwined in this nation and have been on purpose from the start, from European arrival, which is not the start, but that is that juncture of time that people have five years of schooling before they hit the doors of kindergarten. So schooling just feels a lot like the same as home. You listen to the person who's in front of the classroom, you follow the directions, you don't speak.

When you're not supposed to speak, you raise your hand. And all of these things are racialized. And many young people and families live in neighborhoods where access, not necessarily shoe stores, but yeah, shoe stores, but also healthy, live food, public spaces like parks. And also just the ability to be in those spaces have time to do that. And I think we all know that it takes so much more time and effort to be poor than it does to be upper middle class or even wealthy. It takes a lot more time and effort. So even if we imagined a lot of the black communities and immigrant communities and neighborhoods that have had a lot of extractions stripped out of those extraction of public spaces, extraction of spaces where young people and families can gather together, those have all been stripped out. There's still the fact that when people are on the lower end of racial capitalism, they're working so much more. Their commute time is so much more to their job and their job is also less forgiving if they get there on time, if they don't get there on time. So standing in front of a shoe store, multiply less on offer for people who have been raced in classed in a way that minors them.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Thank you. I'm wondering too how assessments play into all of this, into this categorization and this labeling and this kind of way that school operates from state tests to NAEP, to screening tools to progress monitoring. If you talk to teachers today, most of them will complain about the number of assessments. That there's more time spent testing in some cases than even teaching, which is problematic. But I'm wondering about how we privilege the results of these assessments, the assessments orientation to standard American English, a variety of things I'm kind of thinking about. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on these different kinds of assessments and how they contribute to the problem or if there's a way to use them for good,

Leigh Patel:

Yeah, maybe use them a little bit more are from an informed place. And what I mean by informed is understanding what we can know from bell curve based standardized assessments and what we can't know from those things. So when I had the honor, deep, deep honor of being in charge of literacy for the state of Hawaii, which is a lot, and I just have lots of admiration for people who step into those kinds of roles and carry a lot of really fraught tensions of how to proceed when people want, we tend to want things that are, but what do we do? Give us the thing to do, which is not at all an unreasonable ask. It's just that complex things sometimes cannot just be made simple. They're complex. So in that role, and since then it's been very helpful for me to continue to remind myself, and actually Brandon comes back into this story, is that I could see all the standardized assessment results of Brandon and in which year and month he was designated to be assessed at.

And it told me almost nothing about him. And as a state level policy maker, I needed some kind of read of what was going on at a very superficial level. But that's really all I could ask of that standardized assessment. And I still appreciate you bringing up that teachers also, we were talking about teachers before, I don't think anybody goes into teaching because they just can't wait to assess their students every single chance they get. I don't think people enter the profession with that intention. And that also harms teachers when and teachers opt out and have been very brave in doing so and should continue to do so. But sometimes there is this pull that maybe is a little bit too comfortable with the surveillance and understand giving too much credence to what a standardized test score can tell us. And I say that with a lot of empathy and love for teachers are hitting walls of just test, test, test, test, test.

So there's a reason why teachers don't have a whole lot of time to talk to each other, to take a pause to plan together because then they might say, I don't think we actually need this thing, so let's opt out as a school. But schools aren't really designed that way for teachers to be able to speak with each other, which is one of the things that I really value about this podcast is like, well, let's get into it. Let's talk with some people. Let's try to make some meaning. We don't get to do that too much is teachers.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that this kind of fits in with the shoe store categorization and it fits in with one of your other claims in the piece about how binaries kill nuance and how it's important to look at the nuance and the complexity and how challenging it is. And there's this comfort, I think, for some people to the quantitative printout of what grade level are they on, what skills have they mastered? Especially for people looking at a district level or you had a whole state level, you need some data to look at to see is what we're doing working. And yet a lot of what needs to happen lives in that nuance. It lives in that things that can't be measured in this way, I think.

Leigh Patel:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that as human beings, and I really love the way that Grace Lee Boggs talks about this and or a piece called "Organization Means Commitment." And she says in a way that I just, many people have brilliant ways of talking about the United States, James Baldwin. Nothing has ever been written that can contend with the more beautiful and the more terrible that is a reality of the United States. Grace Lee Boggs writes, an organization means commitment that the United States has developed its wealth and developed industry at the expense of humanity. And so she said, so all we're trying to do is be more human beings. And so thinking about those test scores, these data sheets, how much it can feel a little bit comforting, like, okay, I've got some information here.

