Keynote Address for the Philadelphia Writing Project

Last month, I was given the incredible opportunity to give the Keynote Address and Lunchtime Seminar at the Philadelphia Writing Project's Annual Celebration of Writing and Literacy. I was able to speak to over a hundred of my peers and colleagues about reframing our role as teachers and committing ourselves to the types of collective action that our students, schools and sprits demand.

Below is the visual presentation from my talk on how teachers must work to defend and transform public education.




The thesis of my talk was that in this current moment in public education, where our schools & profession AND our students & communities are under attack by a corporate, neoliberal privatization agenda, we as teachers must rethink how we construct our classroom practices, model participatory citizenship in our jobs and in our lives, and engage in building up the network for teacher collective action to defend and transform public education.

I argued that we need to get very clear about the kind of world we want to live in, and therefore, become focused on the kind of world we are teaching toward.  And then we need to all play to our strengths, push forward the areas of work that most suit our talents, and make sure we are constantly networked alongside other teachers with a shared transformational vision.

Nothing short of this type of strategic and emergent collective action will be able to build the focused power we need to stop the assault on our students, schools and city.

Further, we undoubtedly must move beyond the "No!" of oppositional politics, and reclaim, reinvigorate and reorient our schools toward becoming sites where students practice the skills and strategies they'll need to solve the problems of the world they're inheriting.  To do this, teachers will have to engage in a deliberate personal and professional transformation of our own self-concept of what it means to be a teacher.

This work is already happening, and, in Philadelphia, the Teacher Action Group (TAG) is a major hub.

In this moment plagued by structural collapse, I am inspired, strengthened, and motivated to continue improving as a teacher and as an agent of change because of the collective action we're carving out as networked teachers within TAG.

I hope that others will join up and collectively move our city forward.