Sunday May 15th 2011 (Evening) |
4:00 pm
Welcome (Kathy Sanford and Annette Henry)
Keynote address: Julian Sefton-Green
From Othering to Incorporation: Theoretical, Ethical and Practical Dilemmas in Crossing Informal and Formal Learning Boundaries
This paper is situated in debates about the relationships between formal and informal learning and ways that both domains have been constructed in relationship to each other. It will begin by sketching out ways in which the literature characterising the ‘digital multimedia vernacular’ of the ‘Net Generation’ functions as a way of ‘othering’, of imagining forms of informal learning as in some ways different, and more authentic than normative constructions of school based learning. It will then describe some of the different national-cultural approaches to this construction and discuss some of the initiatives which have attempted to incorporate informal learning in mainstream curriculum and pedagogy thinking.
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5:30 – 7:30 pm
Reception + Dinner in DLC
Monday May 16th 2011 |
8:00 – 9:00am : Coffee / Tea / Juice / Snacks
9:00 – 10:15am
Keynote address: Victoria Carrington
New Literacies – Key Shifts and Emerging Issues
This presentation is most particularly concerned with the link between literacy, technology, identity and culture. Using a range of texts produced and used both online and offline, it examines the implications of the shift towards what Henry Jenkins (2006) calls a participatory culture. The ‘hidden curriculum’ of this emerging cultural frame values particular skills sets, knowledges and practices around a range of media. This paper suggests that the out of school literacy practices – those practices which involve the use of technologies to produce texts of various textures within a social context – of many young people reflect the contours and requirements of this participatory culture rather than those rewarded by school-based curricula. Interestingly, many of these new practices and skills are somewhat different from those inculcated via traditional print-based literacy socialization. This shift brings with it a range of opportunities and challenges along with a set of implications for the ways in which we, as educators, conceptualise the literacy curriculum and the pedagogies we deploy.
10:15: Coffee break
10:30am – 12:00
Affinity groups meeting
Group 1a: 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.
Group 2a: Mastin Prinsloo (IN ROOM 201 upstairs)
Maureen Kendrick/Margaret Early
Literacy, Multimodality and Imagined Communities: Connecting English Language Learners through Global Learning Networks
In the 21st Century, new literacy practices require the ability to ‘read’ and ‘write’ complex texts comprised of multiple modes including linguistic, visual, and gestural. Pedagogical designs, however, have not yet elaborated a robust theoretical and practical account of how a range of modalities might contribute to meaning-making. Our research focuses on how secondary school students in Canada and Kenya can participate in global learning networks (i.e., using technology as an integral part of a learning exchange over long distances) by drawing on and adapting their local multimodal resources for the development of literacy.
Claudia Mitchell
What will we know when we know it?” Youth-as-knowledge-producers and digital media in the age of AIDS
This paper sets out to interrogate the idea of ‘youth-as-knowledge-producers’ in relation to digital media projects involving South African and Canadian youth and in the context of HIV&AIDS. Drawing on several case studies (girls and blogging in South Africa, a video makingt in South Africa, and a stop motion project with aboriginal youth in Canada, the paper works with Ursula Franklin’s formulation, ‘what will we know when we know it?’ in order to map out what such terms as ‘knowing’ and ‘ knowledge producer’ might mean in working with youth — and especially girls.
Teresa Dobson
Implications for Literacy Education of Online Video Sharing Applications
In December 2005, “YouTube” was made available for public use. This internet-based video-sharing service designed to allow users to view and upload video clips with remarkable ease enjoyed almost immediate success, becoming the fastest-growing site on the Internet by the summer of 2006 (Cashmore, 2006a). Currently, companies that track Internet usage invariably list YouTube in the top five most accessed sites globally (e.g., Alexa, 2009). While there exists literature on the implications of the social media movement for the way in which individuals conceptualize knowledge creation and diffusion (e.g., Dobson and Willinsky, 2009), there has been limited theoretical discussion from a literacy perspective of why YouTube in particular, which privileges oral and visual over written expression, but which nevertheless demands users have sophisticated literacy skills, is garnering such interest, and of the implications of this scenario for literacy.