I just will always go down fighting that people can handle nuance. People can handle complex things, especially if we give them the space to do that, to be with the nuance and to be with the complexity and to genuinely not know, try to not know more than what a data sheet can tell us from a standardized assessment. That was a lot of what we tried to do in Hawaii. Ye in that role where I just got to work with amazing teachers, this wonderful group of teachers. We just tried to help classroom teachers build their formative assessment knowledge so that they would be more informed, be able to interact with children, be doing assessments about orthography, meaning-making decoding essential, creating texts, doing all of this, and so that they would also be able to say, this is what I know about my students and it's based on this evidence.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Well, your article ends with this beautiful vision for the kinds of literacies and the kind of literate lives you'd like young people to learn in school and practice throughout their lifetimes. And I'd love for you to end today by sharing some of that vision. And again, I'll link to the piece in the show notes and I hope everyone checks it out.

Leigh Patel:

Thank you. Yeah, I think what I was feeling in that closing after having written about three stories, and I thought I should probably end this with some kind love letter because I'm asking us to study and struggle. And Robin DG Kelly teaches us that the thing is, if you want freedom, you have to want it for everyone. You can't want it for just some. So part of that, the closing of that essay is that I just dream and want for children to be seen and teachers and their caregivers to be seen in their full humanity. I would love if education actually embrace the fact that we will make mistakes. We make them all the time, but those are the places where we usually learn the most. We need the most support and we learn the most. Some of those moments that not getting it right is actually some of our most grace-filled moments in our lives. And I would love for all children to try and try and try and try and experiment and play. And when things don't work out, it doesn't work. And well, that's not how I thought was going to go. Just feel, think like, wow, okay, why didn't that go the way I thought it was going to go? How come you made meaning of this story in a really different way than I did and have that latitude to just be able to speak and make meaning together?

I think some of what I was trying to just dream about at the end of that essay are things that we know that we are never just reading a book all alone by ourselves. We're in conversation with the author, the context that they wrote the book and their friends. And I know that it's so important. James Baldwin was so close to Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone that we're so interdependent. And to be able to dream wildly and let children refuse these labels, which also kind of helps out the caregivers in their lives as well, really helps their teachers. I just would love to see more of a release in this society that tends to be fascinated with singular measures. And I think why I was closing with that was trying to do a loop back to an earlier part in the essay is that as researchers, we tend to make this really classic arrogant mistake over and over and over again. We find a measurable thing and then we make it the totality of what it means to be in this case, literate. And we can refuse that.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Thank you, Dr. Patel. Thank you so much for your words, your scholarship. Thank you for your time. I'm really inspired by this conversation.

Leigh Patel:

Thank you, Jen. Please call me Leigh. I'm incredibly honored and thank you so much for reading the essay, putting together questions, for creating this podcast, for feeding a need of thinking with each other and trying to make sense of it together. That's a fantastically beautiful praxis that I honestly, I think all teachers want and need.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Thank you.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I am so excited to welcome my friend and colleague, Shawna Coppola for our post conversation. Shana is an author and an educator. In fact, she's a new book coming out, literacy for All, which I haven't yet read, but I assume is going to overlap with some of the same themes and topics that we just talked about. So she was top of my list for people to invite to have this post conversation. Shauna, thank you so much for making the time.

Shawna Coppola:

Well, thank you for having me. And as Dr. Patel was talking and you were in conversation with each other, I just kept thinking, I wish that this had happened before I wrote my book, because it just echoes so much of what's in there and I could have cited the podcast.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Well, I'm glad to have your thoughts about the conversation now. And I know that you are both a big thinker and research informed, but also really practical and grounded in classrooms and you understand the landscape of teaching and learning. And so I'm wondering what kinds of things off the top of your head from listening to that conversation are you thinking we can do, what are the actionable, practical things that we should be thinking about?

Shawna Coppola:

Well, one of the things that I am thinking a lot about with the story of Brandon in particular is just this idea of story in general and how important it's to tell stories. And that's one of the reasons why I love Dr. Patel's post specifically with the three stories because I'm just not a natural storyteller myself. I think a lot about Difa i's work around social change, and she has this framework with all these different roles, and one of the roles is storyteller. And I feel like Dr. Patel is a storyteller. She's a natural storyteller. Whereas I'm more of a disruptor.

I sort of aspire to be a weaver. And so that speaks to the idea of context weavers see the through lines of connectivity through all of these different things that we do and talk about. But one of the things that I've done with groups of teachers is really look at the story of a student, the holistic story of a student. And so as she was talking and as I was reading her post over and over again, definitely one people should read more than once. I've read this four times. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's so rich. I was thinking about the work that I do that's connected to the work of Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan with Street Data and how they talk about the different levels of data and what kinds of things we learned from those levels. And when we think the typical types of data that we look at in schools and what they say, what story they tell about students, it's so often those sort of deficit stories like, this person can't do this, they don't know how to do this.

