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Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Engaging Learners in Multiple Literacies through Creative Poetics
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Background/Context
Meganarratives, or “grand stories,” are composed of loosely held ideas about standardization, the rhetoric of education for all, the focus on individual success, and the appearance of representative diversity that rarely take into account human diversity embedded in deeply rooted value systems and authentically present in “the realm of face-to-face relationships.”
Purpose/Objective/Research/Question/Focus of Study
In this article, we offer atypical, noncanonical “small” stories as accounts of ways in which teachers and students live in small moments of diversity unseen and unheard within prevailing meganarratives of accountability.
Setting
This research took place in the mid-southern United States and eastern Canada.
Population/Participants/Subjects
Research participants included a preservice teacher candidate in Canada and an in-service teacher in the United States.
Research Design
Through using narrative inquiry as a human research method, we feature small storied nuggets of teachers and students breaking through “surface equilibriums and uniformities” to challenge educational orthodoxies that cast long shadows on their work and their relationships and add to the complexities of their lives.
Conclusions/Recommendations
In the final analysis, we argue for fluid back-and-forth movement between small stories and meganarratives in order to nurture dialectical relationships between and among theory, practice, and policy. Such an approach would create spaces for experiences of accountability to be lived and told, and relived and retold, in more balanced ways.
The Arizona legislature passed HB 2281, which eliminated Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD’s) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program, arguing the curriculum was too political. This program has been at the center of contentious debates, but a central question has not been thoroughly examined: Do the classes raise student achievement? The current analyses use administrative data from TUSD (2008–2011), running logistic regression models to assess the relationship between taking MAS classes and passing AIMS (Arizona state standardized tests) and high school graduation. Results indicate that MAS participation was significantly related to an increased likelihood of both outcomes occurring. The authors discuss these results in terms of educational policy and critical pedagogy as well as the role academics can play in policy formation.
In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment.
The authors investigated the effects of online discussion embedded within metacognitive guidance on mathematical literacy and self-regulated learning (SRL). They compared 4 instructional methods: online discussion embedded within metacognitive guidance (Online+Meta), online discussion without metacognitive guidance (Online), face-to-face discussion with metacognitive guidance (Ftf+Meta), and face-to-face discussion without metacognitive guidance (Ftf). Participants were 86 seventh-grade Israeli boys and girls who practiced problem solving in 4 classes. Results showed that the Online+Meta students significantly outperformed the Ftf+Meta students, who, in turn, significantly outperformed the Online and Ftf students on mathematical literacy of standard tasks, real-life tasks, and various aspects of self-regulated learning. Regarding Online students, results were mixed; these students outperformed the Ftf students on part of the criteria for standard problem-solving standard tasks and real-life tasks. The authors found no significant differences between the Online and Ftf students on SRL. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. This article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that rely solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Rather, the article attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, the article attempts to explicate the theoretical framework of the author in the nexus of collaborative and reflexive research. The pedagogical practices of eight exemplary teachers of African-American students serve as the investigative "site." Their practices and reflections on those practices provide a way to define and recognize culturally relevant pedagogy.
Using several approaches of data collection over a period of 10 months, the author combines participant observations, conversational interviews, photoelicitations, and various other serendipitous types of information gathering in performative spaces of actions and re-actions, demonstrating the contestatory negotiations of two transnational female Indian graduate students who had been in the United States for no longer than a year. Methodologically, the author explores the role of performance ethnography informed by de/colonizing epistemologies to highlight the possibilities of working within/against/through contestatory discourses. Demonstrating the complexities of human experiences through front- and back-staged one-act plays, the author argues for opening up possibilities of scientific research that investigates the role of social structures of inequality in producing experiences of marginalization.
Despite the advances made by research in the spheres of the intercultural and the multicultural, language teaching is still operating on a relatively narrow conception of both language and culture. Language continues to be taught as a fixed system of formal structures and universal speech functions, a neutral conduit for the transmission of cultural knowledge. Culture is incorporated only to the extent that it reinforces and enriches, not that it puts in question, traditional boundaries of self and other. In practice, teachers teach language and culture, or culture in language, but not language as culture. The theoretical framework I propose here for teaching culture through language suspends the traditional dichotomy between the universal and the particular in language teaching. It embraces the particular, not to be consumed by it, but as a platform for dialogue and as a common struggle to realign differences.
