{"podcast":{"title":"The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA","slug":"the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","podcast_index_feed_id":743282,"rss_url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://nowsparkcreativity.com","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/c/2/e/b/c2ebf102a6acd494bafc7308ab683e82/TSCTP_3000px.png","author":"Betsy Potash","episode_count":425,"summary":"Want to love walking into your ELA classroom each day? Excited about innovative strategies like PBL, escape rooms, hexagonal thinking, sketchnotes, one-pagers, student podcasting, genius hour, and more? Want a thriving choice reading program and a shelf full of compelling diverse texts? You're in the right place! Here you'll find interviews with top authors from the ELA field, workshops with strategies you can use in class immediately, and quick tips to ignite your English teacher creativity. Love teaching poetry? Explore blackout poems, book spine poems, I am from poems, performance poetry, lessons for contemporary poets, and more. Excited to get started with hexagonal thinking? Find out how to build your first deck of hexagons, guide your students through their first discussion, and even expand into hexagonal one-pagers. Into visual learning? Me too! Learn about sketchnotes, one-pagers, and the writing makerspace. Want to get your students podcasting? Get the top technology recs you need to make it happen, and find out what tips a podcaster would give to students starting out. Wish your students would fall for choice reading? Explore top titles and how to fund them, learn to mak…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-30T04:18:43.548102+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282"},"episode":{"title":"410: The American Lit Curriculum I Would Teach Now","slug":"410-the-american-lit-curriculum-i-would-teach-now","published_at":"2026-01-28T15:02:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/410-the-american-lit-curriculum-i-would-teach-now","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/410-the-american-lit-curriculum-i-would-teach-now","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sparkcreativity/dream_amlit__full.mp3?dest-id=518145","summary":"American Lit has the potential to be an engaging, broadening, fascinating course. We're in what I consider an in-between era, where many schools are still providing the historical American lit canon to teachers, while other schools or independent teachers going around the system have moved into teaching a broader swirl of America's diverse stories. The American Lit curriculum I was handed twenty years ago was 98% written by dead white men. Since then, I've learned about the impact on our students when they can (and can't) see themselves in the books they read. When they can and can't see their identities. Their communities. Their problems. Their hopes. I learned from Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's call for books in which students can see themselves and learn to understand others in her appeal to our collective humanity in her landmark essay, \"Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.\" I learned from Felicia Rose Chavez, author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop , who shared her personal experience as a young reader: \"It's startling as a young person of color to stare down the spines of literacy and note the neat annihilation of most of the world\" (29). I learned from Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño , co-authors of Conscious Classrooms , that using culturally relevant texts can improve student outcomes by helping improve their comprehension, motivation & engagement. I learned more about pairing contemporary texts to the canon from the #distrupttexts movement , about \"completing\" the canon from Chavez, and about layering multicultural, multimodal texts from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's Cultivating Genius . For me, it feels so clear. And yet I still see so many curriculums either still cleaving to the classics for the most part or abandoning books altogether in…","meta_description":"American Lit has the potential to be an engaging, broadening, fascinating course. We're in what I consider an in-between era, where many schools are still…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1456,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/episodes/410-the-american-lit-curriculum-i-would-teach-now/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/410-the-american-lit-curriculum-i-would-teach-now.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}