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Jeffrey Austin

@jaustinedu.bsky.social

Literacy Consultant | Growing Researchers of Environment Equity Network (G.R.E.E.N.) Co-Founder | Former ELA Department Chair, Writing Center Director, Instructional Coach + Humanities Teacher | Views are my own | Pronouns: He/Him

676 Posts1302 Follower972 Folgt
Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · yesterday

In other words, state-mandated lists of books are little better than big box scripted curriculum because they both suffer from the same fundamental flaw: attempting to studentproof and teacherproof the classroom. I’m all for “whole books,” but there’s a point at which it also becomes illiberal.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · 2d ago

While a primary problem in English classes is that standards often have primacy over content, meaning students are often confined to predictable, decodable texts, mandated book lists are not the solution to this issue. Trusting teachers and students is. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · last wk.

I directed a writing center for 11 years with almost no support from my school or district leaders. Being able to point to and partner with university writing centers often saved our program from being cut or consolidated. This is a very bad omen for those across the writing center community.

Mary Lewis@profmarylewis.bsky.social · last wk.

It‘s quite possible that with this move, @harvard.edu could become the only Ivy League university without a writing center. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · last wk.

What makes talking about crime and surveillance difficult is that the biggest surveillance zealots are those who either believe a) they don't commit crimes or b) their crimes are fundamentally different from the crimes other people commit and shouldn't be prosecuted.

Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · last wk.

That’s the thing about surveillance—we all commit minor statuatory infractions every single day. More surveillance equals more enforcement and that enforcement is almost always done in ways the penalize already marginalized neighborhoods.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · 2w ago

While I'm not in higher ed, NCTE's decision to shutter CCCC is another example of institutional and organization failure at a time when unwavering strength is necessary. It's also a bad omen for the future of our professional organization and another reason for K-20 solidarity moving forward.

Email from NCTE Executive Committee acknowledging messages received and the following: For many years, the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) played a critical role in serving the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) & its mission. In recent years, however, CCCC has struggled with its fiscal sustainability, declining participation, & governance challenges. As a result, earlier today the Executive Committee of NCTE made the difficult decision to de-charter its special topics conference CCCC. To clarify, today’s decision to de-charter does not mean that NCTE has altered its commitment to supporting teachers at the college and university level. This is exemplified by the fact that the NCTE College Section is thriving. The process in making this decision spanned several years, with attempts to work collaboratively with CCCC’s executive committees across multiple iterations. While the organization appreciates the years of collaboration with CCCC, after deep evaluation and thoughtful consideration, the Executive Committee concluded this step was necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole. Although this has been a very difficult decision, we are excited about the future. This change will allow us to provide better support to the college English and writing and composition community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible. We thank CCCC, its leaders, and its members for its many years of contributions and look forward to continuing to involve the composition, rhetoric, and writing communities as we move forward. NCTE remains devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. As future planning takes place, NCTE will communicate updates. A transition team focused on supporting composition, rhetoric, & writing studies will be named imminently.
Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · 2w ago

The Hanford Class is full of non-readers who hijacked control over reading in schools. What has followed is a cheap, technical view of reading that has only served to create a K-3 school system for all, full of constant remediation and devoid of close, critical, and beautiful encounters with text.

Trevor Aleo@mraleosays.bsky.social · 2w ago

This got me wondering: Are there any disciplines who have a generally positive/healthy/productive relationships with journalists/commentariats reporting on their field? To be clear, there is some INCREDIBLE educational journalism, but its often drowned out by corporate tech garbage & moral panics.

Nick Covington@covingtonedu.bsky.social · 3w ago

Fun is a "deadly sin" for Paul Kirschner: "When I speak of making the learning experience more enjoyable I emphatically don’t mean making learning fun. Of course, it would be really nice if we could make learning fun, and I’m not opposed to this, but learning is hard."

Another quote from kitschner opposing funNon existent grit is deadly sin #9When I speak of making the learning experience more enjoyable I emphatically don’t mean making learning fun. Of course, it would be really nice if we could make learning fun, and I’m not opposed to this, but learning is hard.
Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · 4w ago

Brother, every student should have the opportunity to drive a truck like Doug Lemov. It's preparation for being a charlatan who thinks they can tell everyone else what to do and what to read because they wrote a book and sell curriculum.

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Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · 4w ago

The fundamental argument of the CogSci crowd is that students lack durable knowledge, so embodied processes won't work. Learning can only occur when students are explicitly given dots in a systemic, replicable way. The important knowledge students have from other contexts doesn't count.

The science of learning does not reduce education to rote recall. It highlights the indispensable role of long-term memory in learning, because, as Dan Willingham puts it, “thinking well requires knowing facts.” You cannot reason about what you don’t remember. You cannot connect the dots if you don’t have any dots.
Nick Covington@covingtonedu.bsky.social · last yr.

I woke up still upset about this diagram. No recognition of humans as agents in their environment or as active sensemakers & constructors of knowledge & understanding. Just lay down on the floor, class, and collect information like water and I'm a human sprinkler!

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · 4w ago

I have been told by people on this site that the best time to say or do anything at all about scripts, mandates, legislation, or new assessment schemes is years from now because these have no material impact on education and the institutions and people in power won't let anything bad happen.

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Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · 4w ago

What happens when kids don't want to read excerpts from the big box curriculum or write another five-paragraph CER or find the learning culturally or linguistically irrelevant? This ignores that task, text, context, and identity all play a role in how we participate in reading and writing.

A slide from the Michigan Department of Education stating that students need to be assessed for dyslexia if they exhibit escape or avoidance behaviors when asked to engage in reading or writing activities.
Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · last mo.

Really brilliant article on The Guardian's "Top 100 Novels" list that could double as a critique of the current "knowledge building" movement in education, which is also a canon-building project run through the "machinery of consecration," including perceived authority and professional familiarity.

Canons are criticism without the burden of demonstration. They assert hierarchies without performing the readings on which hierarchies must rest. And the deepest clichés in canon-making are not, as one might expect, the repetition of the same titles. They are the repetition of the same conditions of recognition: the same institutional ecology—the syllabus, the review culture, the prize archive, the translation prestige, the teachable masterpiece—through which certain works circulate into visibility while others remain, not unknown to specialists, but unprocessed by the machinery of consecration.
Los Angeles Review of Books@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social · last mo.

"Canons are criticism without the burden of demonstration." Ebadur Rahman discusses canon formation and The Guardian's "Hundred Best Novels of All Time": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/canon-building-guardian-100-best-novels-all-time/

Ornate gates at an university that are closed
Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu.bsky.social · last mo.

One of the reasons we need a less cynical and more human vision for English education is because its current structures, a product of ed reform word salad, has open the door to charlatans. Let’s not give ownership of the ELA classroom to actors like Lemov by staying silent about our values.

A screenshot of Doug Lemov's Substack announcing a new book-based curriculum.
Dan Sinykin@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"English teachers have little latitude to prepare the next generation of citizens. Accordingly, as we've learned from conversations w/ dozens of teachers & from the responses to a nat'l survey we conducted in 2024, they are intensely dissatisfied w/ the state of the field" post45.org/2026/06/post...

Post 451 : English Without Books – Post45

Sara, who until recently taught in a conservative school district in Kentucky, loves teaching Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. She explained in a recent interview that the kids have seen enough dy...

post45.org