About
75
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Introduction
An educational researcher who attends closely to qualitative methods, my scholarship reconceptualizes the role of media and technology as it intersects with children’s and youths’ critical literacy learning. Building on a decade of field-based work, my research traces expansive notions of social and discursive practice to introduce new frameworks and pedagogies for addressing the processes and consequences of how students’ ingenuity is documented and interpreted in classrooms and schools.
Current institution
Editor roles
Research in the Teaching of English
Position
- Editorial Board Member
Education
August 2011 - May 2016
August 2004 - May 2008
Publications
Publications (75)
Despite the rising popularity of video-based platforms, systematic guidelines for developing effective video-based science communication remain scarce. Training scientists in these skills is vital for combating misinformation and engaging audiences. This study reviewed evidence-based strategies for communicating science via video-based social media...
Amidst the backdrop of rising censorship legislation, it is important to understand the influence of teachers' particular contexts on their perceptions of potentially controversial texts and subsequent instructional choices. This study explores five in-service teachers' acts of positioning observed in year-long antibias antiracist professional book...
In this article, James Joshua Coleman and Jon Wargo interrogate the (queer) child as a concept and specter that haunts civic life in the United States. Whereas scholars across a range of fields and standpoints have questioned the value of LGBTQ+ inclusion in public school curricula, and society more broadly, together Coleman and Wargo wonder at the...
This article explores how undergraduate students enrolled in a postsecondary course centering LGBTQ+ young adult literature came to discursively construct notions of queer youth. Braiding postdevelopmental and poststructural theories of childhood with queer theory, we interrogated how what we name as the (il)logics of adolescence shaped who and wha...
Questioning the common practice of treating texts as property that can be stolen and instead exploring the social and rhetorical dimensions that define what is owned (and what is not), as well as what can be taken and appropriated, I drew on data from a yearlong qualitative investigation of young children writing with technology to interrogate how...
This paper uses sensemaking theory and frame analysis to examine how a non-system actor's framing for advancing LGBT inclusion, what they called code-switching, was taken up. Drawing on qualitative interview data generated as part of a larger mixed-methods study, this article examines the material and ideological affordances and constraints of elem...
Despite the growing interest in exploring processes of learning within the context of the arts, the learning sciences as a field has yet to fully engage with arts-based research. We therefore use this symposium to explore the following question: how can the incorporation of the arts into the methodological practices of learning scientists illuminat...
Offering insights from a research–practice partnership, we examine how five
pre-K–6 teachers discussed using LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s literature as backup to counter curricular censorship and community pushback.
In this paper, we follow the co-constitutive material-participant relationships that propel action in escape room play, particularly how they open and close paths for learning. We focus on how learning is organized in one escape room game, The Author’s Enigma, as intertwined with conversations on play and learning to consider the relational values...
Offering a heuristic to apprentice young children into the disciplines, we examine how one multiage classroom teacher leveraged the resources of personal digital inquiry to forward students’ knowledge building.
Reading moments of classroom talk as text, we explored how prospective teachers in a Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature course read and responded to Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, a text with a Muslim LGBTQIA+ theme. Thinking with queer theory—and its constituent concept, homonationalism, more specifically—we examined how discourses...
Building on sociocultural theories of literacy learning, in this article, we think at the intersection of reader response theory and multimodal literacies to examine how 13 preservice teachers in the course Teaching Social Sciences Through the Arts remediated responses to Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit: Stories From the Life of a Migrant Child thr...
This article draws on video data from a larger empirical project tracing how five adults learned to escape a series of complex multi-linear escape rooms. Zeroing in one room, The Author’s Enigma, it interrogates sound as a design feature and more-than-representational resource that co-produced play. Refracted through more conceptual and methodologi...
This article reports on a critical content analysis of contemporary picturebook biographies featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+) protagonists. Recognizing the increased rights and legibility accorded queer life within the United States, we analyze a textual corpus of 26 texts to spotlight how nationalist norms shape...
Students in an elective media production course used digital technology to document responses to local injustices.
Drawing on data from a yearlong qualitative study examining how children in a multi-age (6-9 years) classroom utilized technology to write across genres, this article examines the gendered negotiation and discursive uptake of expert in early childhood writing. Zeroing in on genius hour as a "site of engagement," the author thinks with rhetorical ge...
Thinking at the axes of homonationalism, civic education, and queer-inclusive social studies, this article complicates the uneven relationships between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) exclusion and belonging. Arguing that more attention should be paid to how Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) spaces may function to rende...
This chapter draws on a series of diverse nonfiction texts—Stonewall awardee and honor books in particular—to examine how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) peoples and histories are documented, discussed, and displayed in children’s nonfiction. Using a form of critical content analysis and thinking with queer theory, three que...
