About LEARNCon

LEARNCon, established in 2022, is grounded in linguistic justice –or equitable, asset-based language practices in education at all levels but particularly in the community college system and higher ed, across the curriculum. 

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The conference is the brainchild of Julie Gamberg, poet and Glendale Community College faculty, inspired by the work of her community college colleagues in Northern Califas, instructors Michelle Cruz Gonzales and Kisha Quesada Turner. Comadres since graduate school, Gamberg and Gonzales began collaborating around linguistic justice teaching pedagogy in 2020 during the Covid-19 Pandemic and in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others. This work is informed, firstly, by their own educational experiences - as students and faculty - their Puente and Umoja students, the Students’ Right To Their Own Language Statement, and later, the works of April Baker Bell,Gloria Anzaldua, John R. Rickford, bell hooks, June Jordan, Amy Tan, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barret y much@s más.

 

Developing and sharing linguistic justice practices in the form of this conference really came out of feelings of being stuck and disconnected from our own training. We could not get over how different how we were learning to teach students was from what excited us about the published works we taught and enthusiastically shared with one another, nor could we reconcile the vibrant, rhetorically effective work by students with the assessment expectations we were taught to apply. 

 

This work is the opposite of the practices of adherence to standard English across the curriculum which focuses on that which is often antithetical to the identity of students:

robotic, formulaic structures that are taught in standard English courses. This paradigm robs students of the rich thinking and writing they do “and all the ways they are equipped with ample ways of voicing and translating, with tools and ways of knowing” (Alvarez, Wan, and Lee, Workin' Languages: Who We Are Matters in Our Writing)

 

Another part of the story of this conference is that it was born from, and is sustained from relationships. By design, presenters are often recent conference attendees. Our conference committee is made up of LJE practitioners who help make the conference happen each year and who shape our ethos which supports a communal shift toward teaching in a way that does not ask for perfect English to explore ideas and fosters a space where we celebrate our deepening practices, learned and shared with one another.

We began this because we loved teaching, but, as we wrote, we had been feeling stuck for a long time. Learning about how others are getting unstuck - what they do and how they do it - helps keep us unstuck too. Additionally, Gonzales, a menopunker (Spitboy Rule) always says, this conference is also very DIY, very punk rock. We began this conference from a place of chutzpah and solidaridad. And, because we were inventing this ourselves, we decided it should also be - Free! Accessible! Grounded in Care and Access! And thus we seek funding each year to actually pay presenters and student panelists for their labor, rather than expecting them to pay-to-labor. We value time and intellectual ideas. We value each other. And you. This conference is part of a movement. A vital, necessary transformation centered in learning, where voice is value. We invite you to join us, to Join. The. Movement.

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