Webinar Transcript

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. I want to be mindful of all of the content we want to share tonight, and be mindful of you all's time, depending where you're calling in from. It might be afternoon, evening. Thank you so much for being here, no matter what time of day it is. We are really excited for tonight's Every Educator Counts webinar. This specific topic for tonight is called Beyond the Writing Prompt.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: engaging students through relevance. So if you've attended a session this year with us so far, you might kind of see a theme or trend here about writing, and tonight we're really excited to continue those conversations. So some logistics, just to let you all know. The recording of the webinar, will be posted to our site, so if you are interested in sharing it or rewatching it.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Or checking out our previous webinars, everything is archived on our site, so I'll be sure to link, excuse me, drop that link in the chat shortly. Closed captioning is also available, so if you want to use that, we encourage you to do so. And then please feel free to use the chat and Q&A features throughout the session to share any thoughts or questions, or reflections while… while you listen.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: So tonight's conversation is a really impactful one. It centers on designing writing experiences that feel meaningful and authentic to students. So tonight, we'll spend some time exploring how writing, in its many forms, can help young people examine their words.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Think critically about issues that matter to them, and communicate their ideas with clarity and purpose.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: So together, we'll consider some research-supported approaches that move beyond formulaic prompts and instead foster engagement, voice, and relevance across K-12 classrooms.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: So before we begin, if you are new, welcome. A brief word about us. We are turning 60 this year. We are Reading as Fundamental, or RIF, the nation's largest children's literacy nonprofit. Our mission is to spark a love of reading and ensure every child has access to the resources and opportunities they need to become lifelong readers. And webinars just like this one are a small part of our continued commitment

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: To supporting, all educators and families with practical strategies to make literacy joyful.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: We are especially excited for tonight to welcome our guest speaker, Dr. Catherine, or Katie Sherba, Assistant Professor of Literacies and Children's Literature in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. Dr. Sherba is a former elementary school teacher who has spent two decades teaching writing to K-12 students in both classroom and intervention settings.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Many of you might remember, Katie. She has partnered with us before to facilitate a session titled, Every Book is a Relevant Book, so feel free to check out that in the archive as well, and we're thrilled to continue the conversation tonight with the focus on writing and student voice.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Dr. Sherba's research explores the connections between young people's identities and their literacy practices, with particular attention to the reading experiences of boys of color, the role of popular culture in literacy instruction, and how race, gender, and historical events are represented in children's literature.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Her most recent book was published in 2024 by Teachers College Press. She is also the author of children's literature, including the picture book on the screen. So we are so excited to have her tonight to guide our session. So with that, please join me in welcoming Dr. Sherba. Welcome!

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: So excited to have you!

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Katherine Sciurba: Thank you, I'm so excited to be here again. I really appreciate it. Thank you to reading is fundamental for inviting me back, and I'm gonna share my slides in just a second. I think I need permission to do that. There we go.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Yep, just gave it to you, sorry about that.

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Katherine Sciurba: Oh, not a problem. Okay, perfect. So, let's see here.

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Katherine Sciurba: All right, of course it wasn't queued up. There we go! Alright, so the first thing I wanted to start by talking about tonight is this phrase, write what you know.

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Katherine Sciurba: And I am going to ask you all to please engage in the chat as much as possible. Feel free to not only respond to any questions I post to you, but to please share ideas that you have that are similar to the ones that I talk about tonight, because nothing that I'm talking about tonight is going to be revolutionary. I hope it gives you some ideas, some food for thought, but I know that so many of the educators that are joining us tonight are doing such powerful work in their own

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Katherine Sciurba: classroom spaces that I want to honor that as well.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, this phrase, write what you know, is one that is very, very common in writing class settings. So, I also have my MFA in writing for children that I received from the new school, and this was the mantra of the program, write what you know. But when I was 22 years old, and, you know, new to New York City, what exactly did I know? I wasn't quite sure what that meant.

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Katherine Sciurba: Well…

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Katherine Sciurba: I grew up in Los Angeles, and this is a mural that is for my Los Angeles peeps in the room, if you happen to be here, this is on Figueroa and, I think, 61st Avenue, or at least it was. I'm not sure if this mural still exists, because now this neighborhood that I grew up in, which was predominantly a Mexican-American community, and Mexican and Mexican-American community, has been completely transformed to the point where it's not

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Katherine Sciurba: such… so recognizable anymore. So, many of the murals

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Katherine Sciurba: in the place where I'm from, have now been painted over. They've literally been whitewashed to make room for businesses. But at one point in time, this was a very thriving community, and this is where I spent many, many childhood days growing up around this house here. Of course, it didn't look like this when I grew up there. This has been…

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Katherine Sciurba: Again, completely transformed as the community has changed, but this was my grandmother's house.

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Katherine Sciurba: It has now been painted blue. Much of the work that my grandfather did with his own hands has been, you know, pulled out, it's been demoed, but this house… my grandmother used to smoke cigarettes right there on the porch in a little plastic chair, and my sisters and I would run around this yard, run to the corner and back barefoot. That's what we were… that's as far as we were allowed to go. I learned how to roller skate across this sidewalk.

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Katherine Sciurba: In this front yard is where I learned how to speak Spanish. My grandmother, she kind of fooled me, because when I was growing up, I thought she was fluent, but I learned later she only knew a few key phrases. But this house was super important to my upbringing, to my, you know, my entire… for what my world looked like for so long, as I was, you know, growing up in LA.

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Katherine Sciurba: This room was also super important to me. So, this, at one point, looked like my grandmother's room, and it had red carpet that was horrible. It was like this blood-red color, and it was really kind of ratty, after many years of, you know, it never being replaced.

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Katherine Sciurba: there was a jewelry box in the corner of this room, and my grandmother would keep, next to her jewelry box, stories that I wrote. So, what did I write about as a kid? My grandfather worked at a paper mill, so there were tablets left over from his days working in a factory. So, my grandmother would take what she called her siestas in the middle of the day for about 3 hours, and I would not be allowed to go outside.