Building a more comprehensive understanding of gaming literacies, this article explores the kinds of literacy practices that emerge through participation and play within escape rooms. Based on a dataset of video recordings of participant interactions within an escape room, we perform side-by-side analyses of play based on two theoretical perspectiv...
The emergence of e-literature-texts created on and for digital devices has coincided with innovative, transgressive methods of storytelling. Pry, an iOS-based text, exemplifies e-literature's potential to rethink traditional narrative conventions. Rather than depict the real world as we experience it (i.e. mimesis), Pry features metaleptic elements...
Authors featured in this department share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice.
Drawing on data from a multi-sited study examining making and maker-space technologies' impact on early social studies education, this article explores how two 1 st-grade children mobilized digital media to write (right) a personal issue of geo-civic injustice. Using speculative civic literacies and sound studies as conceptual tools to interrogate...
Refracted through an inquiry-based unit in elementary English language arts, this article traces how two first grade teachers and their students used their school community's local contexts to read personal differences upon, within, and against. Braiding together theoretical perspectives from critical geography and critical literacy studies, the au...
Working at the axes of sound art, critical childhood studies, and posthuman approaches to early literacy, this chapter plays with the politics of ‘noise’ to examine young children’s early art learning. Shaped by the heard and felt dimensions of an 8-week research-creation partnership, it demonstrates how sound was not only a representational resour...
This article examines how sound—as a medium, method, and modality—attunes educational ethnographers to writing the “field” in new ways. In particular, the authors ask: How might cultivating practices of writing the field recording reorient the field note as an ethnographic object of inquiry? Examining the field recording as a representational, expe...
As a conceptual prism for rendering ways of knowing, being, and being known more visible, making and the larger maker movement are shaping contemporary educational places, practices, and discourses. Whereas efforts to expand access to making and makerspaces often treat it as an ahistorical practice, more critical efforts and frameworks are starting...
This chapter sheds light on issues raised in teaching “risky” young adult literature in schools of education. By examining how the often times graphic nature of the young adult experience falls silent to the “implied” adolescent reader, we work to unearth how educators teaching “risky” literature must work within the competing discourses of teachin...
For a Pre-Kindergarten (PreK) class, designing a 3-D map of a newly constructed playground offered authentic opportunities to participate, deliberate, and solve an authentic problem. Responding to the compelling question—“How do we build community spaces that are welcoming to, representative of, and sustaining for all community members?”—the young...
This opening department editorial seeks to share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights in an effort to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice.
This “leading the call” essays documents how sound is directly entwined with literacy practices and the teaching and learning of ELA. Highlighting a number of innovative practitioners and researchers who are amplifying sound’s potential in the teaching and learning of English language arts, this article attenuates towards sound’s capacity to commun...
This study explores how educators (n = 23) in a graduate-level “teaching with technology” course used the affordances of digital composing, and sonic composition in particular, to “sound out” reflection. Using the twin-lenses of sociocultural theory and social semiotics, findings suggest that sound operated as a: rhetorical tool for illustrating af...
A pedagogical perspective for rendering ways of knowing, being and being known, making and the larger maker movement are shaping contemporary educational places, practices and discourses. Despite these advances, its intersection with early literacy and childhood education are nascent. Thinking with theories of multiliteracies and speculative design...
Mobilizing a/r/tographic inquiry with young children, this article focuses on a series of research-creation events to examine the making and movement of speculative “withness” inherent in creative production. Thinking with theories of posthumanism and visual studies, it diffractively reads across young children’s making to refashion Szarkowski’s el...
This article addresses how researchers have drawn from qualitative methods when engaging with/in liminal populations, with a focus on historically marginalized populations and their rhetorical and material (dis)placement. As scholars housed within distinct domains of educational scholarship, we embrace this opportunity to “think-with-theory” and co...
Reflecting on data from a longitudinal connective ethnographic study exploring how six lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youths mobilized digital literacies to write against injustice, this article uses autoethnographic methods to trace desire as a co-constructed text in qualitative research. More specifically, it complicates h...
With an ear toward sound and personal digital inquiry (PDI), this article contributes an account of critical literacy pedagogy in practice in a Midwestern multiage classroom. Focusing on a first-grade student’s sonic art project and interest in working against climate change, it analyzes his practice and development of a critical stance. Examining...
Scholarship in postqualitative research has long examined the constructs of orientation and experimentation. How do we come to know and name experience? How do we value its matter as a form of mattering? Combining perspectives from phenomenology, feminist new materialisms, and sound studies, this article traces the intra-active encounters of the Mu...