Group 3a: Victoria Carrington (IN ROOM 203 upstairs)
Lori McIntosh
‘Can We Play Fun Gay?’: Disjuncture and Difference, and the Precarious Mobilities of Millennial Queer Youth Narratives
This paper takes up the complex project of unthinking neoliberal accounts of a progressive modernity. The authors position their anxieties about an ‘after’ to queer as an affect modality productive of both an opportunity, and an obligation, to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when queer, and therefore gay, were organized in a relation of explicit politicization. The authors interrogate celebratory, modernist readings of millennial queer youth narratives where the potentially democratizing significance of the Internet as a cultural technology is deemed constitutive of mobility, play, and possibilities for a redistribution of rights of recognition, communicality and knowledge in a significant public sphere.
Kedrick James
Altogether Now: Online Agents and Artificial Poets
This presentation considers generative and procedural poetics as advancing new literacy practices that foreground reader engagement with streaming texts and act metaphorically to shed light on how new literacies more generally are adapting to an infosphere in which navigating excess has become a basic ‘skill’. Extending from notions of artificial creativity (Elton, 1995; Gero, 2002), programmer/poets are using algorithmic processing by intelligent robots to gather, cut and remix texts from the world wide web, producing poems that sample online discourse from blogs, websites, twitter feeds and so on, to create generically authored, often epic texts. As search engines and information feeds currently play dominant roles in the accessing of information, these computational poetic practices not only give randomized samples of online discourses, but also integrate new literacy practices that enhance dialogue between human and artificial agents (Schmidhuber, 2007). In this presentation, I argue that drawing on the (online) social resources of language is akin to human poetic practices, and pose questions about whether humans are enculturing computers or computers are technologizing culture, as seen within the context of contemporary ‘avant garde’ poetry.
Jen Jenson
How Much is too Much?: Supporting Student Learning in a Voluntary Media Production Club
This paper will report on an ongoing research project at an “at-risk” Middle School in Toronto area, where students participated in a voluntary lunch-time and afterschool media production program once per week. During this time, students created short stop-motion animations in small groups that were focused on social issues chosen by the students such as bullying, school punishment and family life. Inverting the usual “saviour” tale, we show here the difficult, sometimes impossible task of scaffolding students to make learning meaningful to them, first and foremost.
12:00 – 1:30pm: Lunch
1:30 – 3:00pm
Affinity groups meeting
Group 1b: Julian Sefton-Green (IN DLC – main meeting room)
Kathy Sanford
Complexities of Gaming Cultures: Adolescent Gamers Adapting and Transforming Learning
Three years ago this ethnographic research study of eleven adolescent gamers began in a response to social concern regarding adolescent (dis)engagement in school literacy practices. Since then, the ongoing research has revealed the importance of understanding and knowing more about individual gamers’ ways of knowing, and also about the overlapping and nested culture(s) they create and to which they belong. What has been observed is a culture working deep within the values of complexity science, allowing for the novelty and unpredictability of emergence to occur. The values of complex systems exhibited by these young people serve to disturb values of traditional, linear thinking about schooling and demonstrate the deep and sophisticated learning occurring out of school.
Margaret Mackey
Narrative Comprehension and Cross-Over Strategies
Much scholarship about new literacies deals with different components discretely – gaming, social media, critical information literacy. Young people move between formats all the time, and it would be helpful to know more about how they transfer understanding between one medium and another. This presentation will address issues of cross-over between three narrative formats: book, film, and videogame. To what extent do young interpreters draw upon experience in one medium to assist in their comprehension of another? This presentation will explore the holistic multimodal framework within which these young people engage with all three media, taking into account their articulated perspectives on how and why they move among different media.