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Katherine Sciurba: And so I would write these stories on these tablets, about, you know, nobody… girls nobody liked, who were nerdy and didn't get along with many people. And my grandmother also liked to feed all the neighborhood cats, all the feral cats, so she was kind of the crazy crap cat lady in the neighborhood. And so I wrote a story called Cats, Cats, Cats, and No Cats… and More Cats.

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Katherine Sciurba: And so, that is one of the things that I got. This was a… it was passed down to me. It was a thing that I inherited when my grandmother passed away. So she actually passed away in this exact space, before it was transformed. And you see in the back barn doors that were made into… the garage was transformed into an entertainment space, but at one point, that was my grandfather's workshop.

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Katherine Sciurba: So a lot of the stories that I would write as a kid were inspired by this place where I grew up. And I still have a hard time going back there because of how much the community has changed. I still haven't driven by my grandmother's house since it was painted blue.

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Katherine Sciurba: So I was one of the first people in my family to go to college. I was the first to go away, and I didn't go that far. I just went up, you know, down the road to San Diego, and one of my closest friends was Su Hailey, and Suhale was also from LA, so it was a very quick, easy connection with the two of us.

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Katherine Sciurba: She spoke Spanish, so sometimes we'd speak Spanish together, depending on… and I learned Spanish, so my family… my grandma, again, fooled me, so I didn't know my family didn't really speak Spanish. I learned it and had studied it in school, but Suhale and I were… would go out because she taught me how to dance salsa.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, Sue Haley, was one of my closest friends. She taught me how to navigate school. We were both work-study students, so she really was fundamental to my experiences of, you know, basically just being able to get through college. So, I draw a lot of inspiration from my friendship with her, and I'll say a little bit more in just a minute, but when I moved to New York City.

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Katherine Sciurba: Suhale is one of the people who came to visit me, so I moved there right after college. I was very new to New York. I missed home. I really, didn't know how to navigate the city too well. Even though I was from a big city, it was quite different than New York.

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Katherine Sciurba: And I moved there right after 9-11.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, Suhalei was one of the people who would come there and help me make it feel like home by taking me out to dance salsa. So we went to the Copacabana, we went to many other salsa places, we were crazy, and we didn't know about, you know, New York weather, and stood outside in open-toed shoes in the wintertime, which, as you can see from the weather reports right now, that probably wasn't a good idea.

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Katherine Sciurba: But we had this, it was… our bond continued, and one of the things that I first wrote, you know, I went to New York to do my MFA in Creative Writing, and the very first publication that I had, it was a picture book called Oye Celia, a song for Celia Cruz.

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Katherine Sciurba: And this followed that mantra, write what you know. So what did I know? I knew about… you know, I knew something about the Spanish language from where I grew up, even though, again, it wasn't my home language. I knew a lot about salsa music from my time with Suhele, and I knew about Missing Home.

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Katherine Sciurba: So that was one of the themes that I really played up. By listening to Celia Cruz's music over and over, I really was drawn to this notion of missing your home and leaving people behind that you love and you care about. And that's really where this book came from.

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Katherine Sciurba: Sadly, the book was reviewed negatively as sounding like a eulogy, which I just felt like the person who reviewed the book didn't quite get that salsa is a little bit deeper than maybe just, you know, they said it didn't evoke the hip-shimming rhythms of salsa, and that wasn't the point. The point was to honor Celia Cruz and to draw out these themes again that were important to me, that were relevant to me.

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Katherine Sciurba: Unfortunately, too, I will add a side note. My friend Suhaili passed away when she was 29 years old, but I did have the opportunity for this book to be dedicated to her before that period, so the book came out, and I was able to give her a signed copy, so that's also one of the reasons that I cherish this book in particular.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, what does it mean for something to be relevant to us, right? So, is it just what we know, or is it a little bit more than that?

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Katherine Sciurba: So, I started really digging into these questions, and I focused specifically on reading. What does it mean for something to be relevant? Because oftentimes in education spaces, we use that word, and we probably all define it in very different ways.

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Katherine Sciurba: I even defined it too simply as personal meaning. Something that has personal meaning to us is relevant.

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Katherine Sciurba: And what I've noticed as a scholar, as an educator over the years, is that oftentimes there's a misattribution to Gloria Latzon-Billing's theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, where we just kind of look at who the kids are, identity-wise, usually their racial identity, their ethnic identity, sometimes their gender, and we say, okay, this is going to be relevant to them because of this. And we match texts, or we match writing experiences, or

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Katherine Sciurba: Writing ideas to kids based on who we see, from the outside, as opposed to who those kids are from a complex perspective.

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Katherine Sciurba: So what I did for my study was I actually, I interviewed a group of young men of color, so Black, Latino, and South Asian, over a 10-year span, so, to learn about how relevance took shape from a reading perspective in their lives over time.

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Katherine Sciurba: And what I realized is I had to come up with my own definition of relevance, because personal meaning wasn't cutting it, so this is where I came up with this definition.

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Katherine Sciurba: the condition of being practically, socially, and or conceptually applicable to one's life. So, meaning itself, yes, is part of this, but it's a little bit deeper than that. And what I've argued is that there are also four dimensions

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Katherine Sciurba: to relevance. Those are our identity, and that tends to be where we go in education, looking at race, ethnicity, looking at gender, but I also wanted to think about class, linguistic identity, familial identity, so maybe if you're a sibling, if you're a daughter, if you're a friend.

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Katherine Sciurba: Relationships matter with respect to our identity and who we are, how we see ourselves, as well as how other people see us.

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Katherine Sciurba: Our ideology. How do we see the world? What is our viewpoint? What's our political perspective? What's our religious perspective? What is our framework for making sense of the world in which we are a part, and the world beyond us?

