The Big Read Lakeshore focuses on bringing communities together over literature, but we also go beyond Ottawa, Allegan, and Muskegon counties. This past weekend, part of our community was able to share our ideas with teachers and leaders from all over the country through the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
Our team was made up of the Big Read Lakeshore director (Deb Van Duinen), two student interns/preservice teachers (Addie Wilcox and Rachel Leep), local school teachers (Bridget Pyle from Black River High School and Eric Wilkinson from West Ottawa High School), a Hope College professor (Kristin Van Eyk), and a local librarian (Sarah Rinsema-Sybenga from Muskegon Library).
The NCTE convention has the purpose to “bring thousands of educators, experts, authors, administrators, publishers, and others together for four days of learning, networking, and inspiration.” As a first time attendee, it was overwhelming to walk into the convention and see how many people and organizations were represented.
There are over 1,000 sessions and booths offered throughout the weekend and that made trying to narrow down which ones to go to pretty hard! The first day, a couple members of our team were able to catch the first keynote speaker, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who discussed how important education and the various mentors in her life were to her.
Friday was spent visiting other presentations and spending time on the convention floor where we could network with various companies and publishers and get a ton of FREE books.
The keynote speaker for Friday was Kate McKinnon who you may know from SNL, Barbie, Ghostbusters, and even the voice of Ms. Frizzle. While we split up to attend the sessions that we found most interesting, it was awesome to check in with each other and see what bits of knowledge we could share based on the experiences.
Saturday morning we presented! After giving some background on what The Big Read Lakeshore is, we dove into the different ways we engage people in a community reading project. We presented on 2023’s Big Read Lakeshore program of Homegoing, The Door of No Return, New Kid, and Change Sings. One of our focuses for this presentation was to take the things we used over this programming and encourage teachers to approach these texts or others with similar ideas.
Addie and I presented on Change Sings and New Kid and were able to give some ideas for ways to incorporate children’s literature and graphic novels into their classrooms or school-wide community projects. Our teachers and librarian were able to show what they used throughout the year to get students and community members together and share ideas for cross-generational collaboration and a new way to approach reading and projects.
We also discussed challenges we had to prepare for with these choices and were able to give out some advice on how to approach tough topics. As an English Education student right now, I learned so much from my co-presenters and it was really cool to pick up on some strategies to use for myself. After our presentation, some audience members came up to get more information and get connected, and it was awesome to see how various parts of our combined presentation stuck out to what people and what they wanted to inspire in their communities.
After the talk, a few of us headed over to the keynote by Bryan Stevenson, which was amazing and left few dry eyes in the room. The rest of the day was split up between attending more presentations and spending a bit more time on the exhibition floor, meeting some really great authors!
We met up for dinner to celebrate the weekend and debrief on a few of our favorite sessions we were able to attend. It was awesome to present, but we are also coming back with a lot more ideas on how to make The Big Read Lakeshore even better in the upcoming years! The community at NCTE was great, and we were able to share some of our ideas to hopefully foster a culture where reading matters a bit further into the world.