This professional development workshop primarily for K-12 educators and librarians. K-12 educators in Illinois are elegible to receive ISBE Professional Development Hours (PDH).
Talk & Activity - Language: variation, choices, and appropriateness
In this talk, Drs. Callesano, Clemons, and Fernández-Mallat will discuss how and why languages vary across different communities. Then, we will discuss how people make choices to use different dialects or languages when speaking with certain people. Finally, we will complicate what is deemed “appropriate” language. As a group, teachers will discuss their own experiences with language variation, ideology, and their ideas of incorporating student’s linguistic backgrounds into classroom spaces.
Talking Black in America (TBiA) - Together, we will watch the documentary Talking Black in America, which won a MidSouth Emmy for Best Cultural Documentary in 2020. Following the film, we will work through some discussion questions regarding the film, its contents, and how we can bring the information learned into our classrooms.
Closing Activity – What can we do in the classroom? Creating Personal Action Plans: Teachers set specific goals; Create plans to reach those goals.