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Katherine Sciurba: And then spatiality and temporality, so where we are at a given space or time, and these two dimensions are also complex. So, looking at space, so where we are, maybe we're in a mental space. Geographically, where are we geographically? What kind of house?

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Katherine Sciurba: are we… are we from? Do we live in an apartment? Do we live in a giant mansion? All of these things matter. What does your school space look like compared to your home space?

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Katherine Sciurba: And then temporality, which includes your age, and again, this shifts over time. And so all of these, different dimensions intersect to form what I'm calling relevance. So all of these things matter, and they relate to one another. So, for example, time. I was thinking about age. So if you are from a particular racial gender group, and then what that means to you at a certain point may shift over time. Maybe you become more

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Katherine Sciurba: conscious of your racial identity, your linguistic identity, as you age, as you grow. So these things all are super important for how we construct relevance. And so what I'd like to think about tonight, and I hope that you all add ideas into the chat.

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Katherine Sciurba: is how we can take this idea, this construct that I've created here, and apply it now to writing. So…

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Katherine Sciurba: How do we create writing opportunities for our students that are relevant to them for some reason on this… in this conceptual mapping? So their identity, ideology, spatiality, temporality. How is a piece of writing

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Katherine Sciurba: Practically, socially, and are conceptually applicable to the lives of the young people with whom we work.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, I want to take this back again, thinking about writing in the K-12 classroom broadly, but I'm going to do this through my own writing. And so, I went to Catholic school for 12 years, and this is my actual notebook from 7th grade. I could not find cats, cats, cats, and more cats for you, though that is the one I did want to show you. And so my teachers would give us these prompts every week. And so, one of the things that I liked about them is they were

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Katherine Sciurba: super open. We were allowed to interpret these prompts however they mattered to us personally. So there is that personal meaning piece, right? That's part of what is relevant.

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Katherine Sciurba: But sometimes they were or were not so relevant to us. So there are some pieces of writing where I wrote one sentence, and sometimes I wrote quite a bit more. So, this is about video games. This whole entire piece that I wrote here, which I know you can't read very well, especially in my cursive writing.

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Katherine Sciurba: Katie Sherba was a big gamer in 1992, so this… my boys are 14 and 6 years old, and they are very tickled by this. The fact that their mother had the original Nintendo Entertainment System. My grandparents actually got it for my sisters and me as a group Christmas gift.

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Katherine Sciurba: And we were ecstatic, over the moon, and we used to play with the kids in the neighborhood in my grandma's… where my grandma lived, too. They would subscribe to Nintendo Power, so before you had YouTubers and gamers talking about video games, you had to look it up in a magazine and learn all the tricks, and that's what we did. So this whole thing is about how I wanted games. I'm probably going to be playing Nintendo later this afternoon. I was really into it.

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Katherine Sciurba: Versus another piece that I have here, which is about the Olympics. So, I never watch the Olympics. The only thing I think of is red, white, and blue uniforms and gymnastics. I remember Mary Lou Retton. I see her nowadays, and I wonder if she can still do those tricks.

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Katherine Sciurba: I don't really know anything about Winter Olympics. I know that Magic Johnson is going to play basketball in the Olympics. I also think of that little symbol that has 5 loops joined together. When I was younger, I used to wish I could be in the Olympics. I don't know why, because now I think they're boring, and I wanted to learn gymnastics, but I wanted to learn gymnastics.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, this topic maybe wasn't so relevant to me at the time, but I found something to write about because it wasn't super relevant, or at least I didn't think it was, but I knew something about it. So, write what you know, yes, I could write about this. I knew something about the Olympics.

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Katherine Sciurba: Was it relevant to me? Mmm, I don't know. My identity? Probably not so much, except for the fact that I did want to do gymnastics at one point.

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Katherine Sciurba: probably socially, because the people around me were probably talking about the Olympics at that time, and so I was like, okay, I'm gonna… I'm hearing what they're saying. Like, I was not a basketball fan, I didn't know much about Magic Johnson, other than the fact that he was a super famous man, a super famous athlete. But this is… this was still the kind of prompts my teachers gave us. So these are… it's hit or miss, right? Depending on the kind of prompts we give.

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Katherine Sciurba: of our students, these were super open, which is what I actually liked about this particular notebook. The teachers gave… the teacher of this class, whom I'm not quite sure which one it was.

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Katherine Sciurba: gave us super open prompts, as opposed to a really detailed, scripted prompt, like, tell me what you would do if you were to become an athlete in the Olympics, right? That prompt is a little bit different. It may not yield as relevant of a response, and even this one is questionable.

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Katherine Sciurba: I still don't think I would have had much of an answer for what I would do in the Olympics. It might have been two sentences. One of the topics was work, and the only thing I wrote was, I don't like work.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, there's that.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, what I want to do now is think about how we can take certain writing activities and make them relevant to our kids based on the different aspects of their lives. So, looking at their identity, looking at spatiality, temporality, as well as their ideology, or how kids… how that becomes obvious or apparent to us in the kind of things that our kids write.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, I've worked at a literacy center. I was the director of the San Diego State Literacy Center for about 6 years, and this is one of the activities we would give our kids for a baseline writing assignment, so formative assessment. I do want to say here, too, all of the activities that I'm going to be talking about in detail are linked to the standards. They are 100% linked to the standards. So, this we need in order to see where our students are.

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Katherine Sciurba: And this can be tailored from kindergarten up through even university level. So we can start by asking our kids to think about things that are relevant in their lives.

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Katherine Sciurba: These are the kind of prompts I give my students. I am, I pretend, I remember, I wish, I feel, I love, I believe, I choose. I live, I speak, I know, I listen to, I watch, I would stand up for. So that one, in particular, would get at their ideology. What are some kind of things that kids would fight for that they believe are important, especially linked to any topics of social justice you want to address with your kids?

