MCTE Spring Conference 2020 (#mct2020)

3/8/2020

This weekend Shelly Shaffer, Gretchen Rumohr, and I were the keynote speakers at the MCTE 2020 Spring Conference. We were thrilled to be invited and relish the opportunity to talk about our work on teaching about gun violence in the English Language Arts classroom.

We have a ton of information that we built into a website so that the attendees would have easy access to our notes and and a semi organized collection of resources to use with other teachers and their students. One of the questions teachers seem to ask about are the books. How many books are out there? Which ones are about school shootings? Are there some that are generically about gun violence? Are there short stories? What about nonfiction? What about the ones by our favorite authors?

We, of course, think that ELA teachers should be reading as much as possible. The best books to recommend are the ones are the ones you know well. Next, is know where to look for books and for reliable reviews of those books. After that we hope you are teaching your students how to look for themselves. Don't we all hope that the students we work with will love reading the way we do? We hope they are eagerly looking for books that call to them. Then, they can find an abundance of books on any topic they are interested.

Below is a slideshow of books that we have gathered that are connected guns in a variety of ways.

YA books about Guns (and maybe a few that aren't YA)

Bickmore's
Co-Edited Books

Meet
Evangile Dufitumukiza!

Evangile is a native of Kigali, Rwanda. He is a college student that Steve meet while working in Rwanda as a missionary. In fact, Evangile was one of the first people who translated his English into Kinyarwanda.

Steve recruited him to help promote Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media while Steve is doing his mission work.

He helps Dr. Bickmore promote his academic books and sometimes send out emails in his behalf.

You will notice that while he speaks fluent English, it often does look like an "American" version of English. That is because it isn't. His English is heavily influence by British English and different versions of Eastern and Central African English that is prominent in his home country of Rwanda.

Welcome Evangile into the YA Wednesday community as he learns about Young Adult Literature and all of the wild slang of American English vs the slang and language of the English he has mastered in his beautiful country of Rwanda.

While in Rwanda, Steve has learned that it is a poor English speaker who can only master one dialect and/or set of idioms in this complicated language.

Blogs to Follow