Mid-winter Conference, February 23-25, 2007
Nashville, Tennessee
Workshops
Critical Literacy and Theatre in Urban Public Schools: The
Neighborhood Bridges Program
Maria Asp, Neighborhood Bridges, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Neighborhood Bridges co-founded by Jack Zipes,
professor of German and comparative literature at the University of
Minnesota and Peter Brosius, artistic director of The Children’s
Theatre Company in Minneapolis Minnesota, is critical literacy in
action. Through theatre games, storytelling, improvisation, reading,
and creative writing, students question and challenge our world
empowering them to become animators of their own lives. Workshop
participants will engage in a discussion of philosophical
underpinnings, experience elements of a typical “bridges session,”
and hear how The Children's Theatre Company is partnering with
public schools using the Bridges program to animate learning.
Maria has been with the Neighborhood Bridges program
since its beginning and serves as the lead teaching artist as well
as the captain. She partners with area teachers to use storytelling
and theatre to teach critical literacy to inner city public school
students. As the lead teaching artist, Maria is responsible to
observe, train, and give support to the other teaching artists. She
is also a teacher and the coordinator of CTC’s Jr. Ensemble Theatre
Arts Training program. Maria holds a bachelor's degree from the University of
Minnesota. She plays and sings in the band The Baptism River
Ramblers and has two young boys.
Working the Word and the Image: Embodiment in Socially and
Spatially-Situated
Practice
Julie Cheville, literacy education, University of Maine, Orono
Margaret Sheehy, Reading, University at Albany
This session will address embodiment as a broad
conceptual frame for investigating literacy practices. Given its
breadth, Margi and Julie will address distinct methodological
dilemmas associated with the study of literacy as an embodied
practice. Margi will consider the study of embodied activity in
contexts of social practice while Julie examines its relevance to
contexts mediated primarily by images. Margi's session will be
dialogic. Participants will first consider the theories, then
discuss their real applications, what they mean in real social
settings, and how one can get at that information, methodologically.
Based on these discussions, we'll also ask, what can be learned from
this and is it worth the trouble? Addressing embodied activity in
sites mediated primarily by images rather than words, Julie will
draw on recent developments in semiotics that suggest how the
interpretation of images is embodied. She will focus on the embodied
nature of image-driven signifying practices associated with simulati
on software.
Julie Cheville is an assistant professor of literacy education at
the University of Maine. Her current research focuses on the
neurophysiological dimensions of literacy learning. She is currently
investigating the influence of computer-simulated images on
perspective-taking.
An Integrated Theory of Critical Literacy: Approaches to Data
Analysis
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. In my synthesis model for critical
literacy (Janks, 2000) I argue that issues of power, access,
diversity and design/re-design are crucially interdependent. After
introducing the model to participants, the main question that will
be addressed by this workshop is whether an integrated theory of
critical literacy can contribute to the analysis of multimodal data?
Participants will be invited to work in a hands-on way with
multimodal texts and multimodal research data in order to explore
ways of analyzing this kind of data in relation to the model.
Embodiment in Virtual Environments: Exploring Literacies,
Identity, Research, and Community
Charles Kinzer, mathematics, science, and technology, Teachers
College, Columbia University
Angela Thomas, University of Sydney
An increasing number of scholars, researchers,
game/educational designers, and reporters in the popular press are
writing about the economic, educational, and personal aspects of a
virtual life online. Communities form and disband, individuals join
or are excluded, and people can take very personally the virtual
environments that they present, either intentionally or
unintentionally, to others. With crossover from the "real" to the
virtual (and the opposite) being an area of research and providing
the underpinning for transfer of learning across real and virtual
boundaries, educational opportunities and issues related to
literacy, broadly defined, are being foregrounded.
Participants in this workshop will enter a virtual world, tour
environments within that world, meet people and consider issues
pertaining to research in such environments. The workshop format
allows discussion and consideration of possibilities as well as
presentation of some current activities. Thus, in keeping with the
workshop format, the session will range from a presentation and
consideration of issues related to virtual environments to hands-on
tours and examination of applications in Second Life. We will meet
others in-world, see how education might be facilitated, and
consider embodiment and reality with spaces that exist
electronically and perceptually. Participants may
want to read the materials under Chuck Kinzer's section on the 'links'
page. |