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Katherine Sciurba: This is an example from an article that some of my students and I wrote. It's about paper selfies. So, we… some of my students… I was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and my students created this paper selfie where you could only use torn paper or cut paper to create a portrait of yourself, to get around the fact that kids often say they don't like to draw, and then the kids would frame these portraits of themselves.

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Katherine Sciurba: still do. I have a bunch of them here in my office from my students here who are pre-service teachers. They frame these portraits with four of their chosen prompts to talk about themselves, or what they believe, what they wish, what they hope. And then you can actually assess their writing, look at their spelling patterns, so you can see, I love my family, YIY is how this particular student wrote

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Katherine Sciurba: wrote my. You can see the absence of punctuation, but you can also see that she knows how to express her ideas. So the bottom sentence there, I feel happy when my mom gives me kisses. We could be… we could… we've, and again, I've talked about this with my students, we had to figure it out, we had to decode this together, but then to figure out what next steps we would take to work with our student.

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Katherine Sciurba: Now, this is an example from a really young student, but I also have this one here. So, if you don't…

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Katherine Sciurba: have time for the paper selfie, you could take an activity like this to reach for your goals. So, this is an activity, again, this is something that I found and adapted from the internet. This was not an original activity, unlike the paper selfies.

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Katherine Sciurba: We had kids trace their own hands, and they could color them, or they could use a skin color, construction paper, and then they would write about their own goals.

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Katherine Sciurba: So this student's goal was… he said one goal that he wanted to reach for is to end racism. He wanted everyone to be treated fairly. It wasn't fair that people with darker skin were treated differently, were treated badly, and his other goal was to continue living with his mom and make sure that she stayed healthy so that he could have a happy life.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, again, we could look at this, identity text, things that are relevant to the students, and we can… we can use these as our formative assessments.

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Katherine Sciurba: There is a link when you get the PowerPoint slides.

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Katherine Sciurba: to the full Paper Selfies article, if any of you want to check that out and see how we wrote about that. So we did our own original study around these projects.

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Katherine Sciurba: Next, I want to talk about another activity that I've done with students for a very long time at all levels, including adults, and this is the Writing Fortune Teller. So…

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Katherine Sciurba: This is a completely student-generated writing prompt, and this is for narrative writing. So one of the good things about it is that this is going to help students learn the parts of a story. So they can learn about characters and character development, they can learn about plot, they can learn about setting, and they have a lot of fun with this. So we take giant paper, basically the equivalent of poster paper.

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Katherine Sciurba: And students fold these into those origami fortune tellers, and on the outside are four setting choices, and then I have them underline the word they want to spell out. So they spell out the word, for example, rainbow. And then inside, you have

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Katherine Sciurba: 8 different characters, and 8 different plot points. So they have to choose 2 characters, and then they lift, and they get their writing fortune. What's going to happen in the story?

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Katherine Sciurba: I have not written, from a research perspective on this, so… but anecdotally, I can say the length of writing pieces that come from this, and the laughter in the room, and how relevant you can see that these become to students' lives.

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Katherine Sciurba: based on the things they choose to put in these fortune tellers is absolutely amazing. I highly recommend that you try it, and you could even just do one and let the kids have a chance to use the one fortune teller that you create. So right now, this is sort of my gift to the universe, because many people have taken this idea and adapted it. It came from my working with kids at the YMCA in New York City. I was working at a writing camp, and the kids had,

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Katherine Sciurba: origami class right before me. So I told them, I promise you, if you put those things away right now, I'll find a way to bring them into writing class tomorrow. So I went home, and I had to figure out, what am I gonna do? And that's how this came about. And so…

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Katherine Sciurba: This is a much improved version of my own writing fortune teller idea, which is called the Story Magic Fortune Teller from my students from last semester, Autumn Rennie. I don't know if she is here listening, but here is a link to her Teachers Pay Teachers site. She is a trained architect who is now changing careers, and… or she's in… she is a classroom teacher now, working on her MAT,

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Katherine Sciurba: And this is something that she designed to simplify the process of creating the Writing Fortune Teller. I believe it's $1.99 on Teachers Pay Teachers, so please check it out if you want to try this out with your kids. It's so beautiful what… the way that these come together.

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Katherine Sciurba: Okay, so another way to engage students with writing practices that are relevant. So, many of us in here, I'm imagining, have heard of Reader's theater. Reader's theater is a way to engage our students, or to enact our students' reading fluency. So, by having kids read scripts out loud of stories with which they are familiar, they do repeated readings of stories, they act them out sometimes, but to have kids

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Katherine Sciurba: engage in theater production, or at least mini-theater production around reading, has shown to help their fluency and to help end automaticity as part of that, prosody, expression, all of those things, right?

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Katherine Sciurba: So, when I was the director of the Literacy Center, I said, you know what? I'm noticing that many of my kids need help with fluency, so one of the things I did was everything was arts-based, as you can probably tell from this presentation, and I decided we're gonna have our kids write their own plays, because they can still work on their fluency that way, and they can work on all the, you know, the expression and all these other things, and so

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Katherine Sciurba: What I did notice is that my multilingual learners in particular, they thrived, because they didn't have to be put on the spot to speak themselves, they could speak behind a puppet. And here, I have one here, too, that I just created with my, credential students not too long ago. So the puppets you see here on the left are from my credential students, and on the right, they are from a group of preschool teachers who used those. They created one to read stories out loud.

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Katherine Sciurba: allowed to their kids.

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Katherine Sciurba: So there's a number of things you could do with the puppets. You could use them to read and enact original plays, but you could also do this for older students to, for example, explain complicated concepts. They could do this with math.

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Katherine Sciurba: They could do this to explain concepts to younger children, or to other peers, and it's funny, it's silly, and even the older kids, I feel like most of the time, depending on the rapport you have with your students.

