[00:00:00] Joy and loss live side by side in the stories of our lives. And they live side by side in the stories of characters and fiction. And I think that especially works of fiction are tools for helping young people understand their own lives and how to navigate the difficult things that they'll experience inevitably. Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education Podcast. The space for Education Meets Resilience. I'm Dr. Joey Weisler, and in each episode we dive deep into the personal stories of educators, students, leaders, and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities within modern education. Whether you're just starting your teaching journey or are a seasoned professional looking for inspiration, we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout, and build trauma-informed communities within our schools. Now, let's take a seat at the front of the classroom as we get started. Welcome back to today's show where today I'm joined by Dr. Katie Egan [00:01:00] Cunningham, who is an educator, literacy scholar, and the author of several texts, including Shifting the Balance, Reading With Purpose, Starting with Joy, Literacy, Leadership in changing schools, and Story: Still the Heart of Literacy Learning, just to name a few. Katie's works reminds us that stories aren't something that just live in books. They are everywhere. They're on our camera rolls, they're on our social feeds, they're on the lyrics that we loop on repeat, and even in the news stories that shape how we feel about the world. We don't just read our stories, we live inside of them. We create stories and they help us name what we're going through. And across her scholarship and speaking, Katie has invited schools to center stories that act as both as we coined to be windows and mirrors, which are stories that help children see others and also see themselves. And her work comes from a deeply personal space as parents who navigates her son's journey with dyslexia. And in doing so, she's also confronted systems that were never built with the whole children in mind. She advocates fiercely [00:02:00] earlier identification, equity, and diagnosis, and literacy practices that don't leave families to fight alone. And in her panel through the World Literacy Foundation, which I heard Katie speak with so much pleasure in person back in September, 2025, she said something that stayed with so many of us. And that line that she said is "those with the biggest hearts are often the most misunderstood." So today we're here to talk about stories, literacy, labels, dyslexia, and what happens when systems fail and how we can do better with that. So Katie, what an intro. Welcome to the show today. Oh wow. Thank you so much, Joey. That was really, really moving to hear kind of your take on my contributions to education, and the wider world. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all that you do in the field of education and also in scholarship and professorship as well. And I wanted to start, so I heard Katie speak at the same summit, or we also heard Dr. Susan B. Neuman deliver a keynote [00:03:00] at the World Literacy Summit. So I'm gonna leave a link to Dr. Neuman episode here as well, so we can continue to think about the experts that came out of those conversations from that September day in 2025. But with Katie, I wanted to start today by thinking about how you write that stories aren't just texts, but also there are contexts, there are playlists, there are photo reels, there are social media scrollings. And I always present an article to my own first year literacy class from Tim Gillespie and Tim Gillespie's "Why Literature Matters" says that Stories help us understand how empathy looks within the world around us. We root for the characters in our stories and on TV because we see ourselves through them. And in your scholarship, Katie, you also talk about Elizabeth Dutro, who talks about the wounds that we bleed and how these speaking wounds, if you will appear in the class. And I'll mention as a side note for our listeners that might be tuning into the podcast for their first time. So I'm from Parkland, Florida, and [00:04:00] on Valentine's Day 2018, I was substituting right next door at my former middle school, the feeder middle school, to Stoneman Douglas, during the nationally known Marjory Stoneman Douglas tragedy in Parkland. And on that day we lost siblings, coaches, students, friends, all of whom I taught from my first interim position at that same middle school, that August. In between that time, three months later, I lost a very good friend to an act of suicide. And this friend was somebody who always believed in me by saying, "you can do it! You can be a teacher! All the students will love you! Go, go, go!" And when that loss had happened, there was no playbook as to how to navigate that profound level of grief, especially when you're about to enter the classroom for the very first time. So in that same class, when they walk into the classroom on syllabus day, they are expected to, once they leave, while they're still learning my name, read [00:05:00] my thesis screenplay, who wants to read that, right? But my thesis screenplay, that actually is my first cathartic response to the Parkland tragedy. Wow. So all the students see is, oh my God, it's the first