This post was written by NCTE member michelle g. bulla.

The NCTE Annual Convention is always a treasured gathering and growth experience. Each year that I am able to go, I undoubtedly come back to work feeling renewed and reenergized for the heavy lift that is the hallmark of educators who try to continually do meaningful work with their students and colleagues.

I attended many sessions at these last two Conventions, and have been fortunate to learn from brilliant and insightful folks about moving and highly impactful topics that I have brought back to my students and colleagues. Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s historically and culturally responsive teaching framework from Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework and Unearthing Joy is the foundation of our ongoing grades 9–11 curriculum revision project. Dr. Seema Yasmin’s What the Fact? is helping us tremendously with media literacy and a core text for this coming fall in our journalism classes, and Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English is supporting our endeavors with literary theory in all our classes. I’ve brought back new titles from the NCTE Annual Convention, excitedly sharing photos and video snippets of authors reading from their work. And I have learned from many teachers on the ground in classrooms across the country whose ideas have stimulated projects and other revisions to my curriculum and pedagogy. There is nothing you can’t find at NCTE if you’re looking for it!

Notably, the 2023 Annual Convention further fueled my interest in bringing climate fiction (I only learned this genre term and the nickname of “cli-fi” at the 2022 Convention), ecological topics, and ecocriticism into the classroom with my students and to my department to share with colleagues. For the second year in a row I attended the “Connecting English Language Arts and the Climate Crisis” roundtable led in part by Allen Webb, one of the authors of Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference, and was thrilled to again learn from inventive and hope-driven folks like Fawn Canady, assistant professor of literacy at Southern Oregon University, and Mark Sulzer, professor of English education at University of Cincinnati. These folks—along with many others—have devoted a significant portion of their energies to bringing the climate crisis to the forefront of ELA teaching and professional development work for several years now. Many of them are part of the ELATE Commission on Climate Justice, Inquiry, and Action, and are architects of the 2019 NCTE Position Statement, Resolution on Literacy Teaching on Climate Change.”

Arguably the most profound crisis of our time, learning and inventing ways to bring this topic to my students outside of a science program has had a dramatic impact upon me, my teaching, my students’ learning, and my professional development work.

For the bulk of my 25 years as a teacher and leader, while I have used nature as a backdrop for writing, taught Romantic and transcendentalist writers, and introduced ecocriticism with other literary theories, it had not occurred to me that I could make a difference in a way that was increasingly important to me: turning hearts and minds toward environmental sustainability.

For humanity to have hope, we must—with heart—make space for exploration of this crisis in all of our classrooms. I have been so moved by this work that I have not only invented units around it and introduced it to my colleagues, I will now also join the ranks of those who are advocating for inclusion of it in ELA classrooms at NCTE this fall, sharing my ideas and my students’ work during several presentations and this year’s version of the roundtable noted above.

I’m looking forward to NCTE 2024 to broaden and deepen my learning around climate fiction, environmental sustainability, and ways to center hope in all the hard and meaningful work we do. I hope you can make it. If you can’t and you want to learn more about this kind of work, reach out. I’m happy to share. We’re all in this together.

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