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.

Check out the new online version of the Wisconsin English Journal!  For over 50 years, the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English has published this fabulous resource.  Last year, when the University of Wisconsin – Madison editorial team took over, we sought to update and expand the journal.  As part of our task, we’re also working to digitize and upload past journal issues, so they’re all housed in one location.

The journal will continue to be published twice a year, in spring and in fall.  We’ve added some regular columns, including Views from the Field by Assistant Professor Catherine Compton-Lilly, The New Adventures of Old Literature by Assistant Professor Dawnene Hassett, and Making Research Relevant by me and my fellow assistant editor Jessica Gallo.  In each issue, we will profile an outstanding secondary English teacher and we will feature a guest column on digital literacy.  If you’re interested in submitting an article for peer review, the deadline for the Fall 2010 issue is August 1.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to attend the annual conference of United Kingdom Literacy Association. I met some wonderful people, and it was so exciting to hear about the research happening in the UK and Australia. Mary Louise Gomez, Melissa Schieble, Dawnene Hassett, and I also have an article out in the most recent issue of Literacy, published by UKLA. We drew on Melissa’s research with pre-service teachers’ and adolescents’ use of Moodle, an open-source, web-based software, to theorize how their meaning making processes embody distributed cognition. Entitled Technology, Learning, and Instruction: Distributed Cognition in the Secondary English Classroom, the article examines how three key elements function as distributed tools to facilitate literacy learning and critical thinking around the graphic novel American Born Chinese.

I’m happy to share that Dawnene Hassett and I have an article in the December 2009 issue of The Reading Teacher entitled “Theories and Practices of Multimodal Education: Instructional Dynamics of Picture Books and Primary Classrooms.”  I’m lucky enough to have Dawnene as my advisor, and this paper draws from our research in K-3 classrooms over the past several years.  Next week, we will give a talk on this research at the National Reading Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Check out the Wisconsin English Journal, now housed at the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.  A publication of the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English, it was founded in 1959.  On the UW-River Falls website, some of the article titles from a half-century ago still sound relevant today: “How to Help Students Write Better,” “Teaching Critical Thinking,” and “A New Method of Teacher Certification.”

The Wisconsin English Journal publishes reports of language and literacy research, critical reflections on teaching, descriptions of effective teaching methods and instructional tools, profiles of English programs and outstanding English teachers, book reviews, policy statements, conference proceedings, and columns related to young adult literature, student diversity, and current literacy scholarship.

Interested in contributing as an author or serving as a reviewer?  See the  guidelines on our website, and contact me or Jess Gallo with any questions.  Look for our next issue in spring 2010!

In April, Todd Lilly and I will be giving a talk at the Expanding Literacy Studies conference entitled, “Remixing Rhetoric: What’s Old about New Literacies?”  I created a Wordle, using the abstract of our proposal.  Todd joked that perhaps we should do some installation art or a performance piece instead of a traditional, PowerPoint-driven talk.  Check it out:

And Damiana Gibbons and I recently put in a proposal for the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s annual conference.  We’re talking about a concept that we’ve developed called “dynamic noise” about how youth use digital media to push back against the cultural ideologies that often work to marginalize or silence their voices.  Here’s the Wordle of it:

Cool, huh?