Kari-Lynn Winters

From image to ideology: analysing shifting identity positions of marginalized youth across the cultural sites of video production

In this article, we make visible the ways youth position themselves in and through the cultural sites of video production. Drawing on data from a three-year case study of the multiple literacy practices of youth in an alternative secondary school, we use visual cultural methodology and theories of subject positioning and embodiment to analyse two student-produced videos, illustrating how youth play with multimodal discursive and material resources to inscribe their shifting subject positions. The findings illustrate how otherwise marginalized students negotiate and represent complex, and sometimes contradictory, identity positions tied to both local and larger cultural contexts and ideologies, and suggest new questions and possibilities for multimodal analysis and pedagogy.

Fracturing Writing Spaces

In this paper, we explore the affordances of literature-based, arts-infused and digital media processes for students, as multimodal practices take centre stage in an English Language Arts unit on fractured fairy tales. The study takes up the challenge of addressing multimodal literacy instruction and research in ways that utilize a range of modalities. Incorporating the perspectives and multimodal texts of five students, Alvin, Adamma, Emmett, Layla and Yacoub, we highlight the highly supportive writing environment made possible for these fifth grade learners. The oral, embodied, visual, and written group explorations of the language of fairy tales, story and parody, found in fractured fairy tales, afforded the students numerous, rich opportunities to explore and experiment with language, which ultimately led to the production of individual fractured fairy tales written with a level of sophistication their teacher had not previously seen in their writing.

Authored assemblages in a digital world: Illustrations of a child’s online social, critical and semiotic meaning-making

Drawing on case illustrations of a six-year-old child as he ‘assembles’ a digital world using Webkinz™, this paper proposes an approach that researchers and educators might use to understand, analyse and critique multimodality. This multidisciplinary theoretical framework integrates new literacies, social semiotics and critical literacy perspectives. Data were collected during a broader three-week case study via a side-shadowing interview technique (McClay and Mackey, 2009), where the first author sat next to the child, making detailed research notes, interviewing him and taking screenshots of his digital productions. The findings suggest that authorship is rarely linear as authors continually remix, layer, embed and inter-animate semiotic resources as they assemble their sociocultural worlds and critical positions within these worlds.

Shifting identities, literacy, and a/r/t/ography: Exploring an educational theatre company

This article explores an emerging educational theatre company in Vancouver, British Columbia by investigating how the creators embrace their multiple roles as artists, researchers, and teachers in their effort to promote literacy in schools. The authors begin by exploring notions of identity within an a/r/tographic framework. They then define their understanding and usage of a/r/tography—a practitioner-based methodology that emphasizes living inquiry and reflective practice. They conclude with a dramatized dialogue about the process of researching, creating, and producing two touring theatre shows about literacy for young children. Using a/r/tography as a methodology allowed the authors of this paper to observe and pay close attention to the research data while still honoring the creative process of making theatre.

Singing is a Celebration of Language: Using Music to Enhance Young Children’s Vocabularies

Music engages children in language learning, offering them opportunities to understand and express their ideas and communicate with others in ways that go beyond words. This article, based on two ethnographically-framed studies and the use of two real-life vignettes, demonstrates how singing and musical experiences (e.g., composition, soundscapes, musical improvisation) have the power to enhance children’s lexical acquisition and semantic knowledge at various levels of development. Results demonstrate that singing and musical experiences, whether biologically or socially shaped, provide opportunities to celebrate language and enhance young children’s vocabulary building.

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).

Debra Hundert McLauchlan, 1951–2016

The passing of Debra Hundert McLauchlan has left a giant space in the international educational world of drama and theatre. She was a force to be reckoned with, an advocate for arts education in the broadest sense—schools, universities, theatre groups, government—and always with the students front and center. She was a tireless worker for drama and theatre in and out of schools; a committed and dedicated teacher with both her secondary and university students; a respected, indeed cherished, colleague; and a special friend. As well, Debra played a significant role in different community-based partnerships, including the Carousel Players, the St. Catharines Museum, Shaw Festival, Theatre Ontario, and the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. Debra had taught drama in high school for almost fifteen years, directing and guiding more than sixty student productions, including several student-generated works. It was during her graduate courses at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, beginning in 1993, that I began to notice her strengths in my courses in the arts in education and drama, and from those first days, I recognized her love of her subject and her belief in her students. She was extremely successful in her studies, and I then became her graduate advisor for her Ph.D. thesis. We met frequently during the next few years, Debra journeying by bus from St. Catharines to Toronto. Her thesis was based on her years of working with her drama students, supported by her studies and her readings. It was a pleasure working with her, developing her personal narrative, discussing new research and exploring different authors in her field, as well as in education in general. I learned so much from these Debra McLauchlan. Photo courtesy of Brock University.

Imperfect/I’m perfect: bodies/embodiment in post-secondary and elementary settings

ABSTRACT Using researched perspectives of bodies and embodiment, alongside dramatic structures, where bodies are foregrounded, this article looks closely at bodies and embodiment inside of school settings. Specifically, it investigates a community in Southern Ontario and the perceived, affective, relational, and critical ways that study participants story their identities about their bodies. Findings suggest that body image itself (i.e. how youth perceive their bodies) and embodiment (i.e. how youth use their bodies for communication and learning) are vital but sometimes invisible topics in today’s school settings, where bodies are continually interpreted, admired, shamed, moved, rejected, and positioned. Though drama and other subjects like the arts focus on embodied ways of knowing and offer unique opportunities for learning, they can also hold unique challenges in school settings.