Amy Petersen Jensen

Re)imagining Literacy and Teacher Preparation Through Collaboration

This article reports the outcomes of the first 3 years of an ongoing participatory action research (PAR) project that brought together literacy and content-area teacher educators. The purpose of our collaboration was two-fold: (a) to develop shared understandings or theories related to literacy and the place of literacy instruction in content-area classrooms, and (b) to make changes to our work with preservice teachers in order to prepare them to support adolescents’ content learning and discipline-specific literacy development. The findings reveal that the collaborative activities allowed participants to embrace broad notions of text and literacy that are useful in making sense of disciplinary aims and pedagogy. Furthermore, as teacher educators came to shift their thinking about literacy and disciplinary learning and teaching, their work with preservice teachers changed. Implications for future collaborative activities to promote content-area literacy are discussed.

Seeking renewal, finding community: participatory action research in teacher education

This narrative study describes the experiences of a group of teacher educators as they worked together in a collaborative research activity investigating theories of literacy and the preparation of secondary teachers. The collaboration was organized around the precepts associated with participatory action research (PAR). After four years of collaboration, the narratives of the members of the group revealed (a) changes to the practices and identities of the participants, (b) how the group formed a community, and (c) the ways in which the institution supported the work of the group. Organizing collaborative activities around PAR holds promise to not only produce quality research, but to support the improvement of teacher preparation programs and the development of teacher educators. However, this work requires institutional support that fosters collaborative work without mandating either collaborations or outcomes.

Digital culture, and the viewing/participating pre-service teacher: (re)envisioning theatre teacher training for a social media culture

This paper explores how our ‘digital world’ shapes the ways that young people want to be engaged and how those desires subsequently shape academic theatre spaces. The paper uses artefacts developed in a university classroom to demonstrate that pre-service theatre educators can create educational materials that interrogate and deploy multiple media forms to explore, play with, re-combine and re-produce those multimedia images for and with their students. It also explores the notion of consumption as a means of production and argues that educators should aid young people to acquire new agency and power through theatre education processes that provide opportunities to reinterpret and appropriate popular digital culture as a means of understanding. To demonstrate the possibilities of this argument, I document and explore examples of pre-service theatre teachers who are practicing these ‘processes of utilization’ with the young people they teach in educational theatre settings. Specifically I attempt to re-envision the acts of viewing and participation that occur in educational theatre settings as opportunities for teachers and their students to actively engage in the nuances of (digital) culture at large.

Convergence Culture, Learning, and Participatory Youth Theatre Performance

This article discusses the contemporary idea of convergence culture as it relates to 21st century productions for and with young audiences in professional youth theatre spaces. The author posits that new forms of performativity accompany convergence culture and provide opportunities for new types of learning and engagement in professional youth theatre spaces. The article also explores the ways that spectators constantly relocate themselves between live spaces and technology spaces in their daily lives, and asserts that this migration between spaces produces a set of new aesthetic possibilities for youth theatres that are infused with ideas related to convergence.

Three decade drama/theatre and (for/with/by/about) youth crowd-sourced timeline

What events, patterns, or people have shaped the field or marked its milestones since Youth Theatre Journal’s (YTJ’s) first issue in 1986? We put the call out to YTJ readers, this rich array of ent...

A technological, pedagogical, arts knowledge framework

ABSTRACT This article invites media arts and technology educators to find synergies in their classroom curriculum and practice. Encouraging the use of the National Media Arts Standards it summons teachers to develop a useful framework for technological practice that utilizes arts knowledge and pedagogies.

Theatre Teacher Beliefs About Quality Practice in the Secondary Theatre Classroom: An Ethnographic Study

The act of teaching theatre, whether in the classroom, the studio, the shop, or on the stage, can seem fleeting. The essence of a really good theatre teacher might even be indescribable to most. As preservice theatre teacher educators at two large universities in the Western United States, this fact has nagged us. We want to be able to identify what quality practice is to the preservice teachers we teach and supervise. Furthermore, we want to be able to describe quality theatre education practice to ourselves, but like other researchers, we have found that there are few definite answers regarding what quality practice in a theatre classroom looks like. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to discover the quality practices that teachers espoused and embodied.

Digital Storytelling Pedagogies, Processes and Performances: Two Case Studies

This chapter explores the ways that faculty from Brigham Young University and the University of Texas at Austin are inviting students to infuse digital technologies into theatre processes, pedagogies, and performances. It describes the ways that faculty and students can creatively and critically engage with new media forms in drama/theatre settings. It also explores the shifting nature of drama pedagogy and performance as those new media forms influence it. The pedagogical and performance practice described is grounded in a belief that the act of sharing and receiving stories is a critical form of pedagogy through which participants can actively develop new understandings of self, other and society together as they create, share and receive. The chapter identifies methodological approaches teachers and facilitators might use to engage students at the intersections between theatre, performance and digital media forms. It also outlines ways that theatre educators and their students can explore, play with, re-combine and produce digital stories for creative and educational purposes within performance environments.

Special Issue on Theatre, Multimodality, and Digital Media

The infusion of digital media (social networking, mobile culture, digital remix, hyperlinked multimodal content, etc.) into nearly every facet of our social, cultural, and educational lives requires that those concerned with young people begin to consider how interactions with those digital tools might also shape their minds and bodies. Prominent educators (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000; Gee 2000; Kress 2000) assert that to function in contemporary social worlds, young people must make use of multimodal opportunities. In other words, they must have the ability to simultaneously encounter and express ideas through a wide range of meaning-making and bearing systems—especially systems with cultural currency, like digital systems. The prevalence of new media platforms and accompanying media content now shapes the way individuals interact with each other and with that content. One’s ability to actively participate in these multimedia environments equates social, economic, and cultural capital for young people. These new conditions of our world allow young people to view, use, and engage immediately with media content created by peers, celebrities, and other producers of popular culture. While colleagues in the United Kingdom (Carroll 2004; Carroll, Anderson, and Cameron 2006; Haseman 2004; O’Toole and Dunn 2008) have begun to form a substantial body of work devoted to the intersection of youth theatre and media, there is very little research being done on this important topic in the United States. To this end, this special issue of the Youth Theatre Journal begins to examine the ways that youth theatre practitioners and educators might engage with multimodalities necessary to explore digital media content in traditional and nontraditional education settings and professional youth theatres. Two articles examine how educators can explore multimodal concerns within educational environments. In “Digital Drama—Toolkits, Dilemmas, and Preferences,” Susan Davis explores the possibilities of using applied theatre techniques in combination with information and communications technologies to help drama students develop dramaspecific knowledge, social and relational skills, and reflective practice. Davis encourages educators to familiarize themselves with the concerns of digital culture and asserts that “there are opportunities for drama educators to explore creative processes that are familiar to [students] within these virtual spaces.” Gustave J. Weltsek and Anne Ociepka consider ways that teacher-candidates construct and represent their own sociocultural understandings using a variety of visual modes to convey their personal and social understandings of a real-world event. Their article “Reading the Maps of Meaning Within Drama: Visible Discourse(s), Multimodal Semiotics, and Analogous Reflection in Applied Theatre Inquiry” utilizes critical discourse