Last week, while I was on sabbatical and thousands of miles from home, I opened my email to find one of the lovely “Reply All” messages from the Ethical ELA community. A month earlier, we had gathered virtually and asynchronously to celebrate StaceyJoy, a California teacher and beloved poet, retiring after forty years in the classroom. Her retirement speech had been woven together from a beautiful teaching career of “Where I’m From” moments. Many of us watched the ceremony online, then filled her inbox with congratulations, gratitude, and memories. Now another email had arrived. Stefani, who lives in Michigan, had traveled to New Orleans and met Leilya for coffee. Stefani attached a photograph of the two of them smiling together, along with a note about where we might submit the travel poems we’d written during June’s Open Write. Soon replies began appearing from teachers scattered across the country. People celebrated the reunion, asked about one another’s families, remembered earlier poems, and talked about writing. I sat there smiling. It wasn’t unusual for me to smile at a screen of poems and messages from teacher-poet friends, and versions of this have happened for years. Teachers have traveled across states to meet. They’ve presented together, written together, published together, celebrated births and retirements, mourned losses, and quietly checked in on one another. Sometimes I hear about it because someone sends me a note. Often I don’t. And I realized, again, that Ethical ELA had become something that no longer depended on me.
During my master’s program and later in my doctoral studies, I kept returning to the same question, although I didn’t know I was asking it at the time: What do teachers need in order to create the kinds of literacy communities we hope our students experience? I read Anne Ruggles Gere on writing groups, Louise Rosenblatt on transaction, Bakhtin on dialogue, Vygotsky on social learning, Peter Elbow and Donald Murray on writing as discovery, and later Deborah Brandt and James Paul Gee on literacy as fundamentally social. Years afterward, my reading expanded into Freire, hooks, Noddings, Biesta, Bartolomé, Todd, Buber, Palmer, Muhammad, and others whose work helped me think more deeply about ethics, dignity, care, and what it means to humanize education. At the time, I understood these ideas as theories of classrooms. I no longer think they belong only there. I want to circle with and through some of the ideas I’ve been contemplating in this post, and I invite you to think with me about some of the concepts that are sustaining Ethical ELA, I think. And please share other ideas that emerge for you in the comments.
Over the past several years, I have revised my own understanding of what I mean by ethical and humanizing. When I first began writing at Ethical ELA, ethics referred primarily to instructional decisions. Should I grade this way? Why do we teach this text? How do classroom routines communicate what matters? Those questions still matter, but my understanding has shifted through years of reading and, perhaps more importantly, years of writing alongside teachers.
Ethics has become less about making the right decision and more about how we encounter another person before we decide anything at all. In my philosophy work, I read Emmanuel Levinas (1985) who says that ethics begins not with rules but with our responsibility to another person. When we were researching for the oral history project about the pandemic, I read Martin Buber (1970), who distinguishes relationships that treat another person as an object from those that encounter another as a whole human being. Whole human. That felt good to me. Now Nel Noddings (1984/2013) is someone I read in my masters program and also before then when I was a social worker; she reminds me that care exists in relationships rather than intentions alone. Reading these scholars gradually changed how I understood teaching. I began wondering whether the first ethical act in education is simply to pause long enough to recognize another person’s inherent dignity before speaking, assessing, correcting, or even helping. That pausing got harder and harder as the year and years went on and mandates and testing pressures sort of infested how I moved about the classroom and school. It is what made me start a doctoral program all those years ago. And what I sit with now is the word “humanizing,” because that it what an email from Stacey or Stefani makes me feel, restored, honored, seen. Still, that word “humanizing,” like “ethical,” feels so abstract and vague and difficult to hold or carry. What are the moves we make as humans that honor and see and restore others (even when it may be hard or even when the restoring takes some reckoning).
