A classroom can be home to many emotions. Anxiety as a test begins. Pride when a quiz question is answered correctly. How about joy?
A conference at the Fayetteville Public Library on Saturday, Oct. 3, is all about joy in the classroom. The inaugural Joyful Teaching Conference is open to teachers and future teachers. Guest speakers include graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, professor Chris Schulte from the University of Arkansas School of Art and artist, author and storyteller Zeke Peña.
Zeke came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio this week, along with Hung Pham, director for the Center for Children and Youth at the UofA, and Chris Goering, professor of English education at the University of Arkansas. Chris says the conference's origin story can be traced back to a book he co-wrote with Holly Riesco, Meg Grizzle and Katie Hill called "Joyful Literacies in Secondary Language Arts."
Obtaining joy in the classroom can sometimes be a high bar, Chris Goering says. There are hurdles, but he says there are also pathways to achieving a joyful classroom.
Goering: I think, I mean, a hurdle that in some ways has been solved, in some ways hasn't, is for a number of years it was the distractions of phones. Any adult, any kid with a phone, it's really difficult for them to ever put it down. Or even if, the research shows, even if it's on the table, they're paying less attention to whatever's going on. And so I think that teachers were really facing an uphill battle trying to get kids just genuinely interested and engaged.
And I think that's what the joyful literacies approach or joyful teaching is, like joyfully serious, seriously joyful. This is like, I want moments in classrooms. And I think there will be moments at this conference where people aren't thinking about the clock. They're not thinking about lunch coming up. They're not thinking about everything else going on because they're so immersed in the work. And sometimes that could be digital work. Sometimes that isn't digital work.
And I think anything that we can do to create those authentic connections between students, between teachers and students, I think that's where a lot of the potential for this can really come to fruition.
Kellams: Hung, OK. So I mentioned joy can seem like a high bar. So you've got a conference, you're inviting teachers, you're inviting students to come in for a conference about joyful. What do you do to meet that phrase with the one-day conference?
Pham: So we have a range of different sessions involved, whether it's a plenary session with the entire group as well as smaller sessions kind of spread out throughout the library where it's going to be held. But then also we have these kind of quick-fire, rapid-fire presentations that, one of the things that we want to highlight is just the wealth of brilliance and imagination in our educational community.
So we're going to have these quick-fire round table sessions where folks from many walks, whether they are artists by trade, whether they're classroom teachers, whether they are play therapists, will share some of their approaches and activities that engender joy, whether in the facilitation or from the participants.
Kellams: You'll have speakers.
Pham: Yes. So two of our sort of highlight speakers, one is the graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang and also local illustrator and author Zeke Peña.
Kellams: Zeke Peña is with us. Zeke, the last time you and I talked, I think we talked about joy and how joy can be manifested on the page and through storytelling. What do you want to tell to the people who come to the conference?
Peña: I mean, teaching is really important to me. I mean, it's a part of my practice. It's something I'm thinking really intentionally. I may have mentioned this last time in a separate interview. But when I'm making picture books, I'm critically thinking about how is this going to be held by an educator? How is it held by a parent? Right. Parents are also teachers at home and stuff. And so caretakers.
And so for me, I'm trying to put a moments in there that can spark that joy, right? It's a collective experience, like the bookmaking process. And so for me, the things that I can impart are not only how to process those stories, but then how to tell those stories.
I think what's really interesting for picture books, especially for young readers, the thing that I find that young people get the most excited about are telling their own stories, right? Everyone's really interested in telling their story, their family, right? The new pet that they got at home or the trip that they took, right?
I remember when I was younger, I still have a notebook. I think it's from third or fourth grade. It's a Garfield notebook, and my teacher at the time was having us journal. And so I have these really awesome, like, 30-word journal entries, and I was doing drawings at the same time. I'm not sure if she required that of us, but I was also making drawings in there. So for me, looking on that, it captures this emotional moment.
And so I'm hopeful that I can share some of the storytelling processes. I'm interested in showing people how to do comics. I think comics are a really fun way of storytelling, but can also be used in the classroom to test comprehension, right? If after you read a picture book or after you read a story. So I'll be doing some comic making, sequential storytelling.
And then I'm also excited to share some other kind of visual storytelling techniques through zine making, which is a really, both of those mediums, zines and comics, I love doing those in workshops for young people and also for educators because they're super accessible and, with the right content and the right prompt, they can be really joyful and fun to make.
Kellams: Chris, the whole time Zeke was talking, you're nodding your head.
Goering: Yeah. I mean, that's the spirit of this entire thing, right, is in how he's approaching his contributions to this conference. And I think that that's just thinking about how education is received, right? And thinking about if you're illustrating a book and you're thinking about, to what extent is this going to bring joy to the people that are engaging in it?
And I think, what if every teacher in America entered the classroom every day and thought, how can I make this joyful? How can I make students love this? How can I make this fun? How can I make everybody want to be here for the next 50 minutes or 90 minutes, whatever time frame they have?
And I'm not saying that they don't do that, but I'm saying that there are a lot of obstacles to doing that. And there's things like kind of canned curriculum. There's limitations that have certainly been placed on what teachers can do around Arkansas, around other states in the last several years.
And so with all of that in mind, joy is resistance, and figuring out ways and figuring out new ways to overcome those obstacles. I mean, that's what I think we have to be about and have to continue to seek. And I want students to leave school not only prepared for the world, but also to think that school is actually, this was fun. I liked school. I think a lot of people leave school, and they don't say that.
