Mid-winter Conference, February 23-25, 2007
Nashville, Tennessee
Keynote speakers
Amateur, Mashed Up, and Derivative: New Media Literacies and
Otaku Culture
Mizuko Ito, University
of Southern California, Keio University
Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use,
focusing on children and youth’s changing relationships to media and
communications. She is part of a new research project supported by
the MacArthur Foundation, “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital
Media,” a three year ethnographic study of kid-initiated and peer-
based forms of engagement with new media. She is also conducting
ongoing research on Japanese technoculture, looking at how children
in Japan and the U.S. engage with post-Pokemon media mixes. Her
research on mobile phone use in Japan appears in a book she has
co-edited, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in
Japanese Life. She is a research scientist at the Annenberg
Center for Communication at the University of Southern California,
and a visiting associate professor at Keio University in Japan.
Mizuko Ito's
blog.
Literacies of the Lower Frequencies: Social Ghosts and
Experimental Media Pedagogy
Walter
R. Jacobs, Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, University of
Minnesota
In 1997-1998 I simultaneously taught and
autoethnographically researched a “Media and Society” college
sociology course in an attempt to (a) understand how students use
the media and its products to form understandings about themselves
and others; and (b) build on the idea of a college classroom as a
place of learning, to investigate strategies for developing critical
reflection and action in order to help students actively use
mediated understandings of social interaction in the classroom as
well as in other spaces. In this keynote I will recount some of the
successes and failures of that project, and outline an expansion and
extension that focuses on “social ghosts,” the strong but usually
hidden and unexamined forces that structure students’ literacies. I
will discuss the personal, pedagogical, and research dilemmas I face
as I embark on a teaching and research project that centers on the
meaning and effects of social ghosts in writers' lives.
Walter R. Jacobs is an associate professor of education and the
director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Postsecondary
Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota. He received
his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute
of Technology, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from
Indiana University. While at Indiana University he won department,
college, and university awards for undergraduate teaching. He is the
author of Speaking the Lower Frequencies: Students and Media
Literacy (SUNY, 2005) and co-editor of If Classrooms Matter:
Progressive Visions of Educational Environments (Routledge,
2004). His current research explores personal and social
possibilities of students’ generation of creative nonfiction.
Walter
Jacob's faculty page at the University of Minnesota.
Like Guy Ropes on a Tent: An Interdependent Model of Critical
Literacy
Hilary Janks, applied English language studies, University of
Witwatersrand, South Africa
Critical literacy education, based on a
socio-cultural theory of language, is particularly concerned with
teaching people to understand and manage the relationship between
language, literacy and power. Different realizations of critical
literacy operate with different conceptions of this relationship by
foregrounding one or other of power, access, diversity or
design/redesign. In my synthesis model for critical literacy I argue
that these different orientations in critical literacy education are
crucially interdependent and that, like guy ropes on a tent, they
need to pull together to keep critical literacy education taut. In
this paper, using data from different research projects, I will
focus on questions of habitus and habitat in order to address the
question of embodied and placed practices which will be illustrated
in part with multimodal and visual classroom data.
Hilary Janks' faculty page at the University of Witwatersrand.
Transnational Literacies and Identities in the Digital
Diasporas
Eva Lam, Learning Sciences and Asian American Studies,
Northwestern University
In this talk, I consider how trans-border social
networking and diaspora media flows in Internet communications have
given rise to new contexts of socialization and identity formation
for migrant and multilingual youth in the U.S. Whereas conventional
models of immigrant incorporation and schooling are mostly
restricted to assimilationist and multiculturalist frameworks within
the confines of the receiving country, new global conditions of
transnational migration, economic and cultural flows re-situate
social engagement and identity development in the overlapping and
interconnecting spaces between societies. I will draw on analyses of
a mixed-method comparative study to discuss how adolescent
immigrants of diverse national origins use the Internet to manage
social relationships, access media and informational sources, and
develop linguistic and cognitive dispositions that orient them
toward multiple societies. I will argue that such digital practices
foster new forms of transnational identities and literacies that
should compel us to re-assess our understanding of societal
participation and education of youth migrants.