This year, I have been circling back to other thinking partners who planted seeds of meaning for me twenty years ago. The sabbatical has been a privilege of time in that way. Time to think and reread. Freire (1970) describes humanization as humanity’s struggle to become more fully human in the face of oppression. Whole human and fully human. hooks (1994) advocates something a little different, describing education as the practice of freedom, and dialogue and exchange and histories and identities are part of that. Bartolomé (1994) helps me think about a humanizing pedagogy that refuses methods that ignore students’ lives and instead affirms their histories, voices, and intellectual capacities. I agree with all of this and have built my classrooms around Freire and hooks, though I always fall short of realizing their vision. Again, intentions fall short, which led me to seek others, critical friends, to help me do that circling back and thinking, so I have come to understand humanizing somewhat differently. I no longer think of humanizing as restoring humanity because I do not believe our humanity is ever absent. This is a key point for how I use the word “humanizing” here and in my writing elsewhere. And I think all the thinkers I mentioned agree with this premise. Every student, every teacher, every family, every colleague already possesses inherent dignity. Humanizing is the continual ethical work of affirming that dignity through the language we use, the relationships we cultivate, and the opportunities we create to make meaning together. And writing poetry has been a way into and through all of this.
Now at the end of my sabbatical and another year of Ethical ELA passed and looking back over the past eleven years, I wonder if that affirming has been the work of Ethical ELA, this site, all along. When people read, respond, write, connect, extend — that is a way of affirming through relationships, which is something I crave as an introvert without ever knowing how to be with others fully. So this digital setting has offered something that I never imagined and was always a little embarrassed to admit. I thought I was building a website where teachers could exchange ideas about teaching English language arts. I now think we were creating a literacy community where teachers could experience the very kinds of relationships we hope to cultivate with students. I think I created a community for friends. Yep, there it is.
I wonder if you want to see some of the concrete ways or the kinds of initiatives or contributions that have nurtured our literacy community.
Table 1 Community Snapshot and Milestone (July 2026)
| Community Snapshot | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Years of Ethical ELA | 11 |
| Blog posts published | 1,000+ |
| Lifetime page views | 915,000+ |
| Lifetime visitors | 364,000+ |
| Community comments | 123,800+ |
| Monthly Open Writes | 130+ (approx.) |
| VerseLove poetry celebrations (different iterations) | 9 Aprils |
| Cost to participate | Free |
| Advertising | None |
| Contributors | Hundreds of teachers, teacher educators, poets, authors, and literacy leaders |
| Community model | Teacher-created • Nonprofit • Volunteer-led • Open access |
Table 2 Together, We Have…
| Together, we have… | Examples |
|---|---|
| Written | Monthly Open Writes, VerseLove, collaborative poetry groups, classroom writing invitations, and thousands of poems. |
| Published | More than 1,000 blog posts, teacher-authored columns, classroom resources, poems, articles, and books that grew from relationships formed in this community. |
| Learned | Free webinars, workshops, book studies, classroom inquiries, and conversations that bridge research and practice. |
| Presented | NCTE, state affiliate conferences, universities, schools, and local professional learning communities, often with collaborators who first met through Ethical ELA. |
| Connected | Teachers across states, countries, grade levels, and career stages who have become writing partners, co-authors, presenters, mentors, and lifelong friends. |
| Celebrated | Publications, retirements, new jobs, awards, births, milestones, and everyday moments of teaching and writing. |
| Supported | Teachers through the isolation of COVID, difficult school years, personal losses, moments of burnout, and the everyday joys and challenges of teaching English language arts. |
| Sustained | A free, nonprofit literacy community built through writing, reciprocity, generosity, and care rather than advertising, subscriptions, or commercial products. |
What persists? What is new?
- Beginning in September, the Open Write will move to a four-day format (Friday–Monday) to make participation more sustainable while preserving the rhythm that so many of us have come to love.
- VerseLove will continue each April.
- I’d love to offer more community-led workshops throughout the year. If there is something you would enjoy teaching—whether it’s poetry, artificial intelligence, book clubs, grading, notebook writing, young adult literature, teacher wellness, writing instruction, or something else entirely—I hope you’ll propose it.
- Most importantly, I’d like to hear from you. Ethical ELA has evolved many times over the past eleven years, and I imagine it will continue to evolve. What do you need from this community now? What conversations are missing? What kinds of writing, learning, or gathering would support your life as a teacher, writer, and human being?
Please respond in the comments!
When I started Ethical ELA, I thought I was creating a blog. Eleven years later, I think we have been creating something else entirely: a literacy community where teachers experience the kinds of relationships we hope our students will know through reading, writing, speaking, listening, and living together.
Oh, and be sure you stop by the July Open Write here!