“The invitation to use multimodal resources as a teaching tool, and to create my own, catalyzed ideas I’ve had for a long time and made me feel like this work is possible to do now. So often when we think about teaching, the pedagogical is a little bit ignored. Part of pedagogy is people’s inspiration, how they connect with the lesson or what they’re teaching, how they bring themselves into the lesson, and how they bring in their intentions and what they’re thinking about.. that’s ALL part of your pedagogy. Part of what really got me motivated to create my own resource with teachers was seeing how scholars talk about justice-oriented teaching at scholarly conferences in reductive ways, like “What teachers need is example lesson plans!” But it’s gotta be so much MORE than just the lesson and just the material. The pedagogical approach is not something that is easily communicated or transferred to other teachers. I think every teacher has to explore their own approach and has to make it their own, so what I love about creating with teachers is how much you can see each teacher’s approach and who they are and their individual stories and connected to their family stories, which are part of their pedagogical approach. It’s just so much more than a lesson plan and their material: it’s their rationale, their reflections, their metacognition. That’s going to be helpful for new teachers who are still trying to figure that out. The expectation is not for them to reproduce their lessons but to realize that there are a variety of ways to think about teaching, and learn how to teach from their own perspectives approaches ”
