This summer, teachers are invited to join together with scholars, artists, and authors to strengthen writing and multimodal composing practices in a virtual, open institute co-sponsored by three MIchigan Writing Project sites. This NWP Radio show invited facilitators to describe how they will support participants in coming together to create brave spaces in writing instruction that centers writing and composing models at the intersections of queer, BIPOC, and feminist voices; that center intersectionality; and develop a community of folx to support these efforts and to stay committed with and alongside each other. Join us for this interview to learn more and find out how to get involved; registration is open until June 15, 2022.

Related Resources

• Institute flyer

About Our Guests

Rae Oviatt, Ph.D., has nearly two decades of experience in education, community organizing, and research. She was a middle and high school English teacher and teacher of multilingual and bilingual English language learners across urban contexts in Atlanta, Bangkok, Indianapolis, and Lansing. She is the incoming Vice Chair for NCTE's Genders and Sexualities Equity Alliance, and the 2018 recipient of NCTE’s ELATE Graduate Research Award. Her work with the National Writing Project dates back nearly a decade, and she is a teacher-consultant for the Red Cedar Writing Project. She is currently Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Eastern Michigan University. Dr. Oviatt’s current inquiry examines the liberatory potential for centering Queer of Color literacies and epistemologies in writing and multimodal composing with youth and educators across school and community organizations.

Ileana Jiménez is a leader in the feminism-in-schools movement and is the founder of feministteacher.com and creator of the #HSfeminism and #K12feminism hashtags. An English teacher-activist for 25 years, she has taught high school and graduate students, as well as emerging and established teachers critical feminist pedagogies, curricula, and activism. In 2011, she received a Distinguished Fulbright to interview queer youth in Mexico City. Globally, she has presented workshops for teachers in Argentina, Australia, Greece, India, Mexico, and the UK. She has published in Gender in an era of post-truth populism: Pedagogies, challenges and strategies (2022); Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (volume 1, 2016); Radical Teacher (vol. 106, 2016); One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What's Gotten Better... and What Hasn't (Beacon, 2015); SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence (2015); The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future (2015); and Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics (2018). She received her B.A. in English Literature at Smith College, and an M.A. in English Literature at Middlebury College. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @feministteacher.