Adventures in teaching . . .
-
In collaboration with Somerville’s Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz, we published a 2022 anthology of Somerville HS student poetry which was sold at local bookstores and featured in The Boston Globe where reviewer Nina MacLaughlin writes: “Somerville High students were asked to write about their city, and the resulting poems — honest, spirited, reflective, funny, fierce cover rich territory: heartbreak, autumn nights, longing, confrontations with history, with themselves.”
-
This is a Professional Development course I designed for K-12 educators in Somerville Public Schools in December 2022. The course offers a critical lens to consider curricular over-emphasis on formulaic academic-writing and to imagine a place for personal writing across K-12 disciplines. Resources include theoretical framing, writing exercises, student-facing lesson plans, and opportunities for educators to reflect on their practice.
-
I will have the honor of working with NYC elementary school students next year in collaboration with the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Stay tuned for updates!
As an urban-public high school teacher, I view the teaching of creative writing as a liberatory practice and consider the pursuit of educational liberation for all students to be world-changing work. The centering of students’ voices and histories is at the heart of this enterprise.
We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to each other.
— Melissa Febos