day of class and now I'm assigned a 56 page screenplay. How do I drop? Well, for those that stick it out, which is usually all of them, they learn that the screenplay is my first response to everything I saw and witnessed. There's no violence 'cause I was not on the side of the school on that day, but it's the emotional witnessing from those around me, from myself, from friends, et cetera. And I tell them, you're gonna have a quiz when you come back on this reading. And that quiz question where they return is give me points, I don't have to say gimme one point, I say, give me points, ask me questions, give me takeaways. Share me your feelings. Anything that came up to you when reading these stories, and that is the first conversation we have in class, just the vulnerability of emotions [00:06:00] because of how they are reacting to a text and many of them experience or they share that they cannot believe how moved they could be by reading. So let's start with that. How does recognizing that we are constantly inside stories and even witnessing stories change the way we think about literacy instruction within our schools? Yeah. Gosh, and I, I'm so sorry, Joey, for the layers of loss that you've experienced, what you experienced in Parkland is unimaginable and then to so soon after experience, the loss of your dear friend is just earth shattering. So my heart breaks for you. You mentioned Elizabeth Dutro's work, who I just wanna lift up. She wrote a beautiful book called, " The Vulnerable Hearts of Literacy Learning." And that I think as human beings, we all have vulnerable hearts. I mean, that's the story of being human. Brene Brown, of course, has made a remarkable career out of being [00:07:00] the first person that really put on center stage this idea that as a society we struggle with vulnerability, which means that to some degree we struggle with our own stories, we struggle with understanding the stories of others, but that's the heart of fiction and storytelling in all of its forms, is to understand the human condition, and to try to make our way through the world with a more capacious heart that we are able to better understand the stories of others, I think is really a mark of a person who leaves a legacy when they're gone. I do think a lot about how we are all just here visiting and how brief life really is. And I think that when you've experienced profound loss, it can help you find a newfound purpose and that you wake up every day with a different level of awareness around the [00:08:00] brevity of it all. And what do we do with the limited time that we have and every day is not great. There are some days that are tragic, but on most days if you orient yourself in a particular way, you're able to find some good there. Whether it's moments of small delight, things that surprised you, something that made you smile. And when supporting young people to understand how to make meaning from worthwhile texts, it's important to understand the ways in which great works of literature have always tried to unpack what it is to be human and how our lives are a series of stories one moment after the next. And I think as teachers, it still remains critically important to have an understanding of what are worthwhile texts in the first place. And I think we've lost our way with that a little bit over the [00:09:00] decades where we doubled down on things like strategy instruction, and kind of under-emphasized how critically important the text we select are, and that for, you know, show students of any age, but especially young students sitting on the rug, that I've never seen students like lean in because they can't wait to see what the next strategy is. They lean in because they can't wait to see what happens next. They lean in because they relate to the characters, or the characters have lives that are so different from their own that it captivates them. And I've advocated for a long time now that we need to center the power of stories through the text that we select, through the voices that we use, through the conversations that the text elicit among our students. And both you and I have experienced some rather emotional things in our own lives. I think it's rare to find a teacher who hasn't. But, the depth of [00:10:00] loss that you have experienced is something that we wouldn't want for any teacher. But that joy and loss live side by side in the stories of our lives. And they live side by side in the stories of characters and fiction. And I think that especially works of fiction are tools for helping young people understand their own lives and how to navigate the difficult things that they'll experience inevitably. I think about Susan's keynote again where she says that children are not reading because they don't find purpose. And one of the things that I work to do, even at my college level, and even then my 18 year olds were like, why, why are we getting into this text? Mm-hmm. I told them this because I, myself was not aware as to how much trauma was be coming my way in 2018 when I graduated from college in 2017. So I'm even thinking about my 18-year-old self in 2013, I was still five years away from understanding truly what that human experience would feel like. So I understand my students [00:11:00] when they come in with a lack of purpose or a better way to say it when you think about reading, but I tell them that what we're doing here when we read stories like The Giver, The Hate U Give, Of Mice and Men, all these stories that have some elements of trauma, because even Dr. Wolfsdorf. Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf, who I'll link our episode here as well, he says, if we look at stories without understanding the traumatic element that exists in almost all of them, mm-hmm. We have missed the point Yeah. Of what it's really all about. So I told the students that we're here together to design a toolkit. This toolkit of strategies that when you need it, it may not be this semester, hopefully it's never, and especially not while I'm your teacher in this semester because that's, that's quite soon. But if you ever need to have these strategies handy, mm-hmm. Here's the toolkit. Yeah. And you'll get that through engaging with story. And in doing so, we're then, like you've mentioned, centering the power of stories, we're leaning in, we're all engaged in the [00:12:00] conversation a little bit more, and it really helps us act as windows and mirrors through the way that we engage with stories. So what does that look like when stories become windows and mirrors, and what does it look like when schools actually get it right? And what does it look like when they don't get that right? Oh, what a great question. You know, Dr. Sims Bishop, from University of Ohio, I think is where she was in 1990, had the first article that really coined that phrase around books serving as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. And her work was just monumental. And our minds are made for stories. Our minds are also made for metaphors. So my students also who are, I primarily teach now college and graduate students, like yourself, but that they learn about that metaphor. And it's just, it's so eye-opening that once you learn it, you're just sort of wide awake to a new way of thinking about the relationship we have with books and stories. And then a colleague of mine and great [00:13:00] friend, uh, Dr. Grace Enriquez, at Leslie University did a follow up article more recently around urging us to be careful of not inadvertently creating foggy mirrors, tiny windows and heavy doors. So I recommend people check out that great article of Grace's, where 30 something years later, actually, from that original metaphor saying, we wanna be cautious in the ways that we don't inadvertently stereotype students based on our assumptions about what is gonna be a mirror for them. And we do that as teachers, unfortunately, when we look to find texts that might be labeled diverse text, for example, where it's a character of color and we have a student who has a particular racial or ethnic background and we say, "you're gonna love this because this is gonna be a mirror for you." Um, Jerry Craft really gets at the complexity of that super well in New Kid, his Newberry winning graphic [00:14:00] novel, where there's a librarian, about halfway through the book, who makes that very mistake. And you see it across the panels in terms of the negative impact that microaggression has on a student who's stereotyped and misunderstood because a white librarian assumes that a student of color is gonna wanna read a particular book and it has nothing to do actually with his lived experience in the world. So it's a powerful metaphor to think about the ways in which books are mirrors and windows and sliding glass doors, but that as we're in the middle of 2026, to think about it from a more nuanced perspective of making sure that we're not inadvertently providing those foggy are unfortunately harmful mirrors that we never meant to, or really tiny windows where we haven't provided enough scaffolding or enough support in order for students to understand the [00:15:00] world that's being presented in the text, be it fiction or nonfiction, that they don't have background knowledge of yet. And the more that we learn about how critical prior knowledge is and background knowledge is to reading comprehension, we can't just provide students with texts that are of a particular complexity, for example, and not provide enough scaffolding for students to understand it in the first place. So we wanna be careful of that in terms of selecting texts that are windows for our students. But the best kinds of texts are those that offer those sliding glass door moments. And my dear friend, Pam Allyn, who was also on the Yes. World Literacy Foundation panel with me and who has been just a oceanic influence on my own life. You know, Pam is the founder of Lit World, and when she started Lit World, she was doing grassroots work in Kenya and would take with her Charlotte's [00:16:00] Web and still takes with her Charlotte's Web. Um, it's a book that we both adore and is on our top five books of all time. And at first glance, right, Fern Living in Rural America may not be a mirror for children in Kenya, but it's a book that's a sliding glass door in every way because the children that she shares Charlotte's Web with are their own version of Fern, that they wanna stand up to Papa. And say, where are you going with that ax? Which is one of the very first lines of the book. And those sliding glass door moments and books are those moments where what you thought was a mirror turns out to be a