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Katherine Sciurba: This will be something they'd be willing to do, even if they look a little bit, you know, uncool trying this out. There's a lot of laughter, again, just like with the paper selfies.

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Katherine Sciurba: So how does this become relevant? Students get to actually create their own stories, even if they're based on existing stories, existing narratives, and then they get to create their beautiful puppets to read those stories.

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Katherine Sciurba: An example from the Literacy Center days was a student, with whom I was reading Harry the Dirty Dog, so she wanted to write a play, a spin-off, basically fanfiction of Harry the Dirty Dog, where he has another friend who only likes to stay clean, where Harry the Dirty Dog likes to get dirty, and the two of them become unlikely friends. So we wrote the whole script, we storyboarded it out, and so every day, it was a… this was a literacy

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Katherine Sciurba: intervention context, but at the end of the day, we had movie time, and we eventually filmed it and edited it with music and everything, with the stage, and she got to create her setting, and this was such a fun activity, and again, her fluency was absolutely improved once we finished our session together after 8 weeks. And that, again, I don't have a research study to point you to from my particular experience with this.

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Katherine Sciurba: But I did have… I did assess my student… I did a pre- and post-assessment to actually be able to measure that her fluency did improve with doing this. Now, if sock puppets are a little bit too much, and especially since you have to use a hot glue gun, and I just suggest you look on YouTube for how to make a sock puppet, and it's super easy and fun. Obviously, anytime you do a project, create your own model first and try it to get a sense of, you know.

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Katherine Sciurba: Kids are probably going to take double the time to do this themselves, but if that's too much, you could always do a popsicle stick puppet.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, this is from an activity I did just a few weeks ago with a group of first graders.

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Katherine Sciurba: And the story… we read the story, My Beautiful Birds, which was a little bit complex for a group of first graders, but I drew the birds on… on pieces of paper, photocopied them, and then the kids got to just… they colored the bird however they wanted, and use the popsicle… we just taped them onto the back of the popsicle stick, and then when you actually move them, they kind of flapped their wings.

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Katherine Sciurba: So this was a nice way to be able to talk again about home. I really do love stories about home and missing home, and I really am a big fan of the dimension of spatiality right now in my own research. So that's why I chose this particular text with the kids, and we had a wonderful conversation about their own homes, who had, you know, I'm in Georgia now, so who was new to Georgia, who was born here, who was from someplace else, and

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Katherine Sciurba: what that feeling was like to have to make new friends when you moved to another place. And so, even that preliminary conversation was a fun precursor to this. And I'm not sure what they did with the writing activity, but I could imagine this bird being used to accompany a story about the kids' experiences with home, and how they might make new friends with somebody who was new to their class, or

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Katherine Sciurba: You know, to their state or city.

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Katherine Sciurba: Now, this is me a couple years back.

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Katherine Sciurba: I want to talk very briefly about writing across the content areas. So, especially for my older

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Katherine Sciurba: my secondary level instructors here, or researchers working with older kids. So, one of the assignments I was charged with, often teachers will ask me sometimes, and they're usually at my kids' schools, but they're not always my kids' classes.

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Katherine Sciurba: or when I do consulting work with schools, this particular teacher said, okay, I hear you like comics, I do stuff with Comic-Con, I'm a… I have my pro badge for Comic-Con, and I've presented there a few times.

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Katherine Sciurba: And I love comics and graphic novels, and so she said, okay, you do stuff with comics. My kids are studying ancient civilizations, so do you think you could do something around comics with them? I thought, okay, that's an interesting, combination. But then I've seen a lot of non-fiction texts where kids can make the topic relevant to them by, again, creating… sometimes they create fictional characters to tell.

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Katherine Sciurba: an actual, you know, non-fiction narrative, or to tell something that is true in a comic form. So the way I had to start this with the kids is that one thing that I do see in writing context is oftentimes the teachers will say things like, okay, now go create a comic if you like.

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Katherine Sciurba: And maybe they'll give them a template for the comic. But there's not a lot of instruction about what is… how a comic is actually put together, or what are the features of comic. So that's the re… that's the way that I started with this group of middle schoolers. So…

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Katherine Sciurba: I created this game, which was basically just a bingo game, and it had all the features of a comic, so I went over the vocabulary with the kids, I told them what these things were, such as, you know, an establishing shot.

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Katherine Sciurba: Who is the villain, who is the sidekick, we talked about an open panel, a page panel, we talked about the gutter, and then I gave kids the stickers, so here's the picture of the kids actually using comic books that I had, so they had to go find these features and then cover their boards, and so whoever got 100% first, that was how they scored bingo.

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Katherine Sciurba: So this actually worked for textual… we did textual analysis first.

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Katherine Sciurba: looking at comics before we could actually go and then write our own comics. So the fact that the kids did this, they had a lot of fun with the activity, and then they decided they got to choose their own format. So I showed them how to create a comic without actually using… they could use the grids if they wanted to that we had copies of, or they could do it freehand, and I showed them that's how they can actually play and create different panel types.

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Katherine Sciurba: or they could actually use an app like Pixton, which I've used with kids for a program that I created called Right to Rise in San Diego. But the thing that I want to establish here is that, one, it's important for us to let our kids know what they… how to create the form that we are working on. Even as we're trying to engage them in an activity that's relevant, we still have to show them

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Katherine Sciurba: practically how to do the activity, or how to create the ultimate final piece, how to get there. We have to scaffold for them, which we know is an important aspect of the writing process.

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Katherine Sciurba: So again, they might draft ideas about characters. I have them do character sketches first. I have them figure out what's going to be the beginning, middle, end of their comic, before they could even start drafting the full version.

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Katherine Sciurba: So again.

