Diane R. Collier

“I'm just trying to be tough, okay”: Masculine performances of everyday practices

Everyday cultural resources that originate outside school offer possibilities for multimodal creativity and identity play, as children consume, transform and produce multimodal texts. In this study, Kyle, a boy in elementary school, fluidly performed social identities and engaged in playful and parodic rescripting of identities and resources from everyday culture, such as professional wrestling and rap music. In this paper, I posit that (1) Kyle and his family understood and experienced professional wrestling in contradictory ways as both taboo and appealing, (2) Kyle’s deep knowledge of the genre of professional wrestling as performative text allowed him to use it in playful and parodic ways, (3) this playful approach to wrestling and other masculine identities, made available through Kyle’s culture, constitutes a form of improvisation and can be explained as a form of masculine melodrama and (4) the role of audiences is key in the reflexive performance of masculine identities.

Journey to Becoming a Writer: Review of Research about Children’s Identities as Writers

The beginning years of school are crucial to children’s early development as writers. As children learn to write, they transform themselves. This review of literature focuses on children’s journeys to becoming writers through a range of qualitative research studies. These studies identify how children who are beginning to write in extended ways and to construct their identities as writers are often constrained in classroom contexts, particularly within a larger climate of standardized assessment. The ways in which writing practices (including classroom relationships and assessment practices) contribute to children’s development as writers and possibilities for transformed practice are discussed.

Relocalizing wrestler: performing texts across time and space

In this paper, I examine the textmaking potentials of the popular cultural resources of professional wrestling, including its modes of textual expression, as performed by Kyle, a boy in the middle years of elementary school. Kyle remixed wrestling, and its performative affordances, style and textmaking potentials across time and space. Using a spiral as metaphor, I explore how practices, texts and identities travel across particular moments by tracing the trajectory of a textual resource in new texts that Kyle made. I focus on how hybrid textmaking practices can be viewed as productive, creative and playful through Pennycooks concept of relocalization, which recognizes the roles of time and place in hybrid forms. This examination of textmaking and popular culture points to transformative possibilities in educational practice.

Talking, wrestling, and recycling: an investigation of three analytic approaches to qualitative data in education research

This article is a product of qualitative analyses followed by a collaboration and conversation amongst critical friends. Three methodologies (social semiotic/sociocultural, ethnomethodology, and rhizomatic analysis) were used to analyze the same piece of interview data. An inquiry into the various characteristics, commonalities, and distinctions of these diverse approaches to analysis was then undertaken through extended conversations. Authors worked through the kinds of questions that could be asked and the answers that might be possible given particular theoretical and methodological stances and choices. Analysis of the ensuing inquiry suggests the possibility of deeper reflexivity and new understandings in talking across paradigms. Struggles over representation and compromises in the process created tensions and questions that could not be easily resolved.

The Matter of the Stick: Storying/(Re)Storying Children's Literacies in the Forest.

Childrens intra-actions with the natural world offer an important lens to revisit notions of literacies. They allow for a decentring of humans – here children – as actors. Also, forest schools and nature-based learning programmes are increasingly erupting across North America, although more commonplace in Europe for a longer period. In this presentation of our research, we feature a storying/(re)storying of data from a yearlong research study of childrens entanglements with the forest as a more-than-human world. We ask what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with sticks, not separate from, but in relation to sticks? Eight preschool children, two educators and two researchers ventured into the forest twice a week over the course of a year, documenting their interactions with a mosaic of data generation tools, such as notebooks, iPads, Go-Pro cameras. The forest offered diverse materials that provoked “thing-matter-energy- child-assemblages” that were significant for the childrens play and literacy framing. Through post-humanist theorizing, we have paid particular attention to the stick within the childrens forest play and illustrate the ways in which the stick was entangled with children’s bodies, relations, identities and discourses. The stick was a catalyst, a friend, a momentary and changing text, an agentic force acting relationally with childrens play and stories. The post humanism storying/(re)storying of the childrens encounters in the forest with sticks invites infinite possibilities for literacy teaching and learning. How might educators foster such relations, enquiring with and alongside children with an openness toward what the sticks (forests) might teach us?

I wish I was a lion a puppy: a multimodal view of writing process assessment

ABSTRACT At the same time that creativity, play, and inquiry are receiving special focus in academic, professional, and educational settings, mandated assessments have never been more prominent, despite public debates that question the value of such testing. In the context of these apparently contradictory developments in literacy education, as a “telling case”, we explore writing as a strand within the multimodal compositional processes of one boy in one classroom during a three-day mandated writing assessment that was also a performance-based and process-oriented assessment. There are two primary areas of interest here: (1) what is made visible when one examines processes more closely, in an ethnographic and observational fashion, and (2) what a multimodal understanding of compositional processes offers, especially in terms of the learning that happens across modes of expression.

‘I was kind of teaching myself’: teachers’ conversations about social justice and teaching for change

This article shares teachers’ conversations within teacher inquiry groups and considers how this reflective approach has potential for transforming teachers’ practices. Conversations took place at the early stages of a longer teacher inquiry project and centred on the critical interrogation of social justice-oriented children’s literature. These conversations served as a forum to help teacher professional learning communities and to reconcile understandings about social justice, action and agency within larger political and cultural forums of teaching. The teacher inquiry sessions shared in this paper explore teachers’ beginning struggles with conceptualizations of social justice, and the teacher’s role in imparting values to students. Teacher participants imparted their experience and practice as they negotiated their own understanding and implementation of social justice education in their schools. The teacher inquiry groups provided a needed supportive space where classroom teachers’ struggles were shared alongside their beliefs and pedagogical approaches so that a social justice agenda could be achieved.

Developing TPACK of university faculty through technology leadership roles

This paper reports on a study that explored how faculty who take on technology leadership roles developed TPACK knowledge and built capacity for technology-enhanced teaching. The study was the second phase of a professional development initiative, called the Digital Pedagogies Collaboration, in a Faculty of Education. Four faculty, who had participated in technology workshops, volunteered to conduct workshops on technologies they had integrated into their own instruction. A qualitative case study design was used and data included pre- and post- interviews, videotaped technology workshops, and workshop artifacts. Findings show that taking on a leadership role as a workshop facilitator improved faculty members’ knowledge and skills around teaching with technology (TPACK). Moreover, the TPACK-based Professional Learning Design Model (TPLDM) was useful for designing content- centric workshops and the Faculty as Technology Leaders was a component that extended the TPACK Leadership Theory of Action Model (Thomas, Herring, Redmond, & Smaldino, 2013).