window. And what I have my students do is that they actually go up to windows in our classroom and notice that they can, if they stand just right and the light is just right, that they can see their own reflection in the mirror. I'm sorry, they can see their own reflection in the window. In the window, yes. That it becomes a mirror. [00:17:00] So, to be on the lookout for texts that have that site of possibility and as a reader to kind of position yourself to be on the lookout for those moments where we're always making assumptions, right? We always have biases as humans towards other people and the characters that we meet. But to have a more capacious heart is to approach, especially works of fiction, and say, Hmm, right. There's probably something in this character or in these situations that they're presented with that are actually a lot more like me than I realized based on the book's cover or based on the first couple of pages. And to identify those moments and that they're gonna be personal. Each person's aesthetic response is gonna be different from the next student sitting next to you in class. So I think when we're selecting texts as teachers to think about those lenses in terms of, of all the books in the world, why this one? Mm-hmm. Increasingly, [00:18:00] teachers are making fewer choices about what text they center in their classrooms as state lists come out, where districts need to choose programs and adopt programs or adapt programs that are more aligned to the science of reading. And I am actually in favor of schools really vetting and looking at programs that exist that can make evidence-based instruction an easier lift for teachers. But in the process, I also hope that teachers still remain central in terms of the beautiful books that keep coming out into the world that can do a lot of good for students that are sitting right in front of them that might not be in the program that the school selected. And teachers having the freedom and the autonomy to say, you know, this is a beautiful book like The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld. And this is a worthwhile text for my students at any grade, k [00:19:00] through college to either start the school year with or to address some sort of conflict that arises in the classroom or that the class hits sort of a midyear lull. And you need children to better understand themselves and one another that you might turn to texts that are not in an adopted program and know that they're worthwhile and they're offering your students something really important about how they're gonna live their life. But I think that work is getting more and more complicated and that we wanna make sure that teachers still are agentive in having their own knowledge base about what worthwhile text exists in the world that you would wanna engage your students with. And then knowing how to use them and knowing how to advocate in the face of administration or boards of education that might have restrictions around what is read with students and why. And making sure that teachers are [00:20:00] still seen as professionals who have a deep understanding of things like the science of reading, evidence-based practices, and the great body of children's literature and young adult literature that exists in the world to be able to draw from. The more awareness you have of powerful worthwhile text in the world and have the tools to allow your students to feel things strongly, I think that we need to get more comfortable as a profession with allowing emotions into the classroom and that, it's a worthwhile text if it's building students' knowledge in some ways. Like there's knowledge about the natural world. There's knowledge of historical topics, and there's knowledge of ourselves and others. And fiction is part of the knowledge building equation in schools. And we can't lose sight of that. But that allowing students, you know, creating a culture in a classroom, you're not allowing students, you're creating the [00:21:00] conditions mm-hmm. That allow for strong emotions to emerge. If students aren't feeling things strongly throughout their school day, that's how we create kids who are stressed and bored by the time they're in high school, which overwhelmingly most of them are. Mark Brackett's research outta the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale has found that, that when he surveys teenagers that overwhelmingly their responses to their experience in school are bored, stressed, or a combination of the two. And that's a lack of creating the conditions for students to feel anything, that would be considered a positive emotion. So it starts though, at the youngest of ages of selecting texts that support not only things like oral language development, vocabulary development, which are critically important, but supporting students to feel things strongly. I tell my students a lot that the role of [00:22:00] teacher is that you're really a memory maker. Yes. And that right, to teach students anything is to support them to shift from things in working memory to more long-term memory. Mm-hmm. And that we lose sight of that. I think when we are so like heads down focused on the program or the next lesson that we can lose sight of this larger calling for us as teachers, that we are memory makers. What will students remember about what they learned in your class a month from now, a year from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? Mm-hmm. And some of the books that you select and read aloud to students or read alongside students or some of the best ways to create those memories that are worth making in the first place. We actually used to have a children's literature course as a requirement in my program, and it no longer is. And so, [00:23:00] making space for all of the things that future teachers need to know about is really hard. And making those decisions about what kinds of knowledge count in our elementary and secondary classrooms, but also what kinds of knowledge count and what experiences our future teachers have in our courses is really important to me. And when you no longer have courses in children's literature, you look for ways to embed those children's literature experiences within other kinds of literacy courses. But it's not easy, yeah. There's a lot to learn and I agree that we exist in a system that sometimes doesn't make space, as we say, mm-hmm, for all the things around it. So let's pivot and talk about some views that we share on how the system actually works. Yeah. And you've spoken publicly about your son's journey with dyslexia and navigating systems, as you also say, that can be quote unquote, designed to fail children. Mm-hmm. So what have those experiences taught you about how schools label, how they [00:24:00] identify, and how they miss children, and especially when we are in a system, or rather as classroom teachers who are emotional human beings, and we're told that we cannot let emotion into the classroom. We have to censor what our students say, how they say it, And even when I was a classroom teacher and I taught Of Mice and Men mm-hmm. I had students come to me and say, oh, I feel like I'm Crooks and Curly's Wife, and I'm the outsider, quote unquote, because of my sexuality, because of my depression and my thoughts around suicide. And when I heard that, I brought that down to leadership just to say, you aware that our students feel like this? And their answer to me was, instead of, "thanks, we'll help them", their answer was, "how could you get them to talk to you about that?" So when we work in a system, like we said, it is not designed to always help, what do we do about it? And what are your experiences around that? Oh, it's really hard, you know, and I think that every teacher that my own children have had, I have two sons, every teacher that they've had [00:25:00] have been loving, well intentioned, and sometimes they are teaching within systems that are designed to perpetuate some children's failure, especially my own personal experience is around that one of my sons does have dyslexia and dysgraphia and bearing witness to his experiences, especially as he hit an inflection point of third grade where he was in fetal position on the floor, refusing to go to school, changed a lot of things for me both personally and professionally. I sort of needed to advocate for my own son within larger systems and then our own local systems to help them understand the ways in which reading failure is not the fault of a child, but it is the accumulation of misaligned teaching practices that weren't brain friendly and that then accumulate where what starts out as reading [00:26:00] difficulty becomes something else altogether. And because of my background, on a number of levels, but also as somebody who, is a professor of elementary education and literacy specifically, that I have a background for being able to navigate a system that was not designed for children like my son, to be able to effectively advocate for him in ways that I think ultimately saved his life. You know, you look at an 8-year-old and you don't realize that their school experiences necessarily lay the entire groundwork for how their life will unfold. But it is a huge, huge component to the ways in which not only their teen years will be, but their young adult and adult years that lie ahead of them. The years go fast and when children experience misaligned practices in schools, it compounds and creates a situation that's unbearable for them. And I'm grateful that my [00:27:00] son had the experiences that he did that led me to fiercely advocate in ways that I might not have known how bad it was for him if he hadn't had the courage really to kind of bear down at eight and nine years old say, I'm not doing this. There were signs though, for his teachers, by the time he was in third grade, on the first day of school, he was supposed to fill out an all about me poster, which is pretty typical of third grade. And instead of filling it out, he took his purple crayon and wrote No in all caps with an exclamation mark. In some schools that will be seen as an act of defiance and that child will be sent to the guidance counselor or some sort of assistant principal for some sort of intervention of some kind, right? Or to be put on some sort of list. But actually that's a warning sign that a child is telling us that there's usually an academic underbelly to the emotional behavior or displays of behavior that children give [00:28:00] us that they're giving us these opportunities to intervene before it's too late, or the Torgesen article about catching readers before they fall. We have to do a