Annual Conference Information

9th Annual SUNY Cortland Literacy Department Conference

The Sciences of Literacy: Comprehensive Approaches to Literacy Learning and Teaching

The SUNY Cortland Literacy Department is pleased to announce that we will be holding our 9th annual conference virtually. Details about the conference are below.

Conference Details

Date: Saturday, April 5, 2025
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. (EST)
Platform: Zoom
Cost: FREE for attendees
Conference Registration: Register for the conference here! Registration continues through March 21, 2025.

Conference Theme

For over 100 years, educators, researchers, and policymakers have been embroiled in ideological debates over how to teach reading, and whether classrooms should prioritize phonics instruction or whole language instruction (Kim, 2008). These debates have come to be known as “The Reading Wars,” and they continue to shape today’s national discourses on schooling. More recently, there has been a push for elementary classrooms to embrace “the science of reading” – that is, research-based and systematic approaches to teaching phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and phonics (Young et al., 2022). While acknowledging the importance of the above three skills, the SUNY Cortland Literacy Department also seeks to explore comprehensive approaches to literacy learning that include and extend beyond word decoding. Thus, the 9th Annual SUNY Cortland Literacy Department Conference seeks to go “above the fray” (Lindsey, 2022) of binary debates about reading instruction, taking a “yes and” approach to literacy learning that celebrates the many ways educators meet the unique needs of their students and school communities. To this end, we welcome an array of approaches to literacy instruction that include but are not limited to: anti-racist pedagogies, play-based literacy practices, multimodal meaning-making, translanguaging, inquiry-driven instruction, social-emotional learning, critical approaches to civic engagement, and more. All of the above topics constitute what we are calling “the science of literacy” – critical, inclusive, and research-based approaches to teaching meaning-making and composing.

Request for Proposals

For the 9^th Annual SUNY Cortland Literacy Department Conference, we will accept proposals in the form of a panel, workshop, presentation, or discussion group (described in greater detail below). Our sessions, led by faculty, graduate students, and K-12 teachers, will strive to answer the following questions: 

In what ways does your teaching work to prepare youth for successful forms of comprehending and composing in the 21^st century?
How do you design educational spaces to provide foundational skills and strategies while centering joy, love, healing, redemption, and social justice?
What archeology of the self (Sealey-Ruiz, 2022) and self-identity work do you engage in or ask your students to engage in with you to help create more socially inclusive spaces of learning?
What policies and practices have you developed or enacted to provide youth with opportunities to be/become engaged citizens and agents of change?

Types of Sessions

Panel: Presenters knowledgeable about a common topic gather for discussion, often moderated by a question-answer format. Panels will be held for 50 minutes. 
Workshop: Presenters provide a hands-on experience or demonstration relating to teaching and learning. Audience members may be encouraged to bring their own ideas and materials to “work on” during the workshop. Workshops will be held for 50 minutes. 
Discussion Group: Presenters prepare a session interacting with audience members for discussion, self-reflection, and exploration of topics. Discussion groups will be held for 50 minutes. 
Presentation: Presenters share their research and/or experience answering questions and/or solving problems with little audience participation. Presentations will be held for 20 minutes and grouped in pairs.

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D. is an award-winning associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on racial literacy in teacher education, Black girl literacies, and Black and Latinx male high school students. A sought-after speaker on issues of race, culturally responsive pedagogy, and diversity, Sealey-Ruiz works with K-12 and higher education school communities to increase their racial literacy knowledge and move toward more equitable school experiences for their Black and Latinx students. Sealey-Ruiz appeared in Spike Lee's "2 Fists Up: We Gon' Be Alright," a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou.

Zaretta Hammond, M.A. is a teacher educator and national education consultant supporting teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders. She is the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (Corwin, 2015). Ms. Hammond is a former high school and community college writing instructor. For the past 25 years, through her company, Transformative Learning Solutions, she has supported schools and other institutions in deepening their understanding of the integration of culturally responsive practices, the science of reading, and the science of learning. In addition, she has written articles and book chapters on these topics to help educators improve instruction and understand evidence-based applications of emerging research in the learning sciences. Ms. Hammond is a strong literacy advocate who sits on the research advisory committee for Learning Policy Institute's Alliance for the Science of Learning and Development. She is also a member of the science of reading advisory board for Unbound Ed's CORE Learning.

Register for the conference here! Registration continues through March 21, 2025.

Positionality Statement

The SUNY Cortland Literacy Department recognizes that we are not experts in anti-bias, anti-racist work, and we are continuously reflecting and seeking knowledge about power, privilege, and oppression ourselves. We acknowledge the following about our collective: 

We are uninvited guests living, learning, and teaching on the land of the Haudenosaunee people. 
Our collective racial makeup is predominantly white, and many of us hold unearned white privilege. 
Our department faculty is made up predominantly of white women in a field where white women represent roughly 80% of educators in the U.S., even though our students are increasingly racially diverse.

As a literacy education department, we must address and work to dismantle matters of oppression relating to literacy practices in school spaces. Our goal with this conference is to hold space for learning, reflection, and planning for action with respect to anti-bias, anti-racist literacy teaching. In doing so, we strive to centralize the scholarship and experiences of scholars and educators from the historically marginalized group who established and remain deeply engrained in this work.

We are confident that attendees and speakers have an enormous amount to teach us when grappling with these specific topics. We welcome these moments as they help to re-distribute the unearned power based on our collective positionalities and aid in continuing to disrupt our biases.

Register for the conference here! Registration continues through March 21, 2025.

Resources:

Kim, J. S. (2008). Research and the reading wars. In F. M. Hess (Ed.), When research matters: How scholarship influences education policy (pp. 89-111). Harvard Education Press.

Lindsey, J. B. (2022). Reading above the fray. Scholastic.

Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2022). An archaeology of self for our times: Another talk to teachers. English Journal, 111(5), 21-26.

Young, C., Paige, D., & Rasinski, T. V. (2022). Artfully teaching the science of reading. Routledge.