Contact Kurt at ostrowk@gmail.com if you have a teaching resource you'd like to share with BLTN colleagues. 

Did you know there's a BreadWeb group dedicated to sharing resources for linguistic justice and language study? Contact Tom McKenna if you'd like to join.

I had the opportunity to do a “language exchange” for the third time this year. Leslie Schallock and I developed this mini-unit after taking Dr. Baker Bell’s course Anti-Racist Writing Pedagogy. Students record a short sample of themselves speaking and send it to another student. From there, partners guess who’s behind the voice, the students reveal their identities, and then they exchange letters to each other. The activities allow us to teach topics like linguistic profiling in regards to race and class, the fraught nature of Standard English, and the richness of our linguistic capabilities. Students love it. One wrote to his partner, “I was quite excited to see what you would think about me…The only people I ever talk to are friends and family… No joke, this was actually a pretty fun experience…even if it meant getting out of my comfort zone…I will never forget this experience (I mean it). Language can show a lot about someone… This lesson should remind us all to respect each other regardless of their differences.” This year we hosted students from 4 schools in 4 states (Michigan, Connecticut, Georgia, and Illinois), and we hope more fellows will join us next year! 

We ask current BLTN fellows to submit their mid-year reports by February 15, 2025. These reports help us to make connections across the meeting, plan content, and share your learning and work with fellowship donors. BLTN report forms may be found here. 

Congratulations to BLTN Fellow Mackensi Crenshaw for her recent publications. Crenshaw, of Francis Parker School of Louisville, published in Edutopia and Teach Rock, an open educational resource "bringing the sound, stories, and science of music to all classrooms." "Teaching Students About the Richness of Black Language Traditions," Mackensi's Edutopia publication, is not just a great resource for Black History Month: it's a primer on using multiliteracy practices to engage youth in Black literacy studies.

Crenshaw's most recent Teach Rock contribution is "Motown Records: Detroit's Sound of Success." She previously published "The Origins of Disco."

Mackensi Crenshaw

Given discussions taking place about education at the federal and state levels, we'd like to provide an opportunity for current and former BLTN fellows to discuss your strategies, responses, and needs. Please take this super quick survey to indicate the March or April dates and times you could be available for a discussion via Zoom. We'll send a link once we've set the time and date.

The BLTN NextGen Youth Advisory Board gathered over 25 participants--ages 13-94--to write and share together on Saturday, February 1. Led by guest artist and NextGen alum, Gladdys Jiminian,  and supported by current Youth Advisor Tien Hoang, participants wrote and shared reflective and speculative pieces about self in the world. 

Our 2025 theme is "Making School Relevant: Teachers, Students, and Communities in Meaningful Collaboration"

Why publish in the BLTN Journal ? Write with your students. Use the composing process to reflect on your practice. Help shape the teaching narrative: Colleagues and policy makers need to hear your stories.

For featured articles, we value short teaching narratives (approximately 1,500 words) that highlight BLTN’s core commitments to teaching and learning across difference, and that highlight educator collaboration as well as youth voice, thinking, resourcefulness, and creativity. We prioritize pieces that address pedagogies influenced by teacher learning at Bread Loaf, and strategies that work towards social justice and more equitable systems.

We encourage collaboratively authored submissions, including those co-authored with youth.

Contact Tom McKenna, Journal Editor, or Kurt Ostrow, Assistant Editor, with any questions, or to discuss ideas for submissions. Submissions are due by March 31, 2025.

Bread Loaf Professor Dr. Eric Darnell Pritchard serves as the Founding Director of the Community Literacies Collaboratory (CLC) at The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Dr. Pritchard shares this announcement via the CLC website. "The Community Literacies Collaboratory, with the financial support of the Brown Chair in English Literacy, is pleased to offer grants to support literacy organizations and community literacies educators and researchers whose literacies work is consistent with the CLC and Brown Chair’s purpose: to help all people practice literacies more fluently, richly, productively, and joyfully." Applications for the Spring 2025 grant cycle are open and will close April 1. Maximum awards are $15,000. Read more.

If you haven’t yet done so, it’s time to re-enroll in BLSE!  Summer 2025 re-enrollment forms are now available on your portal, and dates and fees are posted on the website. See the Special Funding page for fellowships and scholarships, including the new Global Change Fellowships for California Teachers. The full list of 2025 courses and faculty is now live on the website. 

Please notify us of accomplishments you’d like to share in the monthly newsletter. We're also interested in promoting reader resource sharing. Do you have a unit you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to discuss? Be in touch. 

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