Teri Holbrook

Set in Stone or Set in Motion?: Multimodal and Digital Writing with Preservice English Teachers.

This study examines the literacy practices of pre-service English teachers engaged in multimodal and digital composing in a writing methods course designed to support both print-based and digital and/or multimodal composition practices. By examining the struggles and resistances of pre-service English teachers as they adapted print-based writing processes to multimodal or digital compositions, the researchers hope to identify strategies, practices, and approaches that will help pre-service teachers develop new writing pedagogies.

Collage as Analysis Remixing in the Crisis of Doubt

In this article, the authors take up the question of what they do when they do analysis in post-qualitative research contexts. Working as a/r/tographers who see their artist/researcher/teacher practices as simultaneous and non-hierarchical, they use theory, writing, and collaging to think beyond work produced by “positivist, scientific storytellers.” Art-making within inquiry becomes a rigorous articulation process through which sense (rather than meaning) is tentatively fabricated. The article includes a three-part assemblage that conveys how the authors articulate thought through pieced fragments of data in ongoing movements of hoarding, mustering, and folding, the aim of which is not to conclude with answers but to pause, gather energy, and invite comments until questions spur them on again.

An Ability Traitor at Work: A Treasonous Call to Subvert Writing From Within

In questioning conventional qualitative research methods, St. Pierre asked, “What else might writing do except mean?” The author answers, it oppresses. Co-opting the race traitor figurative, she calls on qualitative researchers to become “ability traitors” who interrogate how a valuable coinage of their trade—the written word—is used to rank and categorize individuals with troubling effects. In this article, she commits three betrayals: (a) multigenre writing that undermines the authoritative text; (b) assemblage as a method of analysis that deprivileges the written word; and(c) a gesture toward a dis/ comfort text intended to take up Lather’s example of challenging the “usual ways of making sense”. In committing these betrayals, the author articulates her “traitorous agenda” designed to interrogate assumptions about inquiry, power, equity, and writing as practice-as-usual.

Equitable intent: reflections on Universal Design in education as an ethic of care

Teacher educators often stress caring as a vital part of professional practice. However, the intentional enacting of an ethic of care in a teacher preparation program is a nuanced and unobvious process. This reflective self‐study explores how two literacy instructors tried to demonstrate an ethic of care in a Language Arts methods course, a site where issues of equity are complicated by dominant and often exclusionary definitions of literacy within a larger, standards‐based climate. Seeking to generate conversations about equity in literacy education while ‘caring for’ our students, we applied developing educational principles of Universal Design. In this paper, we discuss the complicated considerations encountered as we integrated inclusive literacy practices within an ethic of care while tending to the pedagogical needs of pre‐service literacy teachers.

Poetic Distillation: Artistic Transcription Analysis in Autoethnographic Literacy Research

As artists and critical literacy scholars, we continually seek out methods that more clearly and accurately reflect not only a way to analyze data, but an analysis that highlighted both the critical and the aesthetic for purposes of expanding and disrupting our commonplace notions of literacy, literacy teaching, and literacy research. We see poetically informed analysis – an area in arts-based qualitative educational research that uses the affordances of poetry to express interpretations of data. Our focus on the arts in literacy research extends beyond their use as objects of study or forms of representation; we seek to use artistic methods in the very analysis of data. To that end, we employ found poetry as an analytic method, creating poetic transcriptions – a process of reading across transcripts to locate key phrasing and recurring motifs. The significance of poetic transcription lay in its metaphoric and imagistic features that permit us to tap into both our literacy and artistic imaginations. Our goal is not to create poetry from our data or to claim ourselves as poets. Instead, we draw upon what we see as poetic impulses in spoken language to look at data through the beginner’s eyes that the arts can make possible.