Pham: So kind of going on that statement of joy as resistance, there's a poem by Jack Gilbert called "Brief for the Defense" that it kind of reminds me of. And a line from it is, "We must risk delight." And that always struck me that requiring or really demanding joy is an act of bravery, especially in the context, because I think most teachers would love to have a joyful classroom, but it's not always easy.
And so by our having this conference, by bringing folks together that say that joy isn't a nice-to-have, but it's really an essential part of a truly transformative education, I think is an act of bravery.
Kellams: And energy. It would seem like if you have a joyful approach, if you are having joy, if your students are having joy, if there's joy in the classroom, it seems like it'd be more energetic.
Goering: Absolutely. Yeah. It was kind of a funny story. Several years ago, I had a group of pre-service teachers, and they were all just wonderful, smart people and very capable and just had the world in front of them, and they're all out doing great things still. But they all came to me one day in the methods of teaching English class and said, "Goering, we just don't understand, but our students have to go to the bathroom all the time."
And I was like, "Here's my secret sauce, guys." I was that student, right? This is like, a lot of people might get into teacher education or that kind of thing, or become a teacher because they were the best student in the class kind of thing. And I was the student, as a high schooler, as a middle schooler, that was going to cause trouble if I wasn't engaged, right? And certainly one of the first things I would have done would be to go to the bathroom and maybe even go multiple times in a class period if it was boring.
So I was like, "The problem, folks, is not that the kids have these weird, overactive bladders. It's because you're boring, all right? And you're not doing enough with them to keep them engaged. If your class is fun, if your class is something they're looking forward to, they don't have to go to the bathroom that hour. They go in another class, but right now they're going to your class. And that's kind of an indication that you got to change things up a little bit."
And one of the ways that we're doing this at the conference, in addition to our sort of graphic visual artists, is Anne Marie Garcia. She is going to come from the University of New Mexico, and she's a choreographer, and she's doing a thing in the movement studio. And so, I mean, a big part of it is, how hard is it to sit in the chairs that are in schools for an eight-hour day? If everybody who's ever written an education policy could go just sit in one of those chairs for an eight-hour day. I think that, yeah, it should be a requirement. They should have to probably sit in them forever if they're writing education policy.
But the idea is that if students are bored, they're going to cause trouble, right? And teaching is going to be less fun if students are causing trouble. So let's figure out ways to make them not that way. But Anne Marie's movement and getting students up, getting them acting out different scenes from a play or from a book or from history, or putting their bodies in shape to represent a mathematical equation. There's just so many different ways of engaging out of a seat. And I think that's a great place to start.
Peña: When we were discussing, when they were inviting me and we had an initial meeting about this conference, one thing that I loved hearing was this multidisciplinary approach, right? Having people from many disciplines come and offer insight on our craft and on what we do, just as a different approach to maybe interject a little bit of that, really, the box checking, I think, that happens in classrooms and things like that with curriculum and whatnot.
And so I also remember being that kid that was just bored. But I do remember those teachers that just made it fun, right? And they just activated the class, and they were moving around the classroom, right? Teaching is a performance, right? It's partially a performance. So when you're in front of a group of people, how are you holding yourself, right?
And body work like that can help you be in your body, be more comfortable in things, and it's a more holistic approach, as opposed to just thinking that what we need to be doing in classrooms is just reading books and testing, reading books and then testing for comprehension and things like that.
Pham: And I'd go a step further. And yes, teaching is a performance, but I would say really good teaching is a work of art, and it's not necessarily the most outgoing, big teacher energy jumping off the walls. I've had some of the most engaging teachers have a quiet presence about them, but they still have tools and approaches for engaging the students in the classroom.
One of the qualities that I have been sort of championing and kind of been central to my thinking of education is curiosity, and not thinking of curiosity as something that a student either has or doesn't have, but something that can be cultivated. And you can't really cultivate curiosity by having prescriptive, this is the answer, this is the way how you get to it type of education. There's no searching. There's no wonder within that.
And also, teachers deserve curiosity too. They deserve to be placed in a position where not only are they allowed to, but expected to explore their profession, to look deeper into areas that speak to them for the betterment of their abilities and their performance.
Kellams: So in the morning is the conference, then the event center flips into its other sort of configuration for the public talk, and you do not have to be a conference attendee to come to the talk, right?
Pham: That's correct. It's a public talk open to all ages, all walks, not just educators, but any folks who are interested in hearing Gene talk. I've heard him before. He's a fantastic speaker that touches on lots of different elements of literacy and creativity, and he's well-loved by folks of many age groups. So we're really excited to have him. There'll be a book signing after the talk. So yeah, 3 o'clock. Doors open at 2:30 for folks to get in, and we're really excited for it.
Hung Pham is director for the Center for Children and Youth at the University of Arkansas. Chris Goering is a professor of English education at the UofA, and Zeke Peña is a writer, artist and storyteller who will speak at the inaugural Joyful Teacher Conference, taking place at the Fayetteville Public Library on Saturday, Oct. 3.
Information about registration for the conference can be found at tinyurl.com/joyfulteaching2026. I would advise, just put in Joyful Teaching Conference to your search engine. You'll get there. Information about attending the public talk with Gene Luen Yang can be discovered at faylib.org.
The inaugural Joyful Teaching Conference, being created with support from the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions, the UA Literacy Symposium, the UA Multicultural Center, the UA School of Art, the Arkansas Arts Council and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