Suzanne deCastell
Reading Backwards: Literacy for “21st Century Learners”
The argument of this paper is that current exhortations about a new literacy for ‘21st century learners might gain considerable conceptual traction less by looking ahead into a future necessarily unknowable, and more by reading backwards, to a time when literacy in the western world began its rise to ‘popular media’ status . Reconfiguring Stock’s analysis of 12th century textual communities in terms of Latour’s actor-network theorization of communities as ‘assemblages’ of relationships that bind people, technologies, creatures, sites, and material conditions, offers a provocative re-reading of ‘21st century literacy’ less as driven by, and more as a key driver of that future.
Group 2b: Mastin Prinsloo (IN ROOM 201 upstairs)
Bonny Norton
Language Teachers as Language Planners: Grassroots Literacy in Uganda
In recent research, scholars have argued persuasively that much research on language policy needs to include studies on the everyday contexts in which policies are interpreted and negotiated (Blommaert, 2008; Hornberger & Vaish, 2008; King, 2004; Ramanathan and Morgan, 2007; Shohamy, 2007). IN this paper, we present research findings from two schools in eastern Uganda in which four Primary teachers struggled with the expectations of Uganda’s new multilingual language policy, which seeks to promote literacy in both the mother tongue and English, despite limited material resources and large class sizes. Despite the formal context of schooling, the conditions under which teachers and learners seek to achieve multilingual literacy in Uganda approximates what Blommaert (2008) calls “grassroots literacy”: “It is writing performed by people who are not fully inserted into elite economies of information, language, and literacy” (2008, p.7).
Kimberley Meredith
Multiliteracies and Imagined Identities: Designing Democratic Learning Communities
This paper will document secondary school students’ construction and use of multilingual, multimodal identity texts to simultaneously acquire academic knowledge and negotiate identities in democratic learning communities. In collaboration with the classroom teacher, students participate in the production and interpretation of multimodal identity texts, such as using digital technologies to communicate and represent their lives and local contexts through their preferred modalities (kinesthetic, visual, multi-lingual). A critical analysis of how students interpret and respond to their peers’ identity texts will provide insights into how meanings shift at a local level.
Lisa Starr
Bridging Cultural Understanding through New Literacies
Canadian schools are as ethnically, racially, linguistically, and religiously diverse of any school population in the world (Chambers, 2003). What experiences do we draw upon to meet the challenges of teaching in a culturally rich setting? IN the role of teacher, you are the educator and the educated; “one’s cultural understanding grows from his or her perception of cultural differences – from defensive to adaptive to integrative?” (MurakamiRamalho, 2008, p.84). How are new literacies being utilized to support the formation of intercultural understanding, awareness, and learning?
Group 3b: Victoria Carrington (IN ROOM 203 upstairs)
Shelley Peterson
Teaching Writing Using Digital Technologies in Canadian Classrooms: Assumptions and Instructional Practices
New literacies theory was used to examine the assumptions and writing instructional practices of 192 grades 4-8 teachers across Canada. Interview and classroom observation data showed that most participating teachers used computers in their personal lives and professional lives. They had developed varying levels of confidence and competence in using digital technology and believed that it should play a role in classroom writing instruction. Access to computers did influence the frequency and ways in which teachers and their students used computers in writing classes, however assumptions about students’ writing development, about the authority of the teacher in classroom interactions and about the relative authority of print-based writing over digital writing were at least as influential.
Kathie Shoemaker
Colour’s Complex and Varied Roles in Constructing Cohesive Relations Between Images in Multimodal Sequential Visual Narrative Picturebook Texts for Young Children
While it is widely acknowledged that picturebooks contribute to young children’s literacy and literary development this study aims to study the less understood dynamics of how they make that contribution. It aims to articulate those means for the benefit of providing educators and creators with a metalanguage that will promote their metacognition of multimodal forms. Growing pressure on educators to address the notions of multimodality and multiliteracies makes this study timely. The easily accessible picturebook is ideal in size and scope for most classrooms, making it a fine alternative to other multimodal forms This is important because although there is pressure on public education to bring technology into the classroom and curriculum, neither technology nor the staffing to support it are universally available. Additionally it is a form once thought of only for young children but over the past ten years picturebooks of interest for young adults and adults are being published in ever increasing numbers. My work serves yet another literacy purpose because its focus is on colour’s contribution to textual cohesion and since understanding textual cohesion is one of the major developmental tasks for very young readers this work aims to increase understanding of how young readers construe cohesion and, more generally, learn the narrative conventions that will support their literacy development.