They are underdeveloped in this. And when I've done this and when I've asked teachers I've worked with to look at the more holistic story and to compare and contrast what different levels of data tell about a student, what kind of stories they tell, oftentimes they don't match up. There's lots of things missing. So I think one of the things that we can do as educators right now is to think about what are the different stories of students that we can tell through the use of something like street data through the use of observation and documentation and really close reading of student work that we can't see with the kinds of assessments that we typically privilege in school spaces. That has been really powerful for me and for the teachers that I've had the privilege of working with.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I think that's so important. I think about things that you can learn from watching as kids are working independently, keeping an eye on signs of engagement, signs of disengagement, keeping a checklist, really practical. I watch kids when I'm teaching them in a one-on-one conference. I watch their eyes, I watch their mannerisms, I watch their body language. I know if what I'm saying is confusing them or frustrating them, or you can almost see the light go off. That's nothing you can get from any kind of quantitative, especially computer-based measure. You've got to couple it with the observation that only a human can do. And I think that's encouraging in this age of AI assisted everything. I wonder sometimes will computers ever replace teachers? But I just don't think if you really value the human element that a human teacher brings to a human student and Dr. Patel's focus on humanizing and being more human, that element of what we can see, what we observe. I haven't read Street Data, but I'm interested in reading it now.

Shawna Coppola:

Oh my gosh. I mean, it's just one of those touchstone texts that I have on my table at all to my desk at all times. And I think about, I always go back to this one student because she's sort of my touchstone student when I talk about this kinds kinds of things. And everything that Dr. Patel spoke to in terms of specifically reading and what the satellite data and that overarching data, the high stake standardized assessments and the snapshot standardized assessments, what that told about her was essentially just what she was missing from what we consider to be on grade level or developmentally appropriate literacy and language skills. And yet when I worked with her in the classroom, I was like, she is one of the most gifted storytellers that I've ever worked with. I worked with her specifically in kindergarten, first grade. She had an incredible sense of humor that was the voice that was in her work already as a first grader was incredible.

And there's so much I could say about her, but if she had not been in a classroom, number one where her teacher, and this is another thing we can do practically, is really broadened her idea of what text is and what we accept as text in our classroom. Because she was lucky enough to be in a classroom where her teacher was willing to broaden that idea. And so they were able to make books. They were able to make their own picture books their own comics, and that's where we saw her genius come out. And that would not have been the case if we had only looked at those kinds of data that we typically privilege in school.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Well, I'll shout out

Shawna Coppola:

It's pretty powerful. Yeah,

Jennifer Serravallo:

Your book writing redefined for more on that because it's such a brilliant book. Oh, thank you. About these different modalities or ways of composing and publishing your writing and ways of thinking about just cracking open what even writing is and the kinds of writing that's possible in a classroom. It's such a brilliant book, but I think it's not just, of course, I think it's not just the type of data that I'm collecting, but it's also an asset-based approach that you bring to the evaluation of the data, which is critical, right? It's what I hear you talking about. Even if you said she's writing these brilliant stories, I asked for an essay, but you're writing stories, I could look at that and say, that's wrong. You're writing in the wrong genre. Or I could say you have ideas embedded within a story structure that's brilliant. So it's about intentionally, which reminds me of Goldie Muhammad's work intentionally looking for that brilliance and intentionally looking for the strength that all students bring.

Shawna Coppola:

And starting with that.nYes. And starting with that. And also just speaking of that importance of asset-based work. I think a lot about what Dr. Patel said about the communities and the homes from which students come to us in all variety, this privileging of this white mainstream monolingual home where when she was telling the story about the shoe store, I kept thinking about, oh my gosh. There was a part in the book where I write about known answer questions and how students who come from homes, households that ask those kind of known answer questions where you already know the answer, what are you supposed to do during bathtime? Again, that is a very white middle class thing that several researchers have found. And so those children already come to school. Having that sort of school-based knowledge around even questions and answers in many cases, that puts them at an advantage. And so I think a lot about that whole context and what are the cultural and social practices around literacy and language that we have outside of school spaces and how can we bring that more into school spaces and stop centering those same kinds of language and literacy practices that we're always centering and that we've always centered.

Jennifer Serravallo:

It's hard though, when you have standards that center a certain type of skills and you have curricular materials that have teachers teaching in a certain way. You have assessments that are looking for particular evidence of particular skills. It becomes hard to break out of that for sure.

