Stories From the Kitchen: Carving Unique Spaces For Student Voice, Choice, and Agency with Nawal Qarooni Casiano

Nawal is excited to teach a rich, multimodal summer course titled Stories from the Kitchen: Carving Unique Spaces for Student Voice, Choice, and Agency this summer.

Together as an educator community, we will explore all the ways families can build literacy skills with their everyday behaviors in meal making, passing down family recipes, and sharing of stories about their days at the kitchen table. We will cull and grapple with a variety of mentor texts for work around culturally nourishing stories that are multimodal, in exploration of poetry, passages from novels, picture books and song. Together we will honor multicultural backgrounds via text and composition that includes translanguaging, with hybrid genre texts like picture books about food that elucidates recipes and background on the communities of origin. 

Throughout the process, educators will have the chance to dig into recent scholarship about indigenous education and ways of knowing, in addition to culturally relevant pedagogy that serves our students in engagement by consistently weaving pillars of choice, voice and agency throughout daily instruction and the fabric of our classrooms. Stories from the kitchen also exalts traditions of oral storytelling (think: podcasts and recordings!), propelling us into capstone projects that will be practical for immediate use in the classroom, while nourishing the rich diversity of the students in our care. Stories from the kitchen will nourish us as an educator community, too.

Nawal Qarooni Casiano is a Chicago-based educator and writer who works across education spaces to support a holistic model of literacy instruction. She and her team of coaches at NQC Literacy work with teachers and school leaders to grow a love of reading and composition in ways that exalt the whole child, their cultural capital and their intrinsic curiosities. The proud daughter of immigrants, mothering four young multiethnic kids shapes the way she understands education. She is a former international newspaper reporter and currently a contributing writer for We Need Diverse Books, in addition to the teaching blogs Choice Literacy and Two Writing Teachers. Nawal holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in newspaper, magazine and online journalism from Syracuse University's Newhouse School, and a master's degree from Brooklyn College via the NYC Teaching Fellows program. In her daily literacy coaching and school-based support, Nawal draws on her years as a middle grades classroom teacher and professional writer, as well as her love of photography and connection to nature. Among her projects include researching and designing a family literacy program for Chicago Public Schools and authoring a forthcoming book, slated to be published by Heinemann in 2023. You can find her reading aloud to her kids, biking around Chicago's Logan Square, or on Twitter @NQQCLiteracy. Learn more about her work at NQCLiteracy.com.

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