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Katherine Sciurba: The kids got to create their own responses to a… some aspect of ancient civilization, and they also got to choose the part of ancient civilization that they had been studying that they wanted to focus on in their particular comic. So giving kids choice is another way to make it relevant to them. The fact that they can take ownership, they feel a sense of empowerment over the topic, and again, we can't do this. I do understand.

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Katherine Sciurba: And I do want to just stress here, I understand that many of the teachers that I'm talking to right now are currently in contexts where they have a scripted curriculum, and so writing is often pushed to the side because of, you know, the emphasis on reading and foundational skills that we do absolutely need our students to be able to have, but we can also figure out ways to carve out time for writing, even if you have to do this in very

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Katherine Sciurba: very small increments. Let's say you have 20 minutes.

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Katherine Sciurba: So you can figure out what can you do realistically in 20 minutes and 30 minutes to get your kids to engage in relevant writing practices, because if we don't try to engage our students in ways that are relevant to them, we are going to completely, lose all of the progress we're making by focusing on the foundations.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, another thing I want to talk about tonight is writing and AI. Now, I know that AI tends to be a no-no word in many classroom spaces, and that is also the case here at UGA. We get a lot of messages around AI and kids using AI to write, but I think one of the things is, is that

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Katherine Sciurba: kids are talking about AI. It's relevant to them, especially temporarily, right? If we think about that temporal dimension of relevance, it is super important for them to understand how it works.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, I encourage my teachers to use it in certain contexts. So.

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Katherine Sciurba: opinion writing. This is my least favorite type of writing that is required in the Common Core Standards, because I often have found it to be boring. So that's why I did the sad sun, on this slide, because I feel like what the kids say, like, okay, a lot of times the prompt is.

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Katherine Sciurba: tell us about your favorite kind of weather, or tell me what would… if you could make a change at your school, what would you do, and why, right? So we give… there's a lot of kind of boilerplate

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Katherine Sciurba: prompts that we give our kids to talk about opinions. So, this is how I used AI. I had my students

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Katherine Sciurba: pair with somebody in the classroom, and it was a little bit random. And each of them first had written a list of things that they really, really loved and appreciated. So, the example that I gave, I said, well, I'm gonna do… I'm mashing mine together. They had to take their interest and a friend's interest and merge them together into an AI image. So the two I had were roller skating and salsa, because, of course, I like dancing salsa, as you all know already.

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Katherine Sciurba: study.

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Katherine Sciurba: So this is the image that AI generated for me. And of course, my older boy looks at this as like, look at those wheels, they're totally crazy. You could tell this is AI. And I was like, it's fine. Like, it's fine because AI in this context was supposed to be a little bit silly. So I wanted to take this idea of opinion writing, which tends to be a very boring genre in classroom spaces, and again, you could tailor this up or down, depending on age level of your kids and what's appropriate.

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Katherine Sciurba: And then, what my students had to do.

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Katherine Sciurba: was create a jingle or an advertisement to show how those two things could be merged together in a way that would be absolutely spectacular. So I put down a backdrop of a salsa song that had no lyrics. It was a karaoke version of a salsa song, and I wrote… I didn't sing it, but I actually just had the advertisement for the, the roller… roller salsa night.

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Katherine Sciurba: And I did it over the karaoke mic with an echo, for my students. So some of them actually sang songs, so I brought the karaoke mic to class, and they had the time to write out these jingles and these ads, so they had to make their case

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Katherine Sciurba: for why the two things that they loved were the most spectacular thing that we should all go to. So we had, eating french fries and lifting weights. Another one was linking Jesus and french fries, because they were very into their faith, and they were very religious, so they wanted to merge those two things together. We had some crazy, wild things. We had certain kinds of dance mixed with, hiking.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, there was just a lot of… it was a lot of fun, and again, my students were really into this. This was an exciting way to take opinion writing that sometimes seems, like, borderline relevant, because you're asking kids about their opinions, but taking it to the next level by showing how you could really, really get them to talk about things that are important to them. And again, their worldviews come out, so sometimes their ideology, right? Their religious perspectives, if that's one of the most important things that they

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Katherine Sciurba: care about, that they're passionate about, then it can come through. So again, this is… I also want to talk about this notion of propaganda and talking about social justice, so when you make your topics open to your kids, you can find out about what's important to them, and you can kind of work from there, rather than feeling like you have to lay it on… lay on your own perspective. And again, we all… I know that nobody… we all have our own perspectives, and they're going to come through and

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Katherine Sciurba: some way, some fashion or another in the way that we teach our kids. But this, actually, giving open prompts like this allows your kids to express themselves and their own frameworks for understanding the world in which they are a part.

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Katherine Sciurba: Now, my final slide for the night, and then I'm going to open it up for questions, is to actually be a little bit more explicit here in talking about social justice, pop culture, and writing.

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Katherine Sciurba: So this is another one that I… I believe… actually, I don't know that I have a link to the article, but you can look this one up. It's called Rising Up With Our Students.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, after a few incidents where we saw some anti-Black violence in society, our kids at the Literacy Center were talking about this.

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Katherine Sciurba: And I thought it was important for us to bring it into the literacy context, because I didn't think that we could just ignore it. So that's another thing about bringing up social justice topics.

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Katherine Sciurba: our kids are often talking about things, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away, right? So if we don't give them a space to actually express their perspectives, to talk about things that are important to them, and to facilitate those conversations, and to make sure that they're respectfully engaging with each other when they disagree, then we are doing them a disservice, because then that's how arguments can arise, and we're not giving the kids the tools necessary

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Katherine Sciurba: to actually engage with others who have… for whom things will be differently relevant, right?

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Katherine Sciurba: So this is around the time when Childish Gambino's This Is America came out, and so I asked permission of the parents if it was okay if we showed the video because of the violence depicted in the video, and they said, oh, absolutely, it's totally fine. And again, the kids were already talking, they had already seen it at home, and so we watched the video, and then we listened to… we read the lyrics to that… to the song, and then we read the lyrics to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?

