The Mount’s Collaborative for Equity in Literacy Learning (CELL) invites educators of all backgrounds and teaching levels to attend the event to discuss different ways to engage young learners through creative curriculums. Seen here is a photo from last year’s CELL conference.
Registration is now open for the 29th Annual Conference on Literacy at Mount Saint Mary College, presented by the college’s Collaborative for Equity in Literacy Learning (CELL), in collaboration with the Center for Adolescent Research and Development (CARD).
The conference will be held on Saturday, April 22 in Hudson Hall at the Mount Saint Mary College campus, 330 Powell Ave., Newburgh, N.Y.
Tickets purchased on or before March 15 are $45, or $30 for local reading council members. Attendance is free for full-time Mount students. The registration form can be found at www.msmc.edu/literacy
The conference will begin at 8:30 a.m., with registration and a continental breakfast. There will be workshop sessions throughout the day, with presentations from keynote speakers Thanhhà Lại and Sunil Singh at 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.
Workshops include “Zooming In: Using Digital Technology to Expand Vocabulary,” “To Be A Writer: Identity and Identification,” and “The Art of Writing.”
Thanhhà Lại is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of her debut novel Inside Out & Back Again, which has also been recognized with a National Book Award and a Newbery Honor. She also wrote the acclaimed Listen, Slowly, her young adult literature debut Butterfly Yellow, and the picture book Hundred Years of Happiness. Her keynote speech at the conference is called, “Building a Hybrid Voice.” Lại was born in Vietnam, and now lives in New York with her family.
Sunil Singh is an author, storyteller, and math educator. Singh has recently started a new journey sharing his passion for math history/narrative, leading workshops across North America at institutions like The Museum of Mathematics in New York, The Fields Institute, the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Singh currently works at Amplify to help develop storytelling into their K-12 math program, and at Mathigon as a content writer. His talk at the Mount’s conference will be titled, “Mathematics is Filled with Romance and Wonder: So Why Don’t We Teach It That Way?”
Established in 2012, CELL provides tutoring and out-of-school literacy activities for children pre-school to grade 12 with a focus on reading, conversation, and activities. It explores multicultural books, offers family literacy programs, and more. Each semester dozens of Mount teacher candidates, graduate and undergraduate, help instill a love of reading in local youth as part of their community fieldwork requirement.