Lifting Literacy Framework

Earlier this year, I started playing with new ways to plan. I was already leaning on the learning presented by brilliant women educators like Dr. Gholdy Muhammad and Lorena Germán. Still, as planned, I was jumping between many different resources and did not have the structure I felt I needed. I was looking for ways to incorporate much of my learning into the same place. A recent course provided an opportunity to discuss a conceptual framework to address an area of concern in education. I decided to look at disengagement in literacy work and how I use the work of brilliant scholars to support an engaging literacy classroom, and I submitted the Lifting Literacy Framework.

I had already worked with the Hill Model (Muhammad, 2020) to develop units and, in separate instances, used the Textured Teaching Framework (Germán, 2021). Multimodal composition has been an interest of mine for some time. I had not really played with all three together, but the theory was that the synthesis of these ideas would lead to increased engagement.

I started with the Hill Model.

Followed by looking at adding some texture

Finally, considering some additional resources.

All together

Approaching my identity unit this way helped my students understand the connections between texts, connect to their own lives, and reflect in creative and powerful ways. Rather than responding to a line in a text as we usually did for multimodal responses, we looked at the big idea of conflict one faces when uncertain about identity.

I plan to spend much of the summer looking at my old units and plans and revamping them with this framework approach in mind. I think there is still lots to do as I refine the process but I am excited about where it is going and grateful to the incredible women educators who are out here inspiring ideas. Thanks again, Dr. Gholdy Muhammand and Lorena Germán.