Monday May 16th, 10:30-12:00 – Group 1a

10:30-12:00

Julian Sefton-Green (in DLC – Main Meeting Room)

Theresa Rogers
New Literacy Performances of Marginalized Youth in Local and Global Contexts: The YouthCLAIM Project

In this paper, I use a multi-case research project to theorize the arts and media-integrated literacy productions of ‘new’ and ‘multiple’ and critical adolescent literacies research (e.g., Moje, 2000; O’Brien, 2005; Leander, 203, Burn & Parker , 2003, Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Sefton-Green, 1998; Soep, 2006), new genre theories (e.g., Bakhtin, 1986; Manovish, 2001); and theories of social and cultural identity, agency and positioning (Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, & Caine, 1998), I examine how youth 1) exploit multimodal discursive resources in their work; and 2) improvise and re-narrate their identity positions, and 3) engage in counterdiscursive social critique. Finally, I address the implications for school literacy practices.

Jennifer Rowsell
‘The Mood is in the Shot’: The Challenge of Moving-Image Texts to Multimodality

This paper considers a longitudinal study of new media and digital technologies producers (Rowsell, 2012) looking at their multimodal logic and practices to challenge notions of text and multimodality. Focusing on filmmakers, I build on previous research (Sheridan & Rowsell, 2010) to extend traditional notions of print-based texts to more contemporary ways of making meaning with moving-image texts. Working within a multimodal framework (Kress, 1997; 2010), I present the logic and practices of two producers. One filmmaker produces documentaries about wide-ranging topics from cricket to Jim Carrey to sex scandals and religion. The other producer makes 3-D animated ‘texts’ for film and television. Both are assiduous about their process and product, both highly competent at editing filmic texts, both intimately acquainted with the art and logic of multimodality. Their production stories and expertise inform the article to challenge our perceptions of what modes can do and what they can evoke. Whether it is done through expressions, movements, images, sounds, filmmakers pull on the affordances of modes to emotionalize moving-image texts.

Amanda Wager
Surviving in the Cracks: Rupturing Stereotypes of Homeless Youth

My paper develops and explores the effectiveness of an applied drama project in raising awareness of early adolescent students around issues of youth homelessness.  Informed by the works of Augusto Boal, Dorothy Heathcote, and Kathleen Gallagher, the paper investigates how drama and theatre empower youth to becomes agents of change, fostering creative and critical citizens. The study is largely influenced by Surviving in the Cracks, an original theatre production I co-created with seven formerly street entrenched youth. The play, based on the youths’ lived experiences, documents the lives of homeless street youth and their struggles to survive in the face of cuts to public health resources. Expanding on this project, my current research will bring the production to public schools as an applied theatre project where youth educate youth to raise awareness about homelessness, opening a space for dialogue, reciprocity, and possibility.
This entry was posted in Group 1. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Monday May 16th, 10:30-12:00 – Group 1a

  1. Kim Lenters says:

    o What is lost when offline communities go online?
    -The connectivity and relationship change when the writing/production gets taken online.
    -Look at a creator’s comunicative intent – What shifts when the production goes online – -Is it necessarily more communicative when taken to a wider audience? We tend to valorize the wider audience but is this necessarily a good thing?
    -How can we trace the value of these texts as they circulate? We need research that goes out from the text production moment. Look at the connected communities and the texts circulating within them.
    -Materiality around face to face networks, communities that may have more resonance for the writers.

    o Learning possibilities of kids who excel in the self-taught, diy practices of digital culture outside of school too often shut down when they come to school.
    -Does this also happen when research studies come into participatory communities?

    o What are the economies of practice associated with a site of research, site of production?
    -Research often becomes bound up in whatever is considered “capital” for that particular context. For teachers, the capital may be assessment and their participation in our research continually goes back to issues of assessment. Capital for street youth may be the honoraria they receive for participation. These forms of capital are very uncomfortable for us as researchers.

    o Problem of frameworks, theoretical positioning constructing the research.
    -We as researchers impose certain values on our researched worlds.
    Funded social interventions have many claims, ambitions – how do these mediate the research, the texts produced?
    -As researchers we bring education, social, anthropological constructs to our work that mediates the data we collect and the analysis

    o None of us participate in literate activity alone
    – Nested worlds, networked actors – and productions will live on – contemporary environment allows us access to the past life and co life but aren’t substitutes for other forms of participation

    o Networks
    – With their the co-productions of texts – between people and then in relation to the texts as actants work in the collaboration – in these co-productions is technology as much a participant as the human actors?

    o People’s connection to certain texts
    – How does this shift with the dropping out of materiality of text in digital spaces

  2. Leanna says:

    Something that I was wondering about after hearing these great research processes was about this role of producer. These terms were referred to in Theresa’s work with producers of zines, Jennifer’s both groups who produce, and Amanda’s youth who produced a play.

    What value do we give these producers as knowers? How closely are we listening (an underutilized/underdeveloped literacy skill in my opinion) or how closely can we listen when as was noted by many of you we bring so much of our own values, beliefs, agendas/frameworks? How can we hear what they really want or need? How much time does listening to producers of these rich literacy texts take in order to understand their needs, desires, and wants in relation to their multiple, ever-changing communities?

    I would be interested in hearing more about your experiences of listening as a researcher – the ways it has been meaningful – when you let go and really heard them?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *