Center for Literacy Education Hosts First Annual O’Shaughnessy Summer Literacy Institute

“Kids who identify themselves as poor readers read for one reason, and one reason only,” said Ernest Morrell, co-director of ACE’s Center for Literacy Education. “Because they have to.”

But if teachers and families can help students find joy in reading, Morell believes, all students can become “super readers,” motivated to read both in and out of the classroom.

Such was the mission of this summer’s first annual O’Shaughnessy Summer Literacy Institute, hosted by the Center for Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame. Nine upper elementary and middle school teachers from schools in South Bend, Goshen, Indiana, and New York City were invited to participate in the four-day conference. Workshops introduced strategies to get students excited about reading, writing, and questioning.

Fostering literacy, Morrell said, is not just a matter of teaching students reading skills and walking them through challenging texts, but helping them develop excitement for reading.

“The question is not necessarily how we increase achievement—it’s how we inspire literate lives,” he said.

The Institute also helped prepare participants to conduct literacy research in their own school communities this year.

“The goal is to think about intellectual learning communities where they’re doing the research in their classrooms,” said Jodene Morrell, the Associate Director of the Center for Literacy Education, about the Literacy Institute’s intended impact on participating teachers. “The summer is a time for them to learn to become researchers and develop a research plan, and then they get that continual support throughout the school year.”

In addition to developing their own teaching and research skills, Jodene Morrell hopes that the teachers will become mentors for the next Literacy Institute cohort and for other educators in their school communities.

Ernest Morrell advised teachers to engage families in helping students develop enthusiasm for reading. To this end, he said, teachers can invite families to participate in school literacy nights, personalize book baskets for their children to store their books in the classroom, and read books together as a family at children’s listening levels, which may be higher than their independent reading levels. Perhaps most importantly, teachers and families must ensure that students read at least 10 minutes per day. Students should even be encouraged to read books slightly below their reading so they build the stamina to read for longer periods of time and to help them learn to associate reading with feelings of confidence and pleasure.

As Catholic educators, ACE Advocates Director Kati Macaluso said, literacy teachers can help students realize the beauty and power of language in order to see connections between literature and faith.

“When we think about Christian teaching and the language of faith, it transcends words and the cognitive,” Macaluso said. “It doesn’t make sense. But that’s the point—it needs story, it needs poetic language to contain it.”

To demonstrate how teachers can show children the impact of poetic language, Macaluso compared two accounts of the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing: a news article from The (London) Guardian, and Dudley Randall’s poem, “The Ballad of Birmingham.” She walked Institute teachers through the ballad’s structural anticipation of the bombing, and its gut-wrenching use of irony to capture a mother’s devastation when she learns that her daughter has been killed at Sunday school.

“There’s a pain and an injustice contained in this poem that simply can’t be contained in the same way in the journalistic piece,” Macaluso said. “You have to have the story.”

Reading literature with students, she said, can help students find the mystery and wonder that surround them in everyday experiences, as in a young boy’s bus trip in Matt de la Peña’s children’s book, Last Stop on Market Street.

“One of our chief responsibilities as teachers in the Catholic classroom is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary—to help our students live sacramental lives, and to see the mystery behind everyday realities,” she said.

In later sessions, Mike Macaluso, a member of ACE’s supervision and instruction faculty, spoke to the teachers about critical literacy skills and incorporating multiculturalism into the study of literature. Betsy Okello, a faculty member of ACE Leadership Programs, talked about building dialogic discussion into classroom culture.

Teachers attending the conference look forward to bringing new strategies and excitement for literacy back to their elementary and middle school classrooms.

“I hope that I can continue to become the best educator I can be for my kids,” said Francesca Ciaramitaro, a middle-school teacher at Incarnation School in New York. “I want to build a classroom of ‘super readers’ that are not only really great at reading, but [who] also love it and are hungry for new books and book talk.”

“I hope to learn how I can better foster a love of reading for all of my students, no matter what their prior reading experiences may have been,” said fifth-grade teacher Joscilyn Acosta of St. John the Evangelist Catholic School in Goshen. “I hope I can bring back the love of learning that I experienced at the Institute.”