Anne Burke
Children’s Constructions of Self and Authoring in the Digital Age
This paper looks at how children construct identities in virtual spaces in order to participate in acts of authoring to address social, cultural, and political issues which shape their young lives. This paper will focus on year one of a SSHRC study which explores how students’ engagements in social networking sites such as Facebook, My space, club penguin, Star Doll and Webkinz provide spaces of equity for these children. Student voices and constructed identities will be used to illustrate how they use new literacies to enhance their equity in social spaces and cultural understandings of identity and self.
3:00pm: Afternoon break
3:15 – 4:30 pm
Keynote address: Mastin Prinsloo
The New Literacies as Placed Resources in a Globalized World
It is common cause that changes in technology, institutions, media, the economy and the rapid movement toward global scale in manufacture, finance and communications have affected social practices in all the main areas of everyday life within modern societies: in work, at leisure, in the home, in education, in the community and in the public sphere. However, these changes are not equally distributed both within nation states and between them. This paper draws on in-depth case studies of the particular ways that electronic forms of meaning-making, communicating, learning and acting socially are shaped by local configurations, in African and working-class contexts elsewhere. The discussion generates a grounded theoretical perspective on how best to engage young people, who are not at the core of the dynamics of the globalized world, with new media in educational settings.
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6:30 pm
Dinner at Point Grill on Campus
Tuesday May 17th 2011 |
8:00 – 9:00am: Coffee / Tea / Juice / Snacks
9:00am – 10:30
Affinity groups meeting
Group 1c: Julian Sefton-Green (IN DLC – main meeting room)
Leanna Madill
‘My Son Isn’t Reading!?’ Parents Consider the Legitimacy of Videogames for Adolescents
Most parents of adolescent videogame players have not experienced the innovations of technologies and media in school settings, and therefore do not recognize the value in the meaningful learning and literacies that videogames enable. Although all forms of knowledge and communication should be valued, many parents need to know more about the learning happening in videogames and how to support their children as they become producers of these cultural artifacts. This research project explores the experiences that parents have encountered around videogames and their adolescent children. Through individual and focus group interviews, nine parents identify and examine their concerns about videogames, their perceptions about their adolescents’ gaming practices, and question the liegitimacy of videogames as a learning and literacy tool.
Stuart Poyntz
Media Literacy 2.0: Contemporary Media Practices and Expanded Literacies
This paper is intended to map the practices and concepts that seem to be crucial for developing a model of Media Literacy 2.0. To make clear the elements and resources central to a new model of media education, including the role educators have in fostering this model, I will present a vision of the 8-Cs of contemporary youth media practice – Consciousness, Communication, Consumption and Surveillance, Community, Convergence, Creativity, Copy-Paste, and Cyber-ethics. Each of these areas refers to a conceptual problem central to a new vision of creative media education, along with key ideas about pedagogical practices that can aid in unpacking and exploring these problem fields with young people.
Roberta Hammett
‘Tech FTX!!!’ Ninth Graders Compose Digital Responses to Romeo and Juliet
‘Tech FTX!!!’ Ninth Graders Compose Digital Responses to Romeo and Juliet will describe how 9th graders used online digital resources to compose responses to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The collaborative digital products included e-zines, PowerPoint presentations, digital videos and photostories. The students’ digital texts were created within a school-university collaboration during which preservice teachers mentored the grade nine students online through the affordances of a ning (a social networking site). The paper will focus on what the texts demonstrate the students know about Shakespeare’s play, about collaboration, about themselves and one another, and about technologies. As one student commented in his blog: “Tech FTX!!!” (for the win).
