Browsing by Subject "critical literacy"
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Item Critical Literacy in Neighborhood Bridges: An Exploratory Study(Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 2010-05) Ingram, Debra; Lewis, Cynthia; Erasmus, Yvette; Ewing Flynn, Jill; Janowiec, AbigailThis report describes and examines the meaning and use of critical literacy in The Children’s Theatre Company’s Neighborhood Bridges (Bridges) program. Critical literacy is an orientation to reading that includes an understanding of how texts (oral stories, books, media) position readers (listeners/viewers), how readers position texts, and how texts are positioned within social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. Critical literacy is central to the philosophy of Bridges, which involves elementary and middle school students in storytelling and creative drama. An important goal of the program is to develop in children the capacity to analyze and challenge dominant social and cultural storylines as they create new storylines through imaginative retellings and reenactments.Item Making the Body Visible through Dramatic/Creative Play: Critical Literacy in Neighborhood Bridges(Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 2010-11) Lewis, Cynthia; Doerr-Stevens, Candance; Ingram, DebraThis report describes and examines the meaning and use of critical literacy in The Children’s Theatre Company’s Neighborhood Bridges (Bridges) program. Critical literacy is an orientation to reading that includes an understanding of how texts (oral stories, books, media) position readers (listeners/viewers), how readers position texts, and how texts are positioned within social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. Critical literacy is central to the philosophy of Bridges, which involves elementary and middle school students in storytelling and creative drama. An important goal of the program is to develop in children the capacity to analyze and challenge dominant social and cultural storylines as they create new storylines through imaginative retellings and reenactments. Of particular interest in this report is how critical literacy is facilitated via various opportunities for drama/creative play and Teacher Artist interactions with students during the four phases of a typical Neighborhood Bridges session.Item Storying Literacies, Reimagining Classrooms: Teaching, Research, and Writing as Blurred Translating(2014-05) McManimon, ShannonI theorize teaching and researching as practices of "blurred translating" that center antioppressive education (Kumashiro, 2002) and storytelling (e.g., Frank, 2010; Zipes, 1995, 2004). Based in listening, research and teaching as blurred translating are relational, contextual, and ongoing processes oriented toward transformation and justice that simultaneously recognize what connects us as humans and the separations between us. In this dissertation, I examine this unfinished (Freire, 1998a) metaphor before and after generating data as a participant-observer (using critical ethnographic methods [Madison, 2005]) in a 2012-13 sixth-grade classroom that participated in the weekly Neighborhood Bridges critical literacy and creative drama program. My work there blurred distinctions between teaching, research, and writing, and I utilized writing as my methodology of meaning-making (e.g., Colyar, 2009; Richardson, 2003) to juxtapose multivoiced genres of texts and contexts. Using story and theatre, Neighorhood Bridges attempts to reimagine classrooms as spaces for students to experiment with experiences through playing with words, ideas, and each other. In particular, I explore how these sixth-graders successfully transformed an oral (re)telling of Hermynia Zur Mühlen's story "The Servant" into a play performed in front of schoolmates and family members. Using ideas of counternarrative (e.g., Delgado, 1989) and contexts of identity and production, I also trace and theorize the contested participation of one student, Da'uud, who wasn't at the performance because he had declared their work "too boring now." Thinking with "The Servant" highlighted the intertwined success and mess of the students' individual and collective labor: how students worked--or did not or could not--to become storytellers of their own lives who changed stories and communicated meaning; how they collaborated or did not; and how they utilized tools to (re)tell stories. The success of a Bridges classroom requires risk; humor and imagination; deep listening and abilities to (re)tell stories; student production and ownership of stories and knowledge; and play as both noun and verb. Telling stories such as these as blurred translators in teaching and research can enable the collaborative pedagogical work of creating new--albeit messy and always ongoing--antioppressive educational storylines.Item These Are Stories About Our Bodies: Collective Memory Work and the Pedagogical Imaginaries of Our Teacher Bodies(2016-06) Stutelberg, ErinMuch of the current work on bodies in schools and classrooms is, appropriately, focused on a critical examination of the docile bodies (Foucault, 1995) of students and the violence inflicted on them. But teachers’ bodies are also subjected to surveillance, management, and control by larger systems of power, and thus get marked, erased, and constructed in precarious and oppressive ways. These systems harness teachers’ bodies to normalizing narratives of individualism, the hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, and the Cartesian mind/body binary. As a result, teachers are left feeling disembodied, and yet, our teacher bodies—discursively and materially—still “come up” in the classroom, often in unsettling, painful, or surprising ways. Our memories of our teacher bodies become stories that we use to tell ourselves into existence and they continually shape our pedagogies, practices, and relationships with students. In this study, eight beginning women English teachers and I took up a feminist post-structuralist methodology called collective memory work (Haug, 1987, 1999; Davies & Gannon, 2006) to access, analyze, theorize, and challenge our memories of our teacher bodies. Through our analyses of these memories we critically engaged with theories of teaching and learning and identified and (de)constructed narratives of race, gender, sexuality, and age that are reproduced in our classrooms every day. This study reveals how, if teachers are asked to engage in research that is collective, critical, and participatory, we build new pedagogical imaginaries through which we can learn from our own bodies and the bodies of our students.