Karis Jones

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor of Secondary English Language Arts at Baylor University

Our collective of teacher educators and researchers share the contours of a collaboration on a critical arts-based research project. We attend to the ways we collaboratively composed a table-top roleplaying game, a text intended to support players in co-creating their own speculative fiction. Our game, We Know Something You Don’t Know, was designed...

Textual consumption in digital spaces has come under scrutiny by educators who worry about youth's surface-level comprehension of such texts as well as the polarizing nature of online discourse. This paper synthesizes affective concepts of critical witness and glimmers of care to explore two cases in which adolescent writers in digital OST programs...

This article explores the affordances of roleplaying games (RPGs) in teacher education contexts for supporting navigation across personal, cultural, and literary interpretive practices. Coding preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) discussions about their own learning experiences, we see how tabletop RPGs designed around existing texts have the potential to...

This article traces how multiple equity-focused goals were negotiated in collectively designing a classroom that centered joyful fandom literacy practices , considering how teacher-researchers and youth use expanded conceptions of equity trails in a social design experiment to reset harmful but normalized classroom, disciplinary, and fandom practic...

Building on youth literacies in formal learning spaces is a promising direction for asset-based literacy learning designs. However, in response to ways that academic spaces can deaden passionate literacy study, it is important to attend to the resulting affective flows of such practices. This study traces how affect was sustained and dampened in a...

Due to their rapid evolution, scholars sometimes categorize digital and computer-mediated genres as fully distinct from more traditional offline genres. In this theoretical exploration, we complicate binaries of online/offline to understand networked genres in their own right and situate fanfiction and its associated practices. We examine how socia...

Fandoms are passionate communities dedicated to appreciating and engaging with texts of interest (movies, TV shows, books, bands, brands, sports teams, etc.) via personally and communally meaningful literacy practices. It is increasingly obvious that scripted literacy curricula and standardized tests fall short of meeting meaningful literacy goals...

This article examines how youths and adults make meaning across three play-based contexts: digital roleplaying, cosplaying, and improvisational theatre. Thinking with reader-response theory and employing methods of nexus analysis, we examine how the latter three cases illuminate new ways of understanding and engaging with play-based texts. As a res...

Until Dawn is a popular horror video game critiqued for its perpetuation of pervasive horror stereotypes around gender, race, and mental illness. Drawing from methods of multisited affinity space ethnography, we followed a group of cosplayers as they live streamed Until Dawn together before cosplaying characters from the franchise at New York Comic...

In order to better understand how the full range of students’ semiotic resources may be marshalled for learning, we analyse the role of interpretive claim-making across fandom and disciplinary communities. Using a framework of syncretic literacies with a focus on navigation, we analyse data from a series of writing conferences in a U.S.-based, fand...

This book explores the marginalization that English as additional language (EAL) learners, immigrant or language-minoritized people confront when learning to socialize into using the language of schooling.The authors examine racialized academic language not to dismiss it, but to scrutinize its presence and impact on individuals’ lives. Beginning wi...

This chapter examines how diverse youth in a senior English class critically analyze self-selected memes. Young BIPOC men brought together critical literacies with analytic tools such as English disciplinary close reading (Eagleton, 2013), “Big D” Discourses, and fandom participation structures. This analysis of youth interpreting memes around the...

Purpose This study aims to explore the implications of a recent case in spring 2022 where the novel Dracula went “viral” as tens of thousands of Tumblr users participated in a serialized re-reading and discussion of the text through the hashtags #dracula and #dracula daily. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a mixed-methods sequential exp...

Student agency is considered an important outcome of formative assessment, yet we know little about how interactional dynamics between teacher and student are implicated in the development of agency. Using Bakhtinian notions of dialogic space and persuasive voice, we analyze how four high school teachers assess and support students' writing process...

The authors present a framework to guide youths’ analysis of literary monsters and foster the acceptance of others—in and beyond our classrooms.

Responding to both recent interest in sound within qualitative education research and sound studies literature that conceptualizes sound as a posthuman technology, we use this paper to explore the following research questions: How does sound both enact and unveil posthuman learning ecologies? And how can education scholars engage sound within posth...

This chapter connects the experiences of student writers in two affinity-group writing programs on Zoom within larger arts spaces. The authors lift up the relational and pedagogical structures that make space for student creative learning processes in out-of-school-time spaces, examining creative writing as a way of knowing. The chapter draws on af...

Purpose - This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach - Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of in...

Purpose This paper aims to describe the critical literacies of high school students engaged in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project focused on a roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons , in a queer-led afterschool space. The paper illustrates how youth critique and resist unjust societal norms while simultaneously envisioning queer u...

A group of teacher researchers used dialogic assessment in parallel conferences to help students get more writing onto the page during conferences.

We explore our experiences with roleplaying games across learning environments, chasing communal questions such as: how can teachers engage with the possibilities of roleplaying in classroom spaces, and how can we leverage such practices to open up spaces for youth to bodily experience texts, express identities, and imagine new worlds? This article...

Traditional educational contexts often silence the literacies of vulnerable BIPOC youth (Kirkland, 2013; Paris, 2012) and our English classrooms must be reconceptualized to interrupt the cycle of deficit-framed literacy instruction and disproportionate referral to remedial or special education services leading to unjust systems such as the “school-...

Literacy educators may be familiar with #DisruptTexts, a grassroots education movement organized by four women of color calling for the centering of culturally responsive and anti-racist curriculum and instructional practices. Along with challenging the traditional canon, the movement urges educators to disrupt their teaching in ways that foster cr...

This study used the commognitive framework (Sfard, 2009) to study the learning of preservice teachers in a collaborative digital environment, examining a case of commognitive conflict around using informal and multimodal representations to discuss poetry as opposed to formal academic English. The analysis shows the complexity of power relationships...

This is a supplement to: Jones, K. M., & Beck, S. (2019). “It sound like a paragraph to me”: The negotiation of writer identity in dialogic writing assessment. Linguistics and Education, 55, 1-10. It contains correctly formatted data extracts referred to in the article.

Although arts-based qualitative research initiatives have recently utilized standard musical notation (SMN) as a potent form of data transcription, extant literature into this approach has largely ignored the critiques of SMN that emerge from music scholarship and practice. To address this oversight, we use this paper to explore the following resea...

Purpose This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students’ literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction. Design/methodology/approach This study uses qua...

With dialogic writing assessment, teachers can scaffold students’ writing processes in ways that are flexible and responsive to students’ individual needs. Examples of teachers using this conference‐based method of classroom writing assessment illustrate how to practice assessment that is dynamic and relational rather than static and standardized,...

The authors explain how performing the roles of reader, assessor, and instructor can empower students of diverse skill levels to develop their writing.

A NYS high school English educator’s classroom is shaped by an ecosystem of English assessments, where the English Regents exam may feature prominently. In New York City, English teachers are also required to administer some measures of student yearly progress; the ELA NYC Performance Task is one of these assessments. This paper uses the framework...

This review examines a recently published pedagogy text -- Social Justice Literacies in the English Classroom: Teaching Practice in Action, by A. S. Boyd -- that focuses on incorporating social justice practices into English language arts teaching as a method for inspiring hope and agency in secondary schools.