As an educator, it was an incredible experience to closely collaborate with my colleague.  Lora’s expertise was instrumental as our students to engage in multimodal composition, and her energy and encouragement helped me develop my digital literacy skills. I really think that if we want to implement technology in schools, we need to value this kind of ongoing, hands-on, collaborative professional development.

I have previously published an article in the International Journal of Learning and Media about this project.  In “‘Just like I have felt’: Multimodal counternarratives in youth-produced digital media,” [PDF], we developed a methodology called multimodal microanalysis that sheds light on the complex ways in which modes operate in young people’s digital productions.

I’m happy to share that Lora and I have just published an article in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, “iPoetry: Creating space for new literacies in the English curriculum” [PDF]. Here, we explore how our approach to teaching digital poetry changed over time. We argue that the iPoetry project enhanced students’ critical engagement, increased their awareness of audience, and encouraged their innovative use of multiple modalities.

We share the digital poem of one of our students, Blair Mishleau. Blair is an incredible young man who will soon graduate with interdisciplinary degrees in journalism and interactive arts and media. He has recently been accepted into Teach for America, and I know that any child would be lucky to be in his classroom!  Here is Blair’s digital poem that we analyze in the article.

Photo by wasimmons

Your Desires by Blair Mishleau from Jen Scott Curwood on Vimeo.

These are the opening words of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which is co-authored by John Green and David Levithan.  I love to read when I travel, and I picked it up before heading to the Literacy Research Association conference in December.  Let me say this: it’s the kind of book that can make you laugh out loud on a crowded plane.  But it’s also filled with teenage angst, awkwardness, and heartache.  In short, it’s a great mix of everything.

I loved David Levithan’s first novel, Boy Meets Boy, and I’ve used it in class before.  Many of his books are love stories, and it looks like his latest, The Lover’s Dictionary, is no exception.  Every day for the past 23 years, Levithan has written a story for his friends for Valentine’s Day.  John Green is also a well-known young adult author and his work includes Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns.  I read Paper Towns last year.  While the characters and their pranks are over-the-top, I was drawn into the compelling storyline.  Green is also one half of the Vlogbrothers and founder of Nerdfighters.  I purchased Will Grayson in a local bookstore, and a couple of pages in, I found a handwritten note from a local fan.  It thanked me for buying the book and proclaimed, “Don’t forget to be awesome!”  Here’s a Nerdfighters FAQ:

Will Grayson, Will Grayson tells the story of two Will Graysons who live in the Chicago area.  Other than their name, they don’t have much in common.  They meet by chance in a porn shop (which is not as bad as it sounds).  Neither of them really meant to be there, they’re both a bit heartbroken, and admittedly freaked out to meet someone with the same name.  But soon Will is introduced to O.W.G.’s (Other Will Grayson’s) best friend, Tiny Cooper.  As O.W.G. explains, “Tiny Cooper is not the world’s gayest person, and he is not the world’s largest person, but I believe that he may be the world’s largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world’s gayest person who is really, really large.”

Tiny Cooper is a central figure in the story – so much so that the book could have easily been titled Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and Tiny Cooper.  Levithan and Green each write in the voice of a different Will Grayson, and the chapters alternate this first-person narration.  Some of my middle school and high school students used to struggled with books written with multiple narrators, but each Will has a very unique voice and perspective so I don’t think that would be an issue here.  I think that this would be a great addition to any high school teacher’s classroom library, and I can see it be incorporated into literature circles that focus on friendship or relationships.

Over on his blog, John Green talks about his experience with co-authoring a book.  Consequently, I think Will Grayson might be a wonderful example of collaborative writing that teachers could use in their curriculum, perhaps in conjunction with tools like Bubbl.us, Google Docs, or MixedInk.  To open it up to more collaborators and readers, look to Novlet or Protagonize.