This article presents a discussion of research and theoretical perspectives on
creativity and instructional design, offering a conceptual model of the connection between
these two constructs that was originally proposed in the dissertation work of the first author
(Clinton, Creativity and design: A study of the learning experience of instructional design
and development graduate students, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of
Georgia, Athens, 2007) and that we call the Design/Creativity Loops (DCL) model. Central
to the model is a representation of the iterative, looping problem-solving cycle that can
include established stages of creative thinking. As an instructional designer is routinely
confronted with the next task or design problem in a project, these tasks or problems spawn
iterative mental excursions that are opportunities for creative thinking. This article also
explores ways that the design and development process can benefit from an emphasis on
creativity and offers suggested directions for future research.
Patterned in the style of a musical invention, this work adopts Clandinin and Connelly's metaphor of a professional knowledge landscape (1995), Olson's conceptualization of the narrative authority (1993, 1995) of teacher knowledge, and my idea that teachers develop their knowledge in knowledge communities (Craig 1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1998). The first invention outlines the stories of school (Clandinin & Connelly 1996) that Riverview School and Evergreen School were given and the changes that take place over time. The second invention features beginning teacher, Benita Dalton, and her narratives of experience lived and told in the two school contexts. Relating the teacher's stories to the narrative accounts of the two campuses illustrates the extent to which context shapes teachers' practices and bounds their knowing. The work sheds much light on the subtle complexities of teachers' professional knowledge landscapes and adds to the conceptual base of a line of inquiry that focuses on the shaping effect of context on teachers' knowledge developments.
This chapter begins with a troubling circumstance within which the concept of generous scholarship found expression. Presentation of background information and the research method further help to introduce the topic. Making miseducative experiences educative is the raison d’être of this work. A rudimentary conceptualization of generous scholarship is offered. Its origins trace to personal experience as well as to vicarious knowledge gleaned from professional colleagues’ learning and leading. Attention is mostly paid to the personal and professional satisfaction that comes from taking a generous stance. At the same time, the underbelly of the hierarchical, male-dominated, entrepreneurial research-driven, power-consumed academy is not glossed over. Generous scholarship is championed as a viable local, national and international counternarrative to the dominant neo-liberal mega-story that currently holds sway.
This mixed-methods practitioner inquiry aimed to facilitate transformative learning of individuals’ racial attitudes. The focus of this research was to investigate what influence participating in a semester-long social justice art education studio course may have on preservice and practicing art educators’ implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) racial attitudes and understandings toward self and others. This research also aimed to develop transformative art education pedagogy and understand its role in the critical examination of issues surrounding race and racism, and its impact on transforming racial attitudes. The findings of this study indicated that exploring racial issues through transformative art education pedagogy can facilitate positive attitude change and help educators to become more comfortable with the topic of race and the idea of working with diverse populations.
The cultivation of teacher dispositions is an important topic within contemporary discourses of teacher development. The construct of dispositions, however, is still in need of conceptual refinement. In this article, we use the philosophical theory of Bildung (the educating and forming of the self) to explore how the cultivation of dispositions and the manifestation of dispositions in one's teaching practice are functions of both professional and personal transformation. In particular, employing the methodological tool of narrative inquiry, we present a teacher who, while working on her master's degree, authored her own Bildungsroman (story of personal growth). Her narrative, we argue, powerfully illustrates how teachers are, in part, autonomous authors of their own growth. We conclude by arguing that narrative, hermeneutical, and post-qualitative methods of reflection present unique possibilities for the project of cultivating teacher dispositions in teacher education.
Higher Education institutions face specific challenges preparing graduates to live and work in transdisciplinary and transcultural environments. It is imperative for these institutions to provide their students with the skill sets that will give them the mobility and flexibility to be able to operate efficiently in different cultural and professional contexts. This position paper proposes that developing proficiency in Cultural Literacy will allow graduates of Higher Education institutions to transcend such cultural and disciplinary boundaries. In this paper we define Cultural Literacy in Higher Education as a modus operandi and a threshold concept, following Meyer and Land’s understanding of the term. We also propose ‘Destabilisation’ and ‘Reflection’ as two strategies for teaching Cultural Literacy, and examine three case studies where these strategies were successfully embedded into teaching and learning spaces.
Design is a discipline of innovation: its essence is the creation of something new and unique. An assumption has been that the inclination and ability of a person to respond in novel and useful ways is largely inherited. Present research refutes this view, and it is now believed by
many that, however creativity is defined, it is a form of behaviour that can be taught. Acknowledging this point leads to the questioning of how creativity is situated in the design curriculum. If, as present research suggests, most creativity training programmes are successful in that they
encourage the development of metacognitive abilities, then the study of creativity as a self-regulatory metacognitive process is timely and important to design education.
