Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

I've spent the last seven months writing a book meant for high school ELA teachers. They are not an audience I've written for much, so I didn't feel comfortable throughout the drafting process. The book-length manuscript is done and it's called, What does It Mean To Be An Antiracist Teacher: Cultivating Antiracist Orientations in the ELA Classroom . In my heart of hearts, I'm not really happy with it.  I've sent a full ms to several publishers. I got a really thoughtful and encouraging reply from an acquisitions editor from Teachers College Press, and the publisher who urged me to write it, Corwin, was excited about it, but they never saw the finished draft. I wrote the book because I was urged to do so for a high school teacher audience, mostly ELA. I still want to reach that audience, but I don't think that book publishing industry will go for the kind of book this is. It is not a "how to" and it has no lesson plans or "do this in your class...

So I woke up last night at about 1:30 am. I was dreaming about students, adults, and rooms, and a university. I was making arguments and talking with all these students, who were also writing teachers. They were leaving and coming into rooms. I was leaving and coming into rooms.  Someone asked me about preparation, about how first-year writing courses prepare students for their tomorrows. How do we prepare students if we are doing all this antiracist stuff, if we don't have our standards, our rigor?  At one point, in response to these questions, I said: "It ain't about preparation. It's about linguistic reparations. Our work should be about giving back, about making linguistic reparations."  I woke up saying not White supremacist preparation, but linguistic reparations .  I was wide awake at this point. And I wondered, what would linguistic reparations look like? What would they be in a first-year writing course at ASU or any other college or university?  I did ...

"Dallas" from Kiyoshi Inoue I recently asked on Facebook and Twitter if any grad students out there wanted to be an audience member in my Fall semester grad course, ENG 509, "Decolonizing Dominant U.S. Narratives." I thought I'd get a few people interested, but it was more like fifty or sixty people. So, I'm gonna explain how you can join my grad course this fall in this post as an audience member. You should know that there are students enrolled in the course, so they take my priority. I've talked to them already about this, and they were all excited to have an audience, and perhaps have the option to engage with grad students from across the country. I am too.  What's the Course About? The course supports the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts' M.A. in Narrative Studies degree at ASU. It's an ASU Sync course that is offered on our Polytechnic Campus , but because there are only a few students and all felt uneasy about coming to c...

Photo from Victor Burclaff , "Egg Dawn" My friend, @minfucious, asked me a really good question about teaching problems and changes occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are lots of reasons for why things go awry in a literacy classroom (online or face to face). I don't want to pretend that what I'm about to offer is a universal solution. It isn't. But maybe it will offer something to begin with. Min asks, "In my efforts setting up remote learning, which is a whole new system for my school, my students and me, I’m feeling the failure of my imagination. So much of assessment had to do with the culture we built in a classroom together." She adds, "Tho not all of it, the physical proximity is foundational. How do I reimagine instead of trying to make a square peg fit in a circle?" I believe, Min is working in a high school context, or maybe it's a middle school one, regardless her question really is one that we all can ask no matt...