Group 2c: Mastin Prinsloo (IN ROOM 201 upstairs)
Lauryn Oates
Teachers as Publishers? Closing the Content Gap for Local Language Materials with ICT in Northern Uganda
This paper seeks to share ways in which computer literacy among teachers in Gulu (northern Uganda) can be harnessed to effectively support instruction in the mother tongue, and ultimately, to vitalize the local language and facilitate higher learning outcomes among students. This study approached teachers as partners in content production, as potential contributors and beneficiaries of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, and responds to the finding, from research carried out in Uganda, that the community is a significant but untapped source for the production of local language texts (Tembe & Norton, 2008). This study is part of a larger research program in Uganda, led by Dr. Norton and Dr. Kendrick, who have been working collaboratively with Ugandan and Canadian scholars to address language and literacy challenges in diverse African communities.
Marlene Asselin
Towards a Digital Research Collaborative: Examining New Literacies in Canada and Ethiopia
This paper presents a year-long conceptualization of a collaborative research project at UBC and two major teacher education programs in Ethiopia. This project was initiated in response to Ethiopian faculty’s request for support in developing a contemporary research culture in their institutions. Students and faculty in each university collaborate in relation to the following two topics: 1) What is the range of languages used amongst families with children entering school, and for what purposes are these languages used?, 2) How are digital technologies for communication and knowledge dissemination modifying and extending literacy practices in the Ethiopian context?
Kelleen Toohey/ Diane Dagenais
Video-making in Canada and India: How Children Represent Themselves to One Another
Many have observed that schools ignore the multicompetences of multilingual children, paying little or no attention to the linguistic or other cognitive resources of their students. AS well, as argued by many, schools commonly ignore the multimodality of learners’ lives, pointing out that classrooms operate largely on language as a tool for meaning making, but newly available means outside classrooms are myriad. In this presentation, we describe and illustrate video-making projects conducted with Punjabi children in a Canadian school, indigenous children in Mexico, and Tibetan children in an Indian school, showing excerpts of the videos children produced. We speculate about what such projects might afford for developing multiliteracies in multilingual students, and discuss issues we see as potentially problematic in moving this work forward.
Group 3c: Victoria Carrington (in Room 203, upstairs)
Kathy Hibbert
The Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies Collaborative
Today’s education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn. Multiliteracies teaching and research engages numerous Web 2.0 tools that are changing the ways in which teachers and students interact with learning and demand new strategies for teaching, learning, and research. Challenges faced by educators include how to harness what are often seen as disruptive technologies in powerful ways that reposition students and teachers from consumers to creators of information. I will introduce The Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies Collaborative, designed to provide teachers and students opportunities to connect, share, collaborate, customize and improve upon multiliteracies applications that demonstrate the use of Web 2.0 tools in educationally meaningful ways.
John Willinsky
The Intellectual Properties of Learning and Literacy
This paper will set out the case to be made for introducing the legal, economic, and historical concept of ‘intellectual property’ into literacy education. The concept will be unpacked in relation to the distinct intellectual properties of learning (which have a special non-commercial and protected status recognized by various legal statutes governing intellectual property over the course of history). It will then be shown the degree to which responsible educators should be concerned to include this concept in the literacy education of students of all ages, as they learning about how the value of literacy is traditionally established and managed, and how that is being transformed by the digital age of the twenty-first century.
James Nahachewksy
Objects of Desire: Changing Textual Ecology in the ELA Classroom
Once stable concepts such as ‘text’ and ‘authorship’ — staples of Secondary English language arts curricula and pedagogy for generations – are being challenged by the pluralities of our digital age. Drawing on Barton and Hamilton’s (2000) use of an ecological metaphor, this paper presentation explores findings from the author’s recent and ongoing classroom-based research into teachers’ and students’ textual responses – their selection, consumption, and production practices – in changing times. Importantly, literacies and learning become a ‘tissue of quotation’s (Barthes, 1977) in which a complex relationship of literate potentialities and challenges co-exist as teachers and students co-author their classrooms.
10:45 – 12:00
Panel of keynote speakers and conference organizers reflecting on workshop:
Kathy Sanford, Theresa Rogers, Maureen Kendrick, John Willinsky, Victoria Carrington, Julian Sefton-Green, and Mastin Prinsloo
12:00 – 1:30pm Lunch
Closing