The modernist surveillance of strict, arbitrary borders between 'real space' and 'imagined space' both produces and hides 'Othered' spatialities. While assuming that spatialities are simultaneously real-and-imagined,postmodernspatial theory seeks to recover the identities that emerge in relation to the veiled, lived realms of 'social space'. Furthermore, critical postmodern spatial theory privileges the lived spatialities of left-margined communities as sites of socio-spatial critique. A postmodern identity politics enacts critical postmodernspatial theory by nurturing the developmentof, and solidarity between, 'counterpublics', which are subaltern community spaces where private spatialities of alienation are brought to public discourse.
Although narrative inquiry has a long intellectual history both in and out of education, it is increasingly used in studies of educational experience. One theory in educational research holds that humans are storytelling organisms who, individually and socially, lead storied lives. Thus, the study of narrative is the study of the ways humans experience the world. This general concept is refined into the view that education and educational research is the construction and reconstruction of personal and social stories; learners, teachers, and researchers are storytellers and characters in their own and other's stories. In this paper we briefly survey forms of narrative inquiry in educational studies and outline certain criteria, methods, and writing forms, which we describe in terms of beginning the story, living the story, and selecting stories to construct and reconstruct narrative plots. Certain risks, dangers, and abuses possible in narrative studies are discussed. We conclude by describing a two-part research agenda for curriculum and teacher studies flowing from stories of experience and narrative inquiry.
This paper describes a method for using art therapy with adolescents in crisis. A model developed for the study defines four trauma stages and associated art therapy goals. They are Stage I, Impact—Creating Continuity; Stage II, Retreat—Building Therapeutic Alliance; Stage III, Acknowledgment—Overcoming Social Stigma and Isolation Through Mastery; and Stage IV, Reconstruction—Fostering Meaning. An example of the application of the paradigm is presented through a case study, including the art therapy approaches and method for assessing the artwork and art processes across the continuum of these stages. It is found that hope is experienced through art and generative processes. The author draws on research conducted on an intensive care burn unit to develop a new paradigm for understanding crisis and trauma through art therapy (Appleton, 1990).
The authors conducted a qualitative study on the use of artistic representation to promote students' creativity and enhance their ability to self-reflect. The researchers used self-reflection articles about artistic representation and responses to a questionnaire at the end of the semester. Three overarching themes, as seen through the lens of the researchers, were: a) influences on self-reflection, b) emotions elicited during the creative process and classroom presentation, and c) responses following completion of the assignment. Subthemes were identified under emotions elicited during the creative process and classroom presentation and under responses following completion of the assignment. The authors address implications for using a similar activity with clients and considerations for future studies.
The article seeks to elucidate and academically position the genre of critical arts-based research in education. The article fuses Critical Race Theory (CRT), life history and performance, alongside work with undocumented American students of Mexican origin, to show how a politicised qualitative paradigmatic re envisioning can occur in which counter-histories and counter-stories can be co-created into a powerful, evocative, and transformative arts-based performance text: Undocumented Historias. The article reflects on how critical arts-based research in education can function as a means to legitimise, empower and promote the voices of the educationally and socially marginalised; evoking an experiential and sensual means of feeling and knowing by which researcher and researched may co-recover, interrogate and enrich an anti-colonialist critique of the dominant social order.
This paper tests cognitive mobilization, structural role, and traditional socialization agent theories of political literacy, conceptualized as the potential for informed political participation. Political literacy cannot be measured directly, but we presume that if people are politically literate, they understand party differences and know basic political concepts and facts. Other names for this concept include political expertise, political awareness, and civic competence. Using Jennings and Niemi's youth-parent panel socialization data, we conclude that cognitive mobilization has the largest effect on political literacy, followed fairly closely by structural roles. Socialization agents have a very minor effect. This conclusion partly supports prevailing cognitive mobilization explanations of this concept. However, self-selection causes much of the relationship between political literacy and education, making education's cognitive mobilization potential far smaller than most political scientists assumed. Political involvement and ability are the main sources of cognitive mobilization instead, and education's spurious cross-sectional effect primarily reflects structural roles.
Audre Lorde on poetry as an instrument of change and the courage to feel as an antidote to fear
- M Popova