Eva Lam is assistant professor in the School of
Education and Social Policy and the Asian-American Studies program
at Northwestern University. She specializes in the area of language
learning, literacy, and diversity in education, and is currently
studying the social contexts of informal language learning, new
literacies, language varieties, and socialization practices in
networked electronic media. Her work draws from sociocultural
theories of literacy and learning, media and cultural studies, and
sociology of migration to investigate how young people, especially
diasporic and migrant youth, engage in new forms of learning and
identity formation with digital and transnational media. She has
published in TESOL Quarterly, Language Learning and
Technology, Review of Research in Education,
Pedagogies, and Social Problems, and is a recipient of
the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Post-doctoral
Fellowship (2006-2007).
Eva Lam's profile at Northwestern University.
New Media & New Learning Communities: Critical, Creative, and
Independent
Jay Lemke,
Educational Studies, University of Michigan
Today’s students are teaching themselves to be media producers as
well as media consumers. As they learn to blur the boundaries
between consumer culture and user-made media, will we learn to cross
the divide between school curricula and the rest of students’
multi-literate lives? How can we help them remain critical as well
as creative outside of school and for the long term? Research on
students’ literacies needs to focus on their networked media: from
fan-fiction sites, blogs, and MySpace identities, to online
gameworlds, home-made podcasts, and SecondLife machinema. Research
towards innovative, improved educational systems for the future
needs to look beyond schooling to how professional educators can
participate in learning communities whose goals are set by their
members. I will describe a new research agenda that looks at
learning across media, across sites, real and virtual, and across
timescales.
Jay Lemke is a professor of educational studies at the University
of Michigan (USA) and co-editor of the journal Critical Discourse
Studies. Before coming to Michigan he was head of the Ph.D.
program in urban education at the City University of New York
Graduate Center and co-editor of the journal Linguistics and
Education. Jay is the author of Using Language in the
Classroom (1989), Talking Science (1990), and Textual
Politics (1995) as well as many contributions to the theory and
applications of functional linguistics, social semiotics and
multimedia semiotics in education and sociocultural studies. His
current research focuses on how meaning and identity are formed
across settings and timescales in multimedia learning environments
and computer games and other dimensions of popular culture media.
Jay Lemke's personal page at the University of Michigan.
Performative Literacies: Towards a Critical Analysis of
Embodied Practices
Carmen Medina, Language and Literacy Education, University of
British Columbia
In this presentation I conceptualize how, within
performance practices as creative locations, it is possible to
identify or dis-identify oneself while disrupting the limits of
performing identities between the "real" and the imaginary/dramatic.
Similar to Sumara's (2002) argument that in any interpretative
moment (real and imaginative) new subject identities emerge as past
histories, present realities and future possibilities merge in the
spaces between readers and texts, I argue that performative
pedagogies as it relates to other literacy practices, provide
opportunities to work on and deconstruct our world views. These
performative pedagogies are characterized by an emphasis on process
and productivity as opposed to product and production. They provide
opportunities for participants to examine the multiple and sometimes
contradictory social positionings they bring to dialogic moments and
provide opportunities for investigation into how power and authority
are enacted.
My research and the kind of questions I investigate
are informed by my experiences as an artist-activist, literacy
educator in Puerto Rico, US and Canada and my political views both
in Puerto Rico and North America. Using critical performative
pedagogies situates my research in an interdisciplinary space.
Through the exploration of old and new social imaginaries, multiple
and hybrid worlds, identities and experiences emerge as ways to
begin to understand people's experiences and how those are
reinterpreted and represented in new forms.
Closing speakers
Brian Edmiston, The Ohio State University
Brian Edmiston's faculty page.
Robert Jiménez, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University
Robert Jiménez's faculty profile page. |