Amplified by a global political climate of fear, oppression, and increased nationalism, this article examines how U.S. secondary students in a digital media elective course used multimodal composition, and video production in particular, as a nexus of ‘participatory politics.’ By partnering theories of multiliterate expression with youth civic enga...
Working to combat, speak back to, and shift discourses concerning issues of genders, sexuality/ies, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and 2-spirit (LGBTQ2) identities in school classrooms and curriculum, this article highlights the capacity in building more inclusive elementary classroom spaces through tinkering in teacher education....
Drawing upon conceptual approaches in sound studies, posthuman literacies, and new materialisms, this article highlights how writing for young learners is always already an emplaced invention of withness. Zeroing in on a diffractive experiment of young children reauthoring Showers's picture book, The Listening Walk, this study charts how the withne...
Tracing the acoustic ecologies of urban education through a topography of phenomena, this article considers how sound operates as more than paratext to the institutional structures, forms, and mechanisms of teaching and learning. Combining perspectives from phenomenology, feminist new materialisms, and sound studies, the article traces the intra-ac...
Link: http://constell8cr.com/issue-1/what-fucking-clayton-pettet-teaches-us-about-cultural-rhetorics/
By partnering theoretical insights from multiliteracies, queer phenomenology, and sound studies, this article underscores sound’s capacity as a resource for adolescent multimodal writing. Refracted through a singular LGBTQ youth’s practice of sonic cartography, the practice of mapping narrative through sound, it articulates how sound came to impact...
(Re)Entering data from a networked collaborative project exploring how sound operates as a mechanism for attuning towards cultural difference and community literacies, this article examines one primary grade classroom's participation to investigate the rhythmic rituals of 'emergent listening' in early childhood literacy. Thinking with sound studies...
Attuning to the acoustic ecologies of multicultural education, this critical qualitative project interrogated how elementary prospective teachers (PST) used digital media to write community through and with sound. Examining PST produced soundscapes and the practice of sonic cartography, this study inquired how hearing difference and listening to co...
Purpose
Plugging into the multimodal aesthetics of youth lifestreaming, this article examines how three lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) youths use digital media production as an activist practice towards cultural justice work. Focusing on the queer rhetorical dimensions of multimodal (counter)storytelling, the communicativ...
Locating itself broadly within the 'sociolinguistics of mobility' (Blommaert, 2014) and taking heed of Stornaiuolo and Hall's (2014) call to 'trace resonance' in writing and literacies research, this article works to trace academic literacies across the emerging 'literacy sponsorscapes'
(Wargo, 2016a) of contemporary culture. Despite its variance a...
Recent re-theorizations of resource-based pedagogies have shifted the paradigm away from deficit-based responses towards difference and work to sustain it. Gender and sexuality, however, are never taken up as central features in these more pluralistic pedagogies. Developing a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy, centering gender and sexuality, this ar...
Interested in the semiotic stretches youth employ to navigate (in)equality online, this paper
interrogates the seemingly mundane practices of youth writing with new media to read how “collecting”
and “curating” were mobilized as facets of youth activism. By focusing on curating and collecting as two
forms of remediated communicative practice, this...
Using Durst’s (2015) metaphor of foldings, this essay meditates on the particular ways young people write with mobile media. In particular, it considers what youth and their digital interactions with space, place, and race may teach us about contemporary digital rhetorics. This essay, what Kinloch and San Pedro would call the building place between...
This chapter utilizes a cultural sociological lens towards economy to describe and explore youth techtual economies and the purchase/paradox of educational equity. Reading the inclusion and purchase of technology as text, techtual economies detail and nuance the larger contexts of culture, relational social ties, and institutional structures. Takin...
Re-theorizations of culturally responsive pedagogies have shifted the paradigm away from deficit-based responses to difference and have instead worked toward the act of sustaining it. Gender and sexuality, however, are never taken up as central features in these more pluralistic pedagogies. Working toward theorizing a [q]ulturally sustaining pedago...
Drawing from a subset of data from a multi-year connective ethnographic study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth, this article explores the scriptural counter-economy of composing new media narratives across online/offline contexts. Combining theoretical constructs from “multi-” literacy studies alongside visual and t...
While the vast majority of scholarship on mobile media, social semiotics, and multimodality highlights work done behind the screen, few studies have considered the embodied processes of youth composing with and through mobile technology. This study, drawn from a larger critical qualitative connective ethnography, works to fill a paucity of literatu...
Critics and readers alike praise Malinda Lo for her novel, Ash, a contemporary Cinderella story and a queer variation of the ash girl tale. Despite its potential as a landmark variation in same-sex romance, this paper suggests that Lo’s queer approach is undercut by heteronormative rebounds into sexualized payment. Ultimately, Lo confines her slips...