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Katherine Sciurba: And then we played the music, we played the song a couple of times to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.

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Katherine Sciurba: So we asked the students to think about the way in which these two texts were connected, and then the goal, ultimately, was to write a piece that was relevant to them based on these things that they were already thinking about and talking about with us in snippets in between different activities, right, or that they were talking about with each other.

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Katherine Sciurba: So the art piece that we gave them, so we started with art. Oftentimes, I like to start with the art piece as the precursor to the writing, so that kids can… sometimes they're just talking with each other, and they're developing their thoughts around a topic or an issue as they're doing something fun with their hands. So this is not the one my kids created for this group in the Literacy Center, but this is a giant.

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Katherine Sciurba: I want to say mural, but it's a big art piece that I have in my house. It's probably, you know, 5 feet by 4 feet or so.

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Katherine Sciurba: And this is a project I did when I was a classroom teacher in the Bronx, in New York City, with the help of a teaching artist. So, my kids wanted to study the hip-hop movement, so we looked at the history of hip-hop in the Bronx. The kids got to choose the topic.

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Katherine Sciurba: So what the artists had them do was take felt, and they layered the felt, so with one or two other pieces, using cutout, similar to the paper selfie, but with felt.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, some of the kids actually chose to draw on these pieces, but this was showing the evolution. So, you could see in this image, some of the burn… the buildings were burning in the Bronx, and then they talked about how the music rose up as a sort of resistance to what was happening, especially class-wise in the Bronx, and how people were being displaced.

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Katherine Sciurba: And then the trains. So we talked a lot about the tagging on the trains and people expressing themselves. So the kids in my literacy center group, after watching Childish Gambino's This Is America and What's Going On, created similar pieces. So they created 3 pieces each. So my kids had pieces like, a bomb, a police baton with blood on it, they had certain political leaders depicted.

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Katherine Sciurba: they had a black man with long hair, so what's going on? There's a line about being judged for your hair being too long, so they had a picture of a black man with long locks.

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Katherine Sciurba: And then they also had, things like, tears.

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Katherine Sciurba: and guns. So a lot of these images were expressed… were showing the violence that the two songs were about. And then the next step was to get our kids to actually write about these things. So what were the connections? How do you think, what's going on and This Is America are related to one another? And what are the things, the ideas that you have from these texts, and how might we then, you know, make some changes, either in our own lives.

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Katherine Sciurba: or socially, so beyond ourselves, what are some changes we could make to prevent some of the things that the singers were… were addressing in their texts? So this is, again, it depends. We chose this activity specifically because it came from our kids, this, so we already knew this was a relevant topic to them. So, again, their identities, they… we… it was 100% Black students in this group that we worked with.

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Katherine Sciurba: They were all middle schoolers or high schoolers, so they were 9th and 10th graders, and they, again, they were ready for this kind of conversation, and eager to engage in this kind of conversation with adults who would listen.

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Katherine Sciurba: Now, this brings me to my next point.

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Katherine Sciurba: Which is about Bad Bunny. So, I know there's a lot of different perspectives on that Super Bowl performance, and so depending on your ideological perspective, even personally as an adult, you're gonna have a different reading of this particular text. You're gonna have a different response, so you would write about this differently than maybe some of your kids would.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, I, again, I'm part of the salsa community, so I noticed the salsa dancing, that was something that I noted, and I'm connected, and social media. I follow many of the dancers that actually were in the Super Bowl, so that was a fun thing to see, to then watch their choreo routines after the performance, to see them do… actually, I appreciated seeing it again, because I felt like they got kind of lost in the crowd. There was so much going on with that performance.

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Katherine Sciurba: But one of the things that I think is super interesting about this is that, kids, no matter what… where they are, again, they're hearing something about this. Whether they liked the performance or not, whether they knew who Bad Bunny was or not, many of them heard about this and the response to it. And they have maybe some feelings about the fact that it was all in Spanish.

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Katherine Sciurba: Except for, you know, there are segments, like Lady Gaga's portion is in English, but the fact that they, you know, maybe didn't understand the lyrics, but maybe they understood the dancing and the spectacle of the whole performance, right?

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Katherine Sciurba: One thing I do want to point out that is… was super interesting for me, what was relevant to me, is that this… I noticed that Bad Bunny was paying tribute to Hector Lavo, who is a Puerto Rican performer who is known as one of the most important vocalists of salsa music, you know, certainly of his day. He had an untimely death at the age of 46, but if you see the suit, the glasses.

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Katherine Sciurba: Ty. To me, it's unmistakable that he's paying tribute. So, in Bad Bunny's Salsa album, I think that he's doing this really interesting, kind of, like, he's making this intertextual connection. So, for me, again, as a reader, I…

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Katherine Sciurba: I'm very interested in, in, you know, seeing how other people are responding to this, and what they pick up on, what they pay attention to, versus what they, what they choose to overlook, or just didn't understand, possibly.

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Katherine Sciurba: Now, one of the things that I love about this is there's this tradition in salsa music, where it's like an omenraje, it's like a tribute to an elder, like Salcera or salsera. So there's a Celia Cruz song, there's a song with Celia Cruz and Tito Puente that's called Celia y Tito, and it says in the lyrics, it says, oye Celia.

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Katherine Sciurba: Contito, pongo agosar, or pongo a tito agosar, sorry, is what it is.

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Katherine Sciurba: And Ponga Tito agosar, which basically means

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Katherine Sciurba: make Tito enjoy himself, make him, you know, get into it by her… with her singing, with the music. So this line, Oye Celia, is what became the line for my book, because of that. I was listening to her music over and over, and I was like, that song's amazing, like, to hear these larger-than-life performances, like, being so respectful toward one another, and showing how it wasn't about competing, it was about

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Katherine Sciurba: camaraderie, it was about unity. That's one of the things that I love so much about salsa. So again, not a eulogy. My book should not be read as a eulogy, but it's important to understand this kind of depth of salsa that sometimes is overlooked.

