We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025). moneyontheleft.org/2025/12/01/r...

This is EdTech & AI grifter’s fault. I don’t blame individuals. I get blue books are an understandable stop-gap fix to our AI-hellscape. HOWEVER—the claim timed writings are “a return to authentic human learning” is turning me into the joker. This thread. I can’t.⤵️ open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

Now that “English is for developing fungible 21st-Century Skills™️” is fading from our social imaginary (good thing), I hope whatever comes next is rooted in authentic communities & contexts. Buurma & Heffernan’s “The Teaching Archive” offers a compelling vision from oft overlook literary history.

Unfortunately this sentiment is shared by many education journalists. Instead of adopting a sense of epistemic humility due to their lack of knowledge, they think their assessment of “what’s wrong” and/or “what works” in education is more objective. Then they get $ from Substack & speaking gigs. 😒

bell hooks on educator burnout and overwork (from “Teaching to Transgress”), www.hampshire.edu/sites/defaul...

that’s why we have to fight deskilling of educators. it’s upstream of deskilling everybody.

writing a syllabus is a research project. engaging in research is a boon to teaching- evolving questions, new theories, keeping teacher alongside students in discovery. teaching - asking fundamental questions, facilitating collective meaning, probing surprise - is essential posture for research.

“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller) more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living” worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

A) This course looks incredible B) My reading of The Teaching Archive really has me thinking about the entanglement between our research & our course design C) Reason 1 of 937 that outsourcing course design to AI or boxed curriculum prevents the very sensemaking that makes good teaching possible

*Normalize being anti-Edtech, but pro digital tools to expand the modes/genres available to students to create/communicate! E.g. I used zines & video essays as mediums for Ss to interpret/critique films & current events this semester and the results are AMAZING! Rave reviews from my classes.

So, my citations are political, embodied, collaborative, ancestral, relational, sometimes ceremonial. They are how I converse with the past and carry ideas and people with me toward the future. They are how I intentionally practice care and love in academia. #AcademicSky #AcademicChatter #EduSky

The goal is never to cite for citation’s sake, but to honor a lineage of knowledge I want to be a part of. With this framing, I have to acknowledge there are some lineages I don’t want to be part of, inheritances I refuse because they are not knowledge-ways I want to steward. #AcademicSky #EduSky

I always frame citational practice as relational: Whose ideas do I want to inherit and carry forward? Whose/which ideas am I responsible to/for? Which thinkers have offered me intellectual, emotional, spiritual guidance? Who are my ontoepistemological ancestors? #AcademicSky #AcademicChatter

The intersections (and distinctions!) between teaching English and literacy is a massively important & under discussed topic, particularly for secondary folks. Very exciting to see great organizations like CEL providing a space for leaders in the field to wrestle with this!

I’ve been posting about this, but worth re-iterating. Doing this ⤵️ has so many upsides. In addition to generating “HQIM”, teachers are recognized/compensated for their expertise, learn from each other, develop communities of practice across siloed schools, bridge build with district admin, etc etc.

This is 1000% a hugely damaging part of this trend and it becomes especially rage inducing once you see the dreck being marketed as “high quality.”

Digital humanities, clustering analysis, Tolkien, ruins and revisions, shapeless darkness, grief, hope.

Who is college for? And what does college do? are two questions of increasing urgency because if those of us involved in these institutions don’t provide compelling answers then the tendency towards reducing it to glorified job training will destroy every meaningful part of the endeavor.

NYC! February 20! We're going to launch Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century with contributors, friends, and me!

What were the books of 2025 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us? New at PB: Our 2025 Public Picks are here! Browse our editors’ favorite titles:

My level of elf-on-the-shelf creativity is very negatively correlated with impending end of semester grades, comments, and due dates.

💯 IMO the bigger issue is that we have a “relatively stagnant *way of approaching a list of classics.” Presentist Literary Amnesia™️ vs. Canon Worshipping Hegemony™️ has always been a reductive, boring, & suffocating false dichotomy.

YES! So many structures and words that have been classed as AI giveaways are what speakers of English as a second language have been taught and encouraged to do.