Shawna Coppola:

It does. And I am dealing with it right now because right now I'm working with undergraduate students at a community college, and as part of the English department, there are certain assignments I have to assign being part of this department. And I find myself, we're in the middle of one of them that is supposed to be 20% of their grade right now. And I have a lot of multilingual students and a lot of students who are first generation college students. And I just find myself apologizing over and over again to them because everything that we're doing for this is so, it feels so inauthentic. And it's not the way I would typically approach this kind of piece. But I think the power, what we can do as teachers is to make visible those power structures and the reasons why things are the way they are.

And so when we talk about something like citing your sources, we talk about where MLA came from, who started the Modern Language Association and why? What was their, and I show them pictures of the people. And so they're starting to say, okay, so was this just another white guy saying we should do this? And I'm like, yes, actually it was so-and-so, and it was back in 18 such and such. So I think teaching students about, I can talk to that way to my college students, my undergrads. I of course use different language with younger students, but telling them about making those decisions and those structures visible is just really important. And we can do that as teachers in K to 12 schools too.

Jennifer Serravallo:

It makes me think about context like she was saying, as much as we need to understand the context of the learners who are coming into our classroom when we have these, I mean MLA format's kind of arbitrary when we have these

Shawna Coppola:

Rules around, it's so arbitrary

Jennifer Serravallo:

Why the period needs to go inside of the quotes...when you have these rules, give them the context. Here's why this is, here's why. It's the agreed upon convention, we're just going to do it. But know the history and know the context. It's important

Shawna Coppola:

And know that you can ask questions. And when I first started teaching and students would ask questions like that, why do we have to do this? Or why do we have to dah dah, dah, dah? I mean, I was socialized to think that was kind of disrespectful to ask those kinds of questions. I mean, I've come a long way in the 25 years since I started teaching and now I'm always like, you know what? That's actually a really good question. If I dunno the answer to it, we find out. So it's really fun and I think it feels empowering to be able to ask those kinds of questions. And for a teacher to say, you know what? That's actually a really good question. Let's find out together. So that's one of my favorite parts of my job.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I love that you're teaching college kids writing. That's amazing.

Shawna Coppola:

It's really fun. And their language is so, I mean, all the different languages that they come with are just so beautiful. And there's so much, there was a part in Leigh's piece where she talks about, I'm sorry, it was something about..

Jennifer Serravallo:

Was it her mom? The story of her mom?

Shawna Coppola:

Oh yes. Thank you so much. There was a part in the piece where Dr. Patel talks about her mom and her feeling insecure about her language. I don't remember the exact story at the moment, but I see that a lot. And I hear that a lot with my students because so many of them are multilingual. And they'll say before they read something aloud or before they show me a piece of their work, they always apologize. And I tried to say, there's no reason to apologize. Your language is beautiful. I love, love how your grammar and English grammar melds together really beautifully. And I don't know, I just think it would be so wonderful if we had more of that sort of idea or that stance in terms of language and literacy and what's deemed appropriate or not appropriate because we'll find so much more beauty if we just open up our eyes to something broader than what we tend to believe is the right way.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Is there anything else from your forthcoming book that you want to highlight that you feel like connects well to Dr. Patel's piece or some of the concepts she just explored in the interview?

Shawna Coppola:

Yeah, I mean there's so much, but I think one of the biggest things is, and I felt kind of not really silly writing. So my book is based on a framework that I've developed over the years for how can we be more anti-oppressive or move more toward that direction with literacy education, knowing that there's so much to do with systems work that we have to also take care of. But one of the pieces of that framework is how literacy and identity is completely linked together. And we absolutely have to understand that. We have to accept that. And so I think one of the things that I would like to see happen more is because we still live in a world where the majority of educators in our country are, like Dr. Patel mentioned a couple times, white, upper middle class female and monolingual especially. We have to do embed that identity work into our professional learning.

And it was really happening a lot for a couple of years. And I know because I was doing a lot of that work and now I'm not being asked back to do that work. We're sort of looking specifically in terms of this conversation. We're looking at things like the science of reading to do all that work for us in terms of making things more equitable. And none of that can happen without that identity work happening. And so that's something that I write a lot about and how can we learn more about ourselves and use that to help us learn more about our students and see the connection between language literacy and identity. So thank you for asking.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah, I can't wait to read it. I'm so excited about it. I have it and ready to go.

Shawna Coppola:

Yay. Thank you.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.

Shawna Coppola:

Oh, it's been so good talking with you. And I felt, I feel like this could be a whole series because like I said, if folks haven't read Dr. Patel's blog post, read it over and over again. We can be talking about it for hours. But thank you so much for having me.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Thank you.