2012 Call for Program Proposals
Reclaiming Joy in Teaching, Learning, and Research
St. Louis, MO July 19-21, 2012
2012 Proposal Form 
Submission Deadline: October 28, 2011
The literacy climate in schools over the past ten years has been influenced by legislation and policies that have hurt children and teachers, blamed schools for broader societal problems, and used assessment as a tool for punishment. Yet there are places where whole language teachers and researchers have worked to open spaces for inquiry, hands-on learning, libratory pedagogy, and critical literacy. Within these spaces, learners thrive as they delve into issues and ideas that are important to them and considerate of others. These are the joyful places during hard times, but they are not a simplified version of joy that might be referred to as ‘fun.’ These are the joyful spaces that are demanding of work, investment of energy, interrogation of ideas, and examination of realities, dreams and possibilities. They are spaces in which teachers, learners and researchers have permeable roles, meaning that all are learning, all are teaching, and all are engaging in research. In some settings, these remarkable and refreshing literacy events occur around reading and living with a text, such as a book, a website, a commercial advertisement, a political event, or a content-related movie (to name just a few). In other places, the creation of text becomes central as books are written, websites are composed, commercials are made, and movies are written and recorded (again, naming just a few). The overlap of these receptive and expressive processes is also a space for joys as classrooms and other settings become places in which imaginations are set loose for the sake of genuine and authentic learning for all. Such classrooms welcome and celebrate diversities of languages, cultures, gender, sexual orientation, political views, relationships, media, arts, multiple modes, and more.
The Whole Language Umbrella 23rd Annual Literacies for All Summer Institute in 2012 is intended to focus on the extremely political act of reclaiming classrooms and other settings for learning as places of joyful engagement, learning, teaching, and complex relationships. Joy is one of the most hopeful emotions that human beings can feel and for ourselves, as whole language educators, the search for and support of joy along with the learners with whom we work is central to what we do and who we are. As a growing number of us engage in critical literacy work with learners, the intensity of such work may suggest a marginalization of joy, but we are countering that notion because the work of becoming conscious of power, struggles, positions, and more, although sometimes even painful, is the very essence of what it means to be an informed citizen in a democracy. An informed citizenry experiences the deepest and highest meanings of joy because of the profound understandings that such consciousness allows. Join us in sharing your students and your stories of joys, those remarkable accomplishments that take place in spite of or in response to the repressive environments in which we might work. Or, if we are fortunate enough to work in a supportive setting, share those stories, too, of course! Figuratively, and perhaps literally as well, in the summer of 2012 we will tell the stories of dancing even if we were told to be still, singing even if we were told to be silent, and feeling even if we were told to dismiss emotions.
Join us in reclaiming our joys and celebrating them in the wonderfully supportive forum that gathers each year under the whole language umbrella.
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