Search

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 explores roleplaying across contexts--in school, after school, in teacher education, and in K-12 settings. The authors reflect on our experiences using humanizing methods to critically investigate roleplaying with youth.

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 posthuman research? Through a posthuman framework, we position noise as an analytical tool for exploring and unveiling more-than-human relations. We then draw parallels between posthuman qualitative research into sound (via noise) and the ideological foundation of experimental music, a musical tradition deeply invested in working with sound as an agentic actor. Within this alignment, we propose using graphic scores to transcribe sonic data without reinscribing humanist research aims. To illustrate, we provide a micro-analysis of preservice teachers engaged in a role-playing game activity and uncover the ways sound asserts its agency within learning ecologies.

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 explanatory design approach (quant: topic modeling; qual: multimodal content analysis) to examine how users describe their own practices as well as top posts (more than 25,000 likes, comments and reblogs) in the first month of the collective reading of the novel. Findings: The authors found that the serialization of "Dracula" made space for "wandering reading practices" (Chavez, 2010) relevant to this interpretive community on Tumblr. The quantitative methods determined specific affective, intertextual and serialized aspects of textual play that were salient to readers. In top posts themselves, the authors saw readers creating metaleptic content imagining characters like the protagonist Jonathan in other novels or contexts, as well as processing and playing with their collective emotional responses toward characters. Additionally, readers used irony or satire through multimodal compositions to create literary arguments. Originality/value: Playfully analyzing literature together through intertextual connections and multimodal memes has the potential to be both emotionally resonant, culturally relevant and supportive of literary interpretive practices. Based on these findings, the authors provide suggestions for teachers working to embrace interpretive play in formal learning spaces.

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 high school English classroom that intentionally brought together academic and fandom practices. We listened to how affective encounters with the popular text "Grey's Anatomy" unfolded across the class, with a particular focus on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) focal students' experiences. We found derision and dismissal of certain texts and experiences by peers (undergirded by dominant narratives about fandom and literary taste) dampened affective resonance. All the same, collective intensities were sustained through respectful discourse between fans and potential fans as well as BIPOC women's fugitive literacy practices resisting dampening practices of White students.

When Miss O'Brien looked at me ... what did she see that caused her to turn away? What did she see? --WALTER DEAN MEYERS, MONSTER Juelz, an eighth-grade student studying [...]

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 indexicality. Findings: The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value: This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

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 qualitative research methods of three high school teachers' dialogic assessment sessions with individual students to investigate how these teachers both assessed and taught literary reading moves as they observed and supported the students' writing. An expanded version of Rainey's (2017) scheme for coding literary reading practices was used. Findings: The three teachers varied in the range and extent of literary reading practices they taught and supported. The practices that they most commonly modeled or otherwise supported were making claims, seeking patterns and articulating puzzles. The variation we observed in their literary reading practices may be attributed to institutional characteristics of the teachers' contexts. Research limitations/implications: This study illustrates how the concept of prolepsis can be productively used as a lens through which to understand teachers' instructional choices. Practical implications: The descriptive findings show how individualized coaching of students' writing about literature can also support literary reading. Teachers of English need not worry that they have to choose between teaching writing and teaching reading. Originality/value: This study presents dialogic assessment as a useful way to guide students through the writing process and literary interpretation simultaneously.

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 utopian futures. Using a queer theory framework, the authors consider how youth performed disidentifications and queer futurity. Design/methodology/approach: This study is a discourse analysis of approximately 85 hours of audio collected over one year. Findings: Youth engaged in deconstructive critique, disidentifications and queer futurity in powerful enactments of critical literacies that involved simultaneous resistance, subversion, imagination and hope as youth envisioned queer utopian world-building through their fantasy storytelling. Youth acknowledged the injustice of the present while radically envisioning a utopian future. Originality/value: This study offers an empirical grounding for critical literacies centered in queer theory and explores how youth engage with critical literacies in collaboratively co-authored texts. The authors argue that queering critical literacies potentially moves beyond deconstructive critique while simultaneously opening spaces for resistance, imagination and utopian world-making through linguistic and narrative-based tools.

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, by allowing teachers to vary their support for student writers based on students' unique needs. These examples also suggest that teachers' epistemologies for writing instruction can influence how they practice dialogic writing assessment. The authors conclude with a discussion of how dynamic and responsive scaffolding can support an equity-focused model for teaching academic writing and how teachers' expertise may be a factor in how they apply dialogic writing assessment.

Teaching writing is hard, even for veteran writing teachers. We know how to structure writing conferences so that students engage with ideas, vocalize areas for improvement, and note next steps [...]

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 around language use in collectively owned online spaces and the difficulty of shifting the leading discourse when teachers step back and allow students to drive digital discussions.

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 practices. Using methods of collaboratively aligning equity-focused questions, subsequent instructional designs, and the perception of consequences by various participants to audit the commitment to equity across the design, action, analysis, and reflection, the findings follow the consequences of design choices as conceptualized by both teacher-researchers and focal BIPOC youth. We found that some equity trails—particularly ones that privileged shorter timespans linked with institutional assessments—conflicted with equity trails restructuring larger ecological systems aiming to transform fandoms or disciplines. We suggest that design researchers must center conceptions of power when telling research stories making visible the various and divergent ways participants chase after equity together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]