much, much, much better job of that in order to prevent children from experiencing reading failure in the first place. And our systems are changing. I mean, I am hopeful that to some degree our systems are changing in terms of greater awareness of findings from the science of reading, programs that are doing a much better job of having brain friendly practices, having programs that are more easily navigatable, if that's a word for teachers, that they're more accessible for teachers to be able to do a great job, and part of my work has been on the Right to Read Grant in the state of Connecticut, and I am so full of hope around what I'm seeing in Connecticut classrooms across the state and the, understanding that teachers have of the science of [00:29:00] reading and its research base and what that means for being a more responsive teacher for the children in their care. There is also still a lot, lot, lot more work to be done. I do teach a foundations of dyslexia course with people who are veteran teachers, many of whom are in special education, and they might've been teaching for decades, and they never knew the content of that course. So we need courses that are required in teacher education on dyslexia. We need schools to invest in professional learning around dyslexia. A lot of the professional learning I do with schools are on the science of reading and evidence-based practices. And then I let districts know that I also have a background in dyslexia and that would be a really important area for professional learning. And it is rare that districts take me up on that. So I'm hopeful though, that there's a groundswell through [00:30:00] important podcasts, like sold a story through grassroots organizations like decoding, dyslexia, that more and more school districts will reach out to people like me and others who have something to offer in understanding not only the academic underpinnings of dyslexia, but also the social and emotional ones. And through that work that I do with schools, I also do lean on my own story and my son's story, and the family stories that I've learned over the years. Another research project I'm involved in is collecting dyslexia, family stories. And overwhelmingly, the stories are the same. That families find that they have to navigate what I consider a labyrinth, but that parents shouldn't have to feel like they are fighting a system and that they have to try everything at their disposal, they need to sell their homes. They need to take out loans. They need to take it upon themselves to fight [00:31:00] for their children in systems that don't yet understand them. And families all across the nation and around the world are very much in that labyrinth still today. Very much. Thank you so much for that. And to start to wrap up, one of my last questions is referring back to what you mentioned on how the system works. And one thing that really got my attention was you said at the World Literacy Foundation, that those with the biggest hearts are often the most misunderstood. And I think about how you talk about just the underbelly of people's behaviors, where it's a lot easier for teachers to occasionally say to a student, what's wrong with you versus, how can I help you? Mm. And I'll even say that as an observation to where you say that learning starts so young. There are actually quite a number of students from my kindergarten class who went into education. Wow. And that is not a surprise to me because we had an amazing teacher. Wow. But when it was my time to model the same type of work that she did, [00:32:00] I always joke that I had never been sent to the principal's office a day in my life until I became a teacher. Then I lived in the principal's office. I was under fire for everything, which is why I resigned. 'cause I, I couldn't do it. And I was always constantly under fire because of those social emotional practices of trying to understand why students are misunderstood. Having conversations with those who had those biggest hearts and just saying, how can I help you? What do you need? Not in the way that I thought was crossing a line, but just making them feel seen. But we exist in a system that really, quite frankly what I've learned, frowns upon educators trying to cross that boundary and be in that role. So who or what were you thinking about when you share that with us? And how can literacy in classes like ours in the study of English, frankly help save the lives of those in front of us? Yeah, you know, I like to share the quote from CS Lewis a lot that we read to know [00:33:00] we're not alone and there are children in our classrooms that do feel alone for whatever reason. Everyone else can spell and I'm struggling with it. Everyone else seems to have it all together. You know, when you're a teenager, other people's homes seem happier. Why isn't mine? Kids have all kinds of swirling thoughts that make them feel alone. And then sometimes schools create the conditions that double down on that rather than creating the conditions that you were striving to do, to create spaces of belonging that inevitably are spaces of vulnerability and uncertainty. And school systems like certainty. Mm-hmm. Yes. We like to assume that if you do X, that you're gonna get y and that's not always the way that it works. So uncertainty and vulnerability are