Literacy for Liberation: PCTELA ‘25 Behind Us, and the Future of our Classrooms Ahead by Hannah Lewis and Sarah Wilt

 Literacy for Liberation: PCTELA ‘25 Behind Us, and the Future of our Classrooms Ahead

by Hannah Lewis and Sarah Wilt

This post celebrates Mx. Sarah Wilt and Ms. Hannah Lewis’s experiences co-chairing the 2025 PCTELA conference in October, and is co-written by the two of us.

Collaborating on the PCTELA '25 conference was a new experience for us, but we agreed to the task in part because we value and appreciate one another’s approaches to our work, but in larger part because we felt an imperative: to address the inequities in PA classrooms that the Covid-19 pandemic had made visible, exacerbated, and created the opportunity to address, but which instead had gone largely ignored.

As the year of planning went on and threats to literacy education proliferated, we wanted to organize our conference in a way that would empower educators–help us to see the urgency of the work we do. We needed to reclaim literacy as a liberatory force, and ensure our pedagogy aligned with that goal. So we came up with the conference theme: Literacy for Liberation.

From the featured speakers who shared their unique and diverse perspectives with us to the classroom teachers who showed up with strategies to uplift student voices, our community of educators came through. This conference was an incredible opportunity to think together as a community about what it means to harness the liberatory power of literacy in Pennsylvania classrooms in 2025 and moving forward.

We’d like to highlight a few of the exemplary presentations for members who could not attend.

Featured Speakers

Featured speakers included youth librarian and mental health advocate Caiden Feldmiller, whose insights into the needs of LGBTQ+ teens and those with mental illnesses provided thought-provoking guidance that all of us can use to better handle sensitive topics in our classrooms and ensure each and every student we teach is seen and has a space to be their authentic selves. Find out more about his work at the Sewickley teen library here.

Saturday, former NCTE president Alfredo Luján started our day with his own story of his ongoing literacy liberation–you can find his take-aways later in this post.

Finally, professor of education and advocate for sex education and bodily literacy Dr. Stephanie Jones reminded us of the imperative to create space for students to learn about their bodies and how they exist in the world. With a prolific career and a significant online presence, it may be difficult to know where to start exploring her work, but this provocative podcast episode provides a way in for those who missed her talk, and introduces the exciting liberatory practice of a “read in” for a book challenged for its LGBTQ-supportive content.

In addition to our featured speakers, we want to highlight a few other conference attendees, but we invite you to review the full program to see all of the great work that was showcased.

First-Time Presenters

We want to share work from presenters new to NCTE affiliate conferences, but whose participation in PCTELA and other NCTE affiliate events we hope to see continue in years to come, including at NCTE in Philadelphia in 2026.

Dr. Jim Gerencser of Dickinson College’s Digital Resource Center for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School provides primary sources and free teacher resources that we can use to educate ourselves and our students about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the widespread assimilationist mission of boarding schools for Indigenous children in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Americas.

While his colleague, Dr. Amanda Cheromiah, was unable to attend, her work with the college’s Center for the Future of Native Peoples deserves mention, too. We invite you to explore the myriad resources and initiatives the Center makes available.

Dr. Karen Detlefsen of the University of Pennsylvania Project for Philosophy for the Young, along with colleague Dr. Dustin Webster and veteran Philadelphia educators Kathryn Sundeen and Francesca Canterini shared resources to promote reasoned ethical discourse in the classroom. Their work focused on Ethics Bowl events, but the resources they shared, including the National Ethics Bowl Case Library, are excellent tools for use in middle- and high school classrooms. In fact, Hannah’s already used one of the cases in her A.P. Seminar classroom this year, and her students loved it!

WPCTE members who double as WPWP teaching fellows, with WPWP director Dr. Khirsten Scott. Left to right: Heather Bixler, Khirsten Scott, Hannah Lewis, Carol Frow, and Katie Katkich.

WPCTE Members

And we’d love to acknowledge the work of WPCTE members below:

WPCTE Executive Director Carol Frow presented “Do You Want to Learn about Upstanders or Be One? Teaching Holocaust Literature to Create Student Upstanders,” highlighting how discussions around literature can inform students’ attitudes to their agency when others are treated in ways they know to be wrong.

WPCTE Slam Poetry Coordinator Katie Katkich presented “Amplifying Student Voices Through Slam and Spoken Word Poetry: Culturally Sustaining and Socially Engaged Learning in the ELA Classroom.” Check out her related work on the WPCTE’s Poetry Slam page.

WPWP teaching fellow Heather Bixler presented “Family Matters: Adapting Our Literature and Lessons for Adoptive and Foster Families,” reminding us that youth in foster care or who have been adopted deserve to learn in supportive classrooms.

Featured speaker and former NCTE president Alfredo Luján and WPCTE Vice-President Hannah Lewis co-presented “Free(ly) Writing the Word and the World,” exploring the ways we can disrupt traditional attitudes towards literacy in our classrooms and celebrate our students’ literacies (plural), including in free writes and sustained multimodal projects.

We’ll leave the last word on the experience to Alfredo Luján, who expresses the take-aways we’d hoped all our members would internalize, and leaves us with a call to action that we hope to echo and amplify:

This literacy event has helped me realize what my daughter Amanda, an ASL interpreter, said to me one day when I was espousing Vygotsky’s theory on language acquisition. “Language is never acquired. It is always being developed.” Each of us continues to develop liberation through literacy, as do our students. Our literacy is everything under our hat, the air and things around us, plus what we listen to, what we read and write, what we say and do, our home languages and cultures – our heritage. Our ability and each student’s ability to claim our, her, his, their own name and identity through being, reading, writing, and listening is emancipation from assimilation. The Secretary of Education and the Federal Administration should embrace and respect multi-cultural/multi-lingual literacy in current America.

Dear literacy educators, grow a thick skin to repel the bureaucracy. Resist. As you help liberate your students through their literacies, your way to heaven is being paved.