Presenters and attendees at the 2024 NYSEC Conference, Tracing Paths: Learning from the Past, Navigating the Present, and Shaping the Future, collectively created an atmosphere filled with hope, inspiration, and community-mindedness; the positive energy pulsed through us all. It is crucial to note that three powerful and brilliant keynote speakers– author Samira Ahmed; educator, author, and activist, Dr. David E. Kirkland, Ph.D., and professor, spoken word poet, and social justice advocate, Dr. Victorio Reyes Asili, Ph.D.– were contributing forces behind the initial spark and sustained flow for that energy throughout the conference. Their collective words and messages set the tone for conference attendees to honor the past, to strategize new ways to navigate the present, and to dream of more inclusive futures with our students.
On Thursday morning, the start of the first full day of the NYSEC conference, Samira Ahmed delivered a keynote address that captivated attendees. As she spoke, audience members’ lips pursed in pensive response to her personal journey with writing and the pathway she took with it in honoring her past, cultivating her present, and moving forward towards a more hopeful future. Her anecdotes linked the advice to “know yourself” you write, and how this led to her leaving what she calls “breadcrumbs for her readers” in the opening lines of her novels; several listeners shook their heads in a clear sign of familiarity– acknowledging those shared experiences and tapping into the personal knowledge and reflection that beautifully aligns within a common understanding writing’s power to transform. Ahmed shared the opening line of her latest novel, This Book Won’t Burn: “Fire isn’t the only thing that can burn you,” and its message of urgency to address the current wave of censorship and book banning that educators and their communities face. She warned us of the dangerous paths set forth when folks engage in seemingly harmless acts of soft censorship, like self-censoring, because it “do[es] the jobs of fascists for them.” Though the truth felt ominous, a message of hope prevailed. Ahmed also shared that her book was also largely inspired by youth activism happening across the country to speak out against censorship, namely book banning. Ahmed and her characters remind us that the pathway forward is not easy, but it is a source of hope for the future.
During Friday afternoon’s closing luncheon, Dr. David E. Kirkland, Ph.D., and Dr. Victorio Reyes Asili, Ph.D., delivered echoing messages of hope and perseverance that all educators need. Both speakers acknowledged the difficult truths that haunt our profession– dwindling sources of support and resources, political divides, racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia– and other forms of discrimination– censorship, and countless other struggles– and yet, both speakers provided pathways to help us all work together– with our colleagues, with our communities, and with our students– to create educational spaces and to dream into existence opportunities for a more equitable, just, and joyful world.
Dr. Reyes Asili performed powerful, heartfelt poems with themes of family, community, love, and loss. His words undulated and rendered us all speechless. His cadence perfectly encompassed a breadth and depth of emotion that made the extraordinary momentarily tangible, and the tangible inextricably extraordinary. His poems inspired us all to think deeply about what it means to be ourselves, to be ourselves in communities that accept us, to be ourselves in communities that don’t understand us, and to be ourselves in community with each other, as we trace new pathways forward in our personal and professional lives.
Dr. Kirkland opened his speech with a reminder that “kids come from real places and real spaces” and he echoed the importance of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Danger of a Single Story” TED Talk; we must interrupt the danger of resigning our students [and the communities in which they live] to a single story. He shared some of his own personal and academic struggles that he faced in his youth. Various elements of his experience directly correlate to students who educators in the audience teach. He encouraged us all to think about how we can change narratives by doing more than “responding to the surface”. Dr. Kirkland tasked us to consider how we as educators can “create spaces that respond to [students’] souls”. His question left us all with pathways forward to building such spaces, to moving ourselves, our students, and one another from dreams and ideas to realities.
The NYSEC community is grateful to the speakers who so generously provided insightful, inspirational, and invigorating keynote addresses with messages and guiding steps to accompany us all along our paths to a brighter future.
Holly Spinelli is an advocate for inclusive, antiracist, anti-oppressive education. She teaches English at Monroe-Woodbury High School and S.U.N.Y. Orange County Community College in New York. She served two terms on the NCTE Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. Spinelli is a New York State English Council executive board member, the Voices of NYSEC blog editor, and an NCTE Open Educational Resources Fellow. She is a contributing writer for HITRECORD’s Emmy Award-winning series Create Together (2020), and her article “Our Américas: Writing beyond Borders: Latinx Voices in World Literature” received the NCTE Paul and Kate Farmer English Journal Award (2023). She is the recipient of the 2024 NYSEC Fellow Award, and she led a “This Story Matters” Teacher Corps cohort for creating and contributing book rationales to the NCTE Book Rationales Database (2024). Holly looks forward to continuing to work for and with others in the pursuit of intellectual freedom.