scary to school systems, but they're an inevitable part of teaching and [00:34:00] learning. And so we have to learn how to make space for all of it. We want to use teaching practices that have a greater certainty, for example, of children cracking the secrets of the code. We don't wanna make that a space of a guessing game and inviting vulnerability into that process. But at the same time, we have to honor that learning anything has a certain level of struggle, a certain level of vulnerability and uncertainty in terms of even the pace with which young people will learn things. But I do think quite a bit about teachers like yourself and the kindergarten teacher that you had and how magical and important it is for young people to have teachers that are touchstones across their experience. Because we shape the inner voice that children will have long after they leave our classrooms. So I have no doubt that you shaped a positive inner voice for the students that were in your class and that it's so [00:35:00] beautiful to hear about how many of your fellow students, when you were a kindergartner went into education because of like a fairy godmother they had when they were five years old. Yes. So that's remarkable. But I do share a lot too. You know this about me from the World Literacy Foundation event, but that I did lose my younger brother, Jimmy, five years ago. Jimmy loved life and he hated school. And I of course, think about Jimmy every day all the time. He is my greatest teacher in life alongside my sons. And I think about the ways in which Jimmy's remarkable way of being was so misunderstood. And if you met Jimmy, you were his friend, whether you were five years old or 95 years old. And I thought of my brother often as like a Ferris Bueller figure that he was friends with everyone and everyone loved him, [00:36:00] but he didn't always love himself. And Jimmy struggled with addiction for 20 years. And it ultimately took his life. And I think a lot about the school experiences that my siblings and I had. We all went to the same elementary school. We lived in the same neighborhood. We grew up in the same home, but there were certain school experiences that my brother had that were markedly negative, I think in part because he was a young boy, my sister and I were young girls, we tend to show up differently in schools, and that the ways in which Jimmy's big heart was misunderstood, was seen as confrontational to some teachers. And I sometimes tell a story about how when my brother was in fifth grade, he turned and talked to a neighbor seated on the rug and said, reading sucks. And his teacher did not like to hear that and dragged Jimmy out [00:37:00] into the hallway where he screamed at him for minutes. Rather than looking in the mirror to say, well, why would you know 10-year-old Jimmy say that reading sucks? What could I do better as a teacher to create a culture of literacy where Jimmy experiences a sense of belonging? What books could I read out loud? What books, you know, line my classroom bookshelf where I might be to use Donly Miller's term, a book whisperer to this kid? Instead, it became really a traumatic experience for my brother to be verbally attacked by an authority figure. And of course, you know, we don't want our students to say reading sucks, but the reactive response that his teacher had was damaging. And I think that as teachers, our patients is tried, our most difficult students need the most love and they're gonna ask for it in ways that sometimes will feel the most [00:38:00] confrontational. So I share stories like that in articles I write and with my students who are future teachers because I want them to catch themselves when a student says something does something that in your first response you need to double down on your patience and get curious, rather than leap to punish, which is sometimes what systems are designed to do even this many years later from when my brother was an elementary school kid. I also do tend to think, I did teach in an all boys school for six years where I learned of course there are many different ways to be a boy. There are many different ways to be a girl that's not, you know, universal or singular. But living in a space of all boys for six years taught me the ways that in traditional school settings, boys are often overlooked. And many overwhelmingly, my future teacher students are young women that [00:39:00] wanna go into the field and they themselves were not young boys making their way through the world. So, I ask them to be aware of that, to be aware of the ways in which their childhood preferences or responses to things might be very different from at least half of the students in their future classrooms. And that they need to think about that and notice the patterns. In their own thoughts and in their own actions as a teacher and the children they're relating to that seem as though they're mirrors for them and the children that they're having a greater time relating to because they are more windows for them. Thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. And one thing that you mentioned in your article in Search for Hope and Healing: Guideposts for Wholehearted Living, Loving, and Teaching After Loss, which Katie shared with me in one of our earlier correspondences when I introduced myself as