Ethical ELA

I began Ethical ELA in 2015 as a blog to reflect on my teaching practices as a junior high ELA teacher in a suburb of Chicago. I wrote about choice reading and ungrading and the ethical questions that arose for me. Essentially, I came up against a lot of moments when I didn't feel good about what grades did to and for students, what rubrics did to and for students, what curriculum was doing to and for students. Writing about it helped me surface those tensions. In 2017, I began using Ethical ELA in Aprils for a National Poetry Month celebration. Like many others, I invited teachers to write a poem a day with me and my students. Later, we began to call it VerseLove. And then, during the pandemic, some Ethical ELA friends suggested we write poetry monthly, so we now write poetry the third weekend of every month. We call this the Open Write. And sometimes we have themed series around teaching. In all cases, the writers of Ethical ELA extend far beyond me. This site lives because teachers contribute poetry prompts, read and write alongside one another, answer a call to contribute an essay from time to time. And for that, for you, I am grateful. You may wonder why this site is called "ethical" ELA (English Language Arts). I work toward the belief that a teacher's first responsibility is to the human beings alongside us. Ethics is not a set of rules or codes but, for Levinas, a "first philosophy" -- a fundamental starting point. We can see one another in radical uniqueness, a way of being that we are not meant to understand wholly or to assimilate to our ways of being. In this way, we can be responsible to and for one another in asymmetrical ways, and to nurture such relationality. When we write together, we invite vulnerability that, in fact, requires care for one another. Together , we witness and validate the real, unfiltered humanity of the person behind the text. And so, I found Levinas's inter-human ethic to be a grounding force behind this site's name.

Levinas, E. (1986). Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas (R. Kearney, Interviewer). In R. Kearney (Ed.), Face to face with Levinas (pp. 13–33). State University of New York Press.