Jacqueline Bach

Freedom, physicality, friendship and feeling: aspects of children's spirituality expressed through the choral reading of poetry

Reading and discussing poetry with spiritual themes can play a major role in childrens spiritual development. The communal, oral recitation of poetry has been a means of spiritual expression in many faith traditions. How would children respond to such a time‐honoured oral group experience with poetry? What might it reveal about their spirituality? These were the questions that prompted a qualitative study involving young people in the choral reading of poetry with spiritual themes. Participants were 19 students in a sixth‐grade classroom. We held three separate sessions with the class, each focusing on an aspect of childrens spirituality: relationship with the self and others, relationship with the natural world, and relationship with a reality beyond the material world. Findings indicate that the choral‐reading experience did provide the children an opportunity to express their spirituality, but in ways we did not anticipate. It was not the content of the poems that they pointed to as providing means for their spiritual expression, but rather aspects of the process of choral reading: freedom in interpretation, physicality in interpretation; a sense of friendship, of a safe, interpretive community; and the opportunity to express their ‘feelings’, their emotions.

How teachers negotiate the use of reality television in their pedagogy

While the integration of popular culture into classroom practices is often characterized as superficial, this article proposes that reality television game shows, such as Kid nation, The amazing race and Project runway, can provide educators with ideas for designing authentic activities based on the challenges carried out in these programmes. In these shows, contestants are asked to produce useful products and solutions to actual problems. These shows, which combine aspects from traditional game shows, reality shows and sporting events, can redefine the ways in which educators infuse popular culture into their pedagogical practices. Based on a fourth-grade unit on government, this article examines how two teachers incorporated aspects of reality television into their teaching and how their students responded to these lessons. The author concludes with a discussion of how teachers might negotiate the use of these shows in their practice.

Exploring Queer Pedagogies in the College-Level YA Literature Course.

ABSTRACT One place to start understanding how pre-service teachers learn about contemporary young adult (YA) literature, especially those works that feature lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) and gender identity themes and characters, is through an examination of the YA literature course – a course many pre-service teachers take as part of their teacher certification programs in the USA. In this article, I turn to queer pedagogy to explore the syllabi of 67 college-level YA literature courses in order to address the question: ‘How do young adult literature courses incorporate the growing body of high-quality young adult literature that features LGBTQ and gender variant themes and characters?’ Findings include how the YA literature field might be normalizing, or standardizing through repeated approaches, what it means to teach a text and in turn shape future teachers’ decisions on how a text is incorporated into a curriculum.

Are You Here to Tell a Story

Reality television shows, with their claims to represent real-life experiences, have a bad reputation. They are accused of being scripted and therefore not really real, of negatively impacting the business of television because they cost less to produce than other shows, and of depicting extreme examples of human behavior. Since all texts, whatever their truth-claims, are grounded in specific ideologies, educational researchers must pay attention to how these films and television shows are constructed and for what purposes.

Feel these words: writing in the lives of urban youth

Meet The Writers – Jig, Crazy, TeTe, Mekanism, Robbie, Marta, Patricia, José, and Dave – adolescents from Chicago whose out-of-school literacy practices Susan Weinstein explores in her book Feel These Words: Writing in the Lives of Urban Youth. In this two-year ethnographic study conducted in school hallways, online chat rooms, homes, and in one case, a street corner, Weinstein examines these adolescents’ writings which were created in spaces outside of the classroom. Noting that each of her participants is either African-American or Latina/o, comes from low-income families, and struggles with using standard English in conversation and schoolwork, Weinstein interrogates those all too common representations by politicians, the media, and those within the school system that these qualities are somehow preventing these adolescents from achieving middle-class status. Their writings exhibit their love of language and intellectual pursuits – writings, which are themselves marginalized in much the same way The Writers find themselves. Weinstein’s book provides another way of reading their words by illuminating their complex relationships with their identities, their communities, and society at large. Organized into eight chapters, whose titles are taken from her participants’ words and hers, Weinstein deftly moves back and forth between close examinations of The Writers’ discourse practices and the larger context which frames them. After introducing readers to each of her nine participants (four of them, Jig, Mekanism, Crazy, and TeTe, have formed their own rap crew – The Maniacs, and Weinstein sometimes refers to them as a separate group), Weinstein conducts the tremendous work of documenting not only their worlds but also the outside forces that have influenced the schools and communities in which they live. Weinstein’s relationship to her participants is a multilayered one – she is their teacher at La Juventud, an alternative school which encourages a more informal, but no less challenging, relationship between students and teachers. She is a researcher who records and writes up her field notes constantly and is rarely without her tape recorder. She is a writer, and while she admittedly identifies more so with academic writers, she experiences exhilaration when she reads a poem of hers aloud at a poetry reading at a local bar. She reflects in her first chapter titled “I am me, but what am I?,” “I enjoyed the individual writing of my poem, yes, but even more, I liked the performance, the response, and the thrill of jumping in” (12) as she begins to experience some of what The Writers share. Before she returns to The Writers, she first examines in the second chapter “You never let me speak: power, language, and learning,” the larger system(s) in which her participants negotiate. She speaks first to the US educational system’s attempts to recognize, control, and change their language; she analyzes the Ebonics debate International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 25, No. 2, March 2012, 205–215