4.30.14 To whom it may concern, I have known Courtney Brown for a year now. I started to get to know her as a student in my Reading and the Teaching of Critical Literacy course last Fall. In this class, students learned about the social, cultural, and political foundations of literature. They learned about the kinds of critical lenses they could help adolescents apply to their interpretations of texts in order to understand the work of writers within cultural contexts. They learned how to design reading instruction that connected with the deepest identity needs and questions of adolescents. Courtney came into this class having already spent much time in the field as a teacher. At the time, she was working with students in a BOCES school. She also had a tremendous amount of military experience. In the midst of juggling these responsibilities, she read deeply, embraced every opportunity to dialogue with her peers, with me, and with course readings from high school and middle school teachers. She was a delight to have in class because of the practical experience with working with adolescents that she brought and also because she was clearly a reflective practitioner. She is a teacher who had been collecting questions, questions that she freely raised as she began to dialogue about her practice with others. She loved to bring student work from her teaching to class, to take ideas from our class discussions and enhance her teaching, and then to report back with what she had tried. She was fully present and alive in class, listening and participating wide eyed as she waited for the next insight to hit her. When she shared, her intellectual curiosity and constant research that she was doing on her own each day was strikingly apparent. Her wisdom helped all of us understand the work of reading, of collaborative inquiry, and of deconstructing texts meaningfully with adolescents from more angles. At the end of the semester, I asked the students to construct their own pedagogical frameworks for strong multicultural and critical, adolescent literacy centered teaching. I also asked them to engage the process of backwards planning to design a power-packed unit, that would not only help students improve as readers and writers but also improve as successful communicators in any kind of cultural context. By that time, Courtney had secured a job at Cortland BOCES High School. She was working with a group of students in a developing reading class. We spent hours as a class mapping out their essential questions, breaking down the features of their chosen texts, delineating the concepts of the critical lenses that would help students understand the larger cultural significance of the texts, establishing productive reading strategies for students, and designing long and short-term learning objectives that aligned with Common Core Standards. It was both grueling and imaginative work and required tremendous persistence to fit all of the pieces together coherently in a way that would be accessible and meaningful for adolescents and their literacy and identity projects. Courtney chose to work with Malalas autobiography on her fight for literacy in Pakistan and with Mark Zusaks The Book Thief, the literacy story of a young child in the midst of the Holocaust. She decided to engage her current students in writing their own literacy autobiographies, exploring all the real world implications of the reading and writing skills they had been developing within specific literacy events in their lives. In the process, she positioned students to learn how to take up the position of ethnographers and to study the relationships between their reading and writing skills and the range of identity options available to them and others. Her unit, in which she fleshed out in 60 pages of careful lesson planning deep reflection for her teaching rationales, was a wonderful example of her incredible intellect and creativity on behalf of adolescents. She later let me know how well her students had responded to it, students who in general have not succeeded in school contexts. In her words, the unit I wrote in your class turned out AMAZING and my students, colleagues and administration LOVED it! :) I have some awesome student work I would love to share with you...and hopefully that conference if we get to go! I have invited Courtney to apply with me and to share her unit plan and teaching with other teachers at NCTE this next Fall. Courtney is the real deal. She has total passion for students and for teaching, and she is willing to go to all lengths to design power packed instruction that inspires adolescents to connect meaningfully through reading and writing about literature with their peers, and with people, cultures, and communities outside of their comfort zones. If you would like to talk further, please dont hesitate to contact me.
Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Hobson Assistant Professor Adolescent English Education SUNY Cortland 115C Old Main Cortland, NY 13045 607-753-2230 sarah.hobson@cortland.edu