How can creative writing be used to humanize both teachers and students in our too-often rigid educational systems?

Our guest in this episode, Dr. Karleen Pendleton Jiménez, engages in a deeply human conversation about happiness, writing, and the messiness of being a teacher and academic. We talk about what it means to centre joy in schools, how creative writing can be a tool for wellness and resistance, and why personal experience still matters in the age of AI. From burning Barbie dolls to zine-making and protest playlists, this episode is a celebration of teaching that dares to be honest, playful, and real.

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is a writer, filmmaker, scholar, and educator. She is cross appointed between the school of education and school of gender and social justice at Trent University in Peterborough Ontario. Her research investigates sociocultural influences on learning, and works with creative writing research methodologies.

Mentioned in this episode:

-Nel Noddings Happiness in Education

-Teaching to Transgress bell hooks

-Teacher Man, Frank McCourt

-Jeanette Winterson, 12 Bytes book on AI

-Karleen’s film on CBC Gem

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. Celeste is our editor and Rob Simon, TWP’s director, is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Doug Freisen.

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.

How can teachers create more equitable, more humane writing ecologies in their classrooms? Today on the show Mel and Celeste speak with Dr. Asao Inoue, professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University.

In this conversation we get into labour-based grading contracts, some of the inherent racist problems with a traditional grading framework, AI in relation to trust, colonialism, and classroom ecologies, as well as how to implement some of these ideas outside of a college context. We build off of Dr. Inoue's scholarship in this book, Anti-Racist Writing Assessment Ecologies, which is definitely worth a read.

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 Mel 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

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.