As ELA teachers, we care a lot about student engagement and voice, but we also know how challenging it can be to invite all students’ participation. When students seem distracted or distracting to others it can seem counterintuitive to give them greater power. Yet, research tells us that circulating power can make a big difference in fostering student motivation to engage in literacy learning. In this interactive session we’ll explore Rex and Schiller’s (2009) view of circulating power as a “social resource” for the “co-construction of knowledge” in a community where “everyone feels powerful in relation to one another” (p. 43). Paying particular attention to language, we ask, how can we foster equitable and engaging classroom interactions that open opportunities for all students’ critical literacy learning (Janks, 2009)? In this interactive session, we’ll invite participants to join us in exploring this question. Using research-based methods, we share the story of our own learning about the instructional tools that prepare students to participate in meaningful discussion, create a safe space where all students feel comfortable sharing, keep the conversation going, and assess student contributions. We’ll co-analyze transcripts from classroom interactions to consider the role of our own language choices and the ways in which those languaging choices (Beach & Bloome, 2019) can open or foreclose collaborative learning. By inviting participants to try out activities and language tools that they can use in their own instruction to circulate power, we’ll invite conversation about how these efforts can build trusting relationships that pay dividends for everyone.