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Katherine Sciurba: When we maybe, you know, there's a line in my book about, I underst… there's a, the girl is saying, some people who don't understand the words, but they understand the passion. And she says, I understand the words and the passion, because Celia Cruz, like Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl performance, only sang in Spanish.

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Katherine Sciurba: So…

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Katherine Sciurba: I am going to stop my sharing here so I can actually see every… every… everybody, you know, in the chat. I don't know, I wasn't able to see comments popping up, so I hope things, you know, if you could call them out for me again at this point. But I do want to say my final words here for you all are that I wanted us to think about the Bad Bunny example to leave on that note, because I was thinking.

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Katherine Sciurba: You know, how could we take something

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Katherine Sciurba: that already means something to kids, and then turn it into a writing activity that is truly relevant to their lives, right? So we know that that meant something to them. So how can they then take that and turn it into a piece that's relevant to them, whether they like it or not, right? It doesn't always have to be a positive relevance. It could be, like, it's relevant because I hate it. It's not something they can write about, too. So it doesn't have to be all, you know, gumdrops and roses all the time with our kids, either.

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Katherine Sciurba: So, I encourage you to go out there, take these ideas, run with them, please share with me at any point anything that you're… that you do that's, you know, take it into a wild direction and let me know how it goes for you. I'd love to hear it. But I would love to take questions, too, at this point.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Well, thank you so much, Katie. Before I read out some questions and some shout-outs that you had throughout, too, I really just appreciated everything you shared tonight. I didn't know… I actually didn't recognize the trip, like, the Bad Bunny tribute, so that was something I learned tonight, which is really awesome, and just made me enjoy the performance, I think, even more. So thank you for… for pointing that out for us.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: But there is a question that I want to make sure we get to. So, the question is…

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: How can we scaffold critical thinking in writing without over-structuring or limiting students' ideas?

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Katherine Sciurba: That's a great question, and I think that it's… there's not really a short answer to that, because it's going to depend a lot on your context, the age of your students.

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Katherine Sciurba: But one of the things I like to do is engage our students first in conversation, and then we have to be comfortable pushing them to deepen their thinking and to provide evidence for their thinking. So not to just say, hey, I claimed this and that's it, and then they shut down, but to actually get them to think, okay, what about this perspective to show, you know, to show them that other ideas exist that are out there.

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Katherine Sciurba: and then to then scaffold the writing slowly. So first, I would allow… if you look at that 7th grade notebook, starting with free writes. Maybe even before you have that conversation, let them just jot down whatever's in their mind, and then now we're going to have a conversation about it, and then set some parameters about being respectful, but also noting we have to support where we're coming from, and we also… we're becoming educated to push our thinking about something. We're not coming here just to be

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Katherine Sciurba: to learn what we already think we know, right? And I think that's something that we just need to reiterate to our kids at all different levels. And again, the scaffolding, it's a very complicated, probably very long answer, that I could give, but I think the best thing to start is to, like, let them express themselves, and then you slowly teach them the structure, and you have to be comfortable making corrections where necessary.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Yeah, that's a really good point, and I… I spent most of my teaching in 5th grade, so I really had a hard time with,

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: getting stuck with reteaching just the foundations of writing, while also trying to meet the expectations of what fifth grade writing is supposed to look like. So I think you raise a lot of really good points, and just…

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: there needs to be, like, a joy and motivation and, of course, relevance to the topic, so I like… I really like the idea of just allowing them to

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: take away, like, a prompt, but allowing them to still free-write, and then working… working backwards from there. I think we get stuck in prompts and scripts because we feel like we have so much to get through and teach, so I think…

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Yeah, I think it's a really good point to just allow them to start first, and then you can work, because they are not going to feel motivated to do it if you're hounding them from the beginning, from my experience, at least.

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Katherine Sciurba: Absolutely, at any level, even the college, you know, my college students, for sure, that's not the way to go.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: No, for sure. And speaking of your college students, I did see a couple, at least one or two just really appreciate, everything you shared, and just feeling really grateful that they got the opportunity to hear you talk again tonight. So, you have a lot of fans out there, including us at RIF, and for those of you that are still with us, be on the lookout, because RIF has a new

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: podcast, and Dr. Sherba is going to be, talking more about this, and even more exciting things related to writing and relevance, and I think you might be sharing about your new book, is that…

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Something that's happening? Is that you?

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Katherine Sciurba: I'm… well, I'm working I don't know that I… I think it was too early to drop.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: It's too premature, too premature. Well, all of that to say, we have so many guests on our podcast as well that we encourage you to go check out, including the wonderful Dr. Sherba. So, please be on the lookout for that, as well as the follow-up email, and if you have any questions, please feel free

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: to reach out to either myself or Dr. Sherba, but thank you so much for everything. We are such big fans of yours at Riff, and we feel so lucky to have you in our corner, so thank you for such an engaging session. We really appreciate it.

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Katherine Sciurba: Well, thank you, and thank you to all of you for coming tonight, and for those who will join online. Thank you.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Yes, thank you all. And if you all were here and accidentally heard me stop the recording, that was a quick little accident. Don't worry, the full recording is still there, and you will be able to get it. Oh, and someone, just another quick shout out. I enjoyed storytelling and the discussion. That takes the load off of the writing. Their thoughts are free. Yeah, that's a really good reflection. Absolutely. Kind of talks about what we were talking about earlier, like, the heavy load of all of the things that come with writing.

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Katherine Sciurba: For sure, that is a fantastic comment.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you again, and I'm sure we'll be in touch really soon, and thank you all for joining tonight, and be on the lookout for the follow-up.

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Katherine Sciurba: Sounds good.

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Karly O'Brien, RIF: Have a good one, thank you all!