Jen Scott Curwood

Five years ago, I began teaching a digital poetry unit in my 10th grade English classes, in collaboration with my school’s library media specialist, Lora Cowell.  With iPoetry, students engaged in a process of multimodal composition where they integrated still images or video with music, voiceovers, text, and transitions.

In the recent issue of the International Journal of Learning and Media, Damiana Gibbons and I worked together to analyze one student’s digital poem.  Drawing on the work of Glynda Hull, Andrew Burn, and others, Damiana explains (and shows) the process of multimodal microanalysis.  As a graduate student, I’ve come to appreciate when authors explicitly present their methodology and walk the reader through their analytical process.  (In the field of literacy education, Karen Wohlwend’s work is an excellent example!)  In this paper, we tried to do the same.

I’m really grateful that my former student, Tommy Nouansacksy, gave us permission to analyze his work and to use his real name.  Tommy is in college now and an avid consumer and producer of social media.  Intentionally or not, he’s a comedian, an activist, and a role model.  (Case in point: a recent YouTube video where Tommy’s promoting the Trevor Project).

I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who gave us critical, formative, and insightful feedback.  Their comments led to an substantial revision of the theoretical framework and prompted us to draw on more work related to race and sexuality.  I know that reviewing journal articles can be a time-consuming process, but I think that it is an invaluable one.

Tommy’s digital poem is available on the IJLM website, but it skips sometimes.  I’ll share it here too.  In this poem, Tommy is responding to the work of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes to describe his America.

I, Too, Sing America by Tommy Nouansacksy from Jen Scott Curwood on Vimeo.

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