Root Systems is a land-informed professional development for teaching culturally responsive language learning strategies, which will use canopies, understories, and forest floors to inspire and inform vocabulary development, multilingual learning, and social and emotional learning strategies.
Participants can expect to leave the workshop with a selection of new strategies and prompts, a recursive strategy for classroom use, and suggestions for bringing literature informed by Indigenous languages into the learning space. This two-hour workshop will fulfill OSPI’s Continuing Education clock hours (2) for all state educators and meets the requirements for ongoing Racial Equity Training for teacher certification.
This course will offer free resources and is suitable for teachers and learners of all ages including adult learners. Writers may also find the content useful.
This professional development for educators centers language learning, word choice, and vocabulary development in conversation with Indigenous language and literature. The metaphor of the forest will open considerations of multiple language traditions and underpin strategies to help students create their own etymologies, consider the nature and purpose of word connotation, and explore the narratives and lyrical possibilities within words.
This offering will look at words and language as a source of creative fascination by connecting learning to place and offering new lenses to teach word choice, sentence structure, and word comprehension.Topics discussed:
- Language inclusive lesson planning strategies
- Recursive strategy for reading, writing, speaking, and listening for language instruction
- Language and Worldview discussion strategies
- Visual literary analysis strategy
- SEL focused vocabulary tools
Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Eastern Shawnee. Her first book, Tributaries, was published by the University of Arizona Press and won a 2016 American Book Award. Da’ has held residencies at the Richard Hugo House, Tin House, and Jack Straw. Her newest book, Instruments of the True Measure, is the winner of the Washington State Book Award. Da’ lives near Seattle with her husband and son.