The answer is seizing the means of curricular production, not abandoning individuals to fend for themselves. My last district ran summer sessions where teacher/admin volunteers developed curriculum & assessments for the whole district. ALWAYS optional, but always an option, especially for new Ts.

Same thing is happening with the revived reading wars. Drives me nuts that actual experts/researchers are ignored because someone made a popular podcast or wrote an airport non-fiction bestseller *ahem* that reduces complex issues into pat narratives that lethally mutate into unimpeachable truths.

“We should afford them aesthetic experiences. We should help them understand for themselves what it means for a beautiful piece of writing to withstand scrutiny and to be the focus of honest conversation across generations.” @annieabrams.bsky.social #EduSky

“In my view, the greater harm to adolescents is not subjection to uncomfortable art but failure to help them understand that the world is, and has always been, big, complicated, and unpredictable.” @annieabrams.bsky.social #EduSky

I swear that I love books so much, and I hate feeling like a pedant, but The Discourse™️ today makes me feel like I have to remind folks: books are necessary but insufficient for transformative teaching. We can’t talk about the “what” absent the “how”! open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

"I need to make you know that you're going to feel seen here." This entire conversation with @jessenathaniel.bsky.social was phenomenal and I cannot wait to share it tomorrow AM!

There are multiple ways to learn how to read, and I'm of the opinion that we need many different approaches, including but not limited to phonics and phonemic awareness. www.humanrestorationproject.org/writing/who-...

Read Orwell, any Orwell. Never a bad use of your time.

Probs because, as my current rhet comp student explained: “All we did in AP Lit & Lang was write timed essays using a formula that would give us a 5-6 on the test over and over. We read stuff… to prepare for the test. Sometimes we’d do current events… so we had background knowledge for the test.”

This is honestly like a fractal fever dream inside a matrix inside a nightmare inside a matrix

Had a lot of fun writing this review of @tomcomitta.bsky.social’s strange, moving, and hilarious book. Gets us to think, as I argue here, about the value of an aesthetic education—something we all should aim for as we teach our kids. mid-theory.com/2025/12/04/u...

Huh. Turns out novels can help us think about money… and maybe even save the planet. Who knew?! moneyontheleft.org/2024/02/26/h... @moneyontheleft.bsky.social

Friendly reminder as we approach "final grading" season: grades are a fabricated assessment metric that never accurately reflect students' skill or progress, and only reproduce in students the god-awful idea that they should "game" the system and not actually learn. TY for coming to my Ted Talk.

What a pleasure to have this out in the world! Read our editorial to learn about this open access issue featuring research re: the use of digital texts in classrooms!

📚New Pub! Kicking off our guest edited special issue series on digital texts and how to teach them, @mraleosays.bsky.social writes on “Pixels, Prose, and Literary Knowledge Production: Cultivating Aesthetic Literacies Through Audiovisual Essay Composing”. Check it out!

For MTC, John Downes-Angus reviews Tom Comitta's PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE and reflects on his experiences as a high school English teacher where on the daily he makes a case for reading the strange, the extreme, the unwanted—for the chance to accept "reading’s complicated gift to us."

So exciting for this to roll out as our first articles from the special issue are released! Read the first two pieces here: citejournal.org/category/eng...

Excited to have our work on digital texts & how to teach them recognized by NTLI! Whether you’re an English teacher, professor, teacher educator, or literacy scholar, our database is a great resource to explore new digital genres and forms. reminiscent-attention-b9e.notion.site/HackYourStac...

I love doing this.

In Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press), coeditors and English professors Sinykin and Winant seek to redefine the technique as a way to make and understand arguments, with uses beyond literary studies.

@cohslgates.bsky.social was my 12th grade AP Literature teacher and is one of the central reasons I became an English teacher myself. I was beyond thrilled when Marcus told me he had an incredible conversation with her on @thebrokencopier.bsky.social. Highly recommend this episode!

I too loved this… and I want to expand this idea: In grad school, I co-led a course to explore what it would mean to think of “Teachers as Intellectuals”. We read everything from Freire to Gramsci to Said to Ransby. I think about that a lot as I lead PLCs…and the gap between theory & practice is 😳