somebody from Parkland who also lost a friend to suicide, thank you for that scholarship that you exchanged with me, I normally don't feel moved by a [00:40:00] scholarship, even as somebody who studies trauma for a living, but that was really something that made me feel an emotion based upon those experiences as well. So thank you for trusting me with those words and I wanna put a link to that in our show notes for those that also want to honor Katie's scholarship through that. But one thing that you mentioned in that article was that sometimes behaviors that students have in the classroom is indicative of what we call to be a missing the pedagogy or a way that we can approach our students to adjust the way that we teach and approach them to give them something that they don't have yet, but we're able to provide to them in order to make a full spectrum of learning happen. So as we come to the end, and I always do this at the end, I don't know why. Can we pause for a second to Katie, just have you share a little bit more about yourself, what you do, where you are, and having 'em get in touch with you. Oh yeah. Lovely. Thank you. Um, so I'm a professor at Sacred Heart University. I'm the program director there. So I get to oversee our future teachers who are in our five-year program and [00:41:00] also future teachers who join us for our graduate degree. I love our university. I love our emphasis on wholeheartedness and we have really a beautiful program to prepare folks for being their best teacher self, for being skilled and caring educators. That's really the goal of our programs. So you can find me there. Um, you can also find me@katieegancunningham.com, which I try to update, but I'm not great at. Um, you mentioned the books that I've written or co-authored and one of the greatest gifts in my life was being a co-author of the Second Shifting the Balance Book, which is designed for upper elementary educators. And that work has had a profound impact on my life and the work that I'm able to do in the world and partnering with schools. We have shifting the balance online classes that I also highly recommend. My colleagues, Jan Birkins and Carrie [00:42:00] Yates wrote the famous first Shifting the Balance book and they have a beautiful online course that's a companion to that book. And then we wrote the three through five online course. So you can also find me there in our online courses. We also hold as for participants of that course, monthly Q and As. And we've gotten hundreds of questions, that also allow me to kind of understand and have a finger on the pulse of what teachers are really wondering in real time about how to make sense of the science of reading and how to use evidence-based practices to support the kids in front of them and the struggles they're encountering with live children in the room where reading doesn't always go according to plan. Yes, in a child's brain. I'm super, super proud of that work and I get to travel to schools and get to do conference appearances and keynotes, especially around [00:43:00] that work. I'm proud to announce a new book that I'm working on that's really a departure from previous work and is a book of meditations for teachers that's kind of in the vein of Kate Bowler for people who follow Kate Bowler's tremendous work so you might find similarity there in terms of a book that's really designed to support teachers to have kind of daily entries and tools for making sense of the trials and tribulations of being a teacher and the demands that are on folks today, and how to navigate that from a space of. recognition, acceptance, hope. So that book I'm hoping people can learn more about in the days to come, but it's gonna be out in late 2026, is the goal. So I'm excited about that work too. Incredible. We can't wait to support that as well. And any final takeaways for listeners for today? Any major points that we should leave with? [00:44:00] Oh, I would just say stay hopeful. Find your people, know that you're not alone and there are great people like Joey and this podcast who are here to support you with all that you're facing. But you're doing great work in the world and I'm, I'm grateful, grateful to be here and grateful for the great work that teachers are doing every day. Thank you for being a part of our community as well. Well, Katie, thank you for our conversation and the honesty that you brought to a scholarship, to parenting and to the work of re-Imagining School so that every child can be seen named, heard and supported. And your reminder that stories live everywhere in that children deserve stories that act as both mirrors and windows, and a way that shifts how we think about literacy entirely. And your advocacy around dyslexia and inequitable systems is a call to action for educators, families, and policy makers. And for those who want to dive deeper, please visit Katie's website for her devotion to [00:45:00] Evidence-Based Literacy learning. Thank you for being here and for the heart of your work. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast. If today's episode inspired you or made you think differently, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom Narratives podcast over Instagram and Facebook. Remember, together we can transform our scars into stars and education, one conversation at a time.