Name: From Classroom to Community: Empowering Students by Indigenizing Your Secondary ELA Curriculum Using A Rhetorical Approach
Start: 2026-07-15T10:00:00-0600
End: 2026-07-15T11:30:00-0600

From Classroom to Community: Empowering Students by Indigenizing Your Secondary ELA Curriculum Using A Rhetorical Approach

Wednesday July 15, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am MDT

TBA

How do we prepare students for where they’re going in life? Recent scholarship on writing and rhetoric offers important insights about how we can help students negotiate the critical transitions that increasingly determine postsecondary success—like the transition from middle school to high school, high school to college, school to work, and from first-year college courses into the major and beyond. Teaching texts rhetorically promotes students’ agency and resilience by empowering them to transform their learning for new purposes. The units provided by the Native Literature Design Program encompass this approach.

No curriculum is perfect and for many secondary ELA teachers, the curriculum we have been given is often imperfect. Curriculum is equitable and effective when it acts as a “positive light” (142), to use Gholdy Muhammad’s description. Muhammad explains that “a quality curriculum provides teachers with guidance on how to approach, enhance, and customize lessons to meet the needs of their students” (157). When we use the tools of the Native Literature Design program and the framework from the California State University’s Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum (ERWC) we can create a curriculum that meets the needs of all of our students, gives students a voice, and celebrates the joy of Indigenous Genius.

In this session, participants learn how to level up literacy and language learning through a rhetorical approach to reading and composing. Using examples from California State University's Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum (ERWC) and the Native Literature Design Program, we explore teaching strategies and frameworks that promote transfer from reading to writing (and back again), between academic disciplines, and across genres and rhetorical situations. Most importantly, as part of the process of integrating these frameworks, participants will learn how to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into their existing curriculum.

Speakers

Margo Batha

English teacher Los Alamos High School and Coach, California State University Expository Reading and Writing Course, Los Alamos Public Schools

From Classroom to Community: Empowering Students by Indigenizing Your Secondary ELA Curriculum Using A Rhetorical Approach
How do we prepare students for where they’re going in life? Recent scholarship on writing and rhetoric offers important insights about how we can help students negotiate the critical transitions that increasingly determine postsecondary success—like the transition from middle... Read More →

Wednesday July 15, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am MDT
TBA

Breakout Session A

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4th Annual Indigenous Education Symposium

Margo Batha

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4th Annual Indigenous Education Symposium

Margo Batha

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