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...

Eyeball by Kiyoshi Inoue Last night (Sun, July 19), I did a keynote for the unofficial AP slow conference, "Mosaic 2020" ( #Mosaic2020 ). My talk's title was: "What Does It Mean To Be An Antiracist Literacy Teacher." There was just shy of 1,000 attendees, and some wonderful questions and engagement afterwords. I was honored to be asked to speak to so many hard working and dedicated secondary teachers. It was a wonderful event with truly wonderful people.  In my talk, I paused to offer a poem I wrote as a way to understand the hegemony in schools, how difficult it is to escape it, and a way to consider it in our antiracist efforts. After the talk, several wanted to know where they might find this poem. Of course, I just wrote it last week, have been mulling its details over for about seven or eight days now, so it wasn't anywhere. I promised to post it here. And so I offer it now. I hope you enjoy it, and it offers more questions for you to consider your own ...

Last night, I was thinking out loud on Twitter, and asked if I had online office hours for any teacher who had questions about their use (or potential use) of labor-based grading contracts in their courses, would anyone be interested? Within hours I got thousands of engagements with the tweet, and 60 replies. So I'm gonna try out some labor-based grading contract office hours this coming week -- that's, July 7 - 11 .  Please keep in mind that these are not webinars or workshops. They are office hours where teachers can ask me questions about their use of labor-based grading contracts.  For this first time around, I'll try to do the best I can with how the whole process works (i.e. signing up, scheduling, etc.), so please be patient and bear with me. Know that I want to talk to you if you have questions and want to talk to me. Also know that I'm trying to protect myself in this process.  After looking at my schedule for next week, I have enough time to do 23 one-on-one...