12. We never fully arrive at "best" with Dr. Rob Simon

How can challenging traditional teaching and research methods and embracing diverse student literacies transform English Language Arts education to be a more inclusive and empowering experience for teachers and learners?

Dr. Rob Simon, our guest today, is an associate professor and Associate Chair, Student Experience, in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He is also Academic Director of the Centre for Urban Schooling, Director of the Toronto Writing Project, and Principal Investigator of the Addressing Injustices research project. Dr. Simon came to teaching in a non-traditional way, working in San Francisco with the Delancey Street Foundation, a self-help rehab facility for people who were recovering from addiction and people who had come through the criminal justice system. Through partnerships with community organizations in the Bay Area, he helped start the Life Learning Academy and after school programs that helped children thrive, in and out of school systems that had marginalized them. This community and people centered collaborative work of reinventing school, alongside young people with different backgrounds from his own, still guides his work today.

In this episode, Dr. Simon shares nuggets of wisdom on promising practices in teaching and research, and drawing upon learners’ rich literate lives to empower them in the classroom. His teaching and research focuses on Freirian critical literacy–reading the word to read the world and vice versa–and practitioner inquiry, which challenges research hierarchies by privileging teachers as knowledge creators and theorizers of their own teaching practice.

Mentioned in this episode:

“Without Comic Books, There Would Be No Me”: Teachers as Connoisseurs of Adolescents’ Literate Lives

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Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast developed by members of the Toronto Writing Project. The Toronto Writing Project—or TWP for short—is made up of teachers and researchers who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large.

This episode was produced by Celeste Kirsh and Melissa Arasin. Rob Simon, TWP’s director, is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Doug Friesen.

You can learn more about the Toronto Writing Project, and sign up for our upcoming writing workshops and speakers series, by visiting www.torontowritingproject.com.