Image Credit: John Green

A week ago, I submitted my dissertation to my committee. As I await my final oral defense, I have been reflecting on the years that I’ve spent in graduate school. I have had an incredible experience at UW, and I’m grateful for the friends, colleagues, and mentors that I’ve met over the past four years. In preparation for my upcoming move overseas, I’ve been going through my bookshelves to decide what to keep, store, or give away. Here are several books that really helped me in graduate school. You’ll notice that they’re not about theory or methodology – depending on your discipline, there are countless ones that can help you there. Instead, these focus on writing, productivity, and being an academic.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

I love Anne Lamott’s writing – she’s funny, self-deprecating, and incredibly honest.  When I first started graduate school, I didn’t realize how much of my life would be spent writing.  Or, more accurately, preparing to write, trying to write, and attempting to revise my writing.  As a former English teacher, I really enjoy writing.  But it’s not something that always comes easy.  As Lamott says, writing “is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work” (p. 7).  Over the years, I’ve realized that many graduate students tend to be perfectionists.  (Or maybe it’s that perfectionists tend to be graduate students).  This can lead to paralyzing perfectionism, which often manifests itself around writing.  In graduate school, you need to write (and write well) to clear the major hurdles: master’s thesis, preliminary exams, dissertation proposal, and the dissertation itself.  Lamott’s book provides insight into the writing process.  While she focuses on fiction, many of the chapters readily apply to academic writing, including the ones entitled “Shitty First Drafts” and “Perfectionism.”

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

This is the kind of book that you may see in Barnes and Nobles’ self improvement section which, incidentally, is not far from the teenage paranormal romance section.  (Thank you, Twilight).  The premise of Allen’s book is that small changes in our daily habits and organizational practices can result in less stress and higher productivity.  Take email, for instance.  Many of us send and receive dozens (if not hundreds) of emails each day.  Allen offers the “do it, delegate it, defer it, or drop it rule” that can be useful in maintaining a nearly-empty inbox.  He also argues that we need to write down all of the things that we need to do, even the everyday tasks like “take the cat to the vet” or “bring donuts to next week’s meeting.”  Otherwise, we’ll remember at random moments and it will be a source of stress.  The book also tackles issues related to setting goals, managing projects, and generally, staying on top of life.  Personally, I found a combination of using Gmail (and having all email accounts forwarded there), Google Calendar (with various color-coded calendars), and Todoist (which works with the Doings app on my iPhone) invaluable.  My friend Alecia prefers CalanGoo with Google Tasks.  Sarah uses beautiful stationary and hand-written lists.  If you consider all of this within a theory of distributed cognition, it makes a lot of sense.

Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success by Wendy Laura Belcher

In my discipline, graduate students are encouraged to publish.  Sometimes, we work as part of a research team and conduct research, analyze data, and write articles together.  Other times, we work on a project with our advisor and publish from that.  These experiences can be instrumental in exposing us to the peer review process, not to mention helping us land a tenure-track position down the road.  But most of us, at some point, may be working on our own, targeting a specific journal, attempting to organize our writing schedule, or just struggling to move an article from conception to completion.  Belcher’s workbook can be incredibly useful in that respect.  While I haven’t followed it from start to finish over 12 weeks, I’ve referred to chapters here and there.  I used to think that there was some magic that went into writing and publishing peer-reviewed articles.  Now I know that it’s more about applying your ass to a chair and your fingers to a keyboard.  Recently, a professor at my university was discussing, with admiration, the writing habits of another senior professor:  “Before he does anything else that day, he writes three pages.”  While I didn’t have the heart to ask if it was single or double-spaced pages, it did leave an impression on me.  Regular, goal-oriented writing is what matters in academia.

Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus by Robert Boice

When I was pregnant with my son, I read all of the books that I could about pregnancy, labor, and delivery.  A week before my due date, I had a sudden realization: I hadn’t read any books about parenting.  I had knew nothing about no-cry sleep solutions, the happiest babies on the block, or parenting with love and logic.  Somehow I was so focused on the task at hand, I missed preparing for the next phase of my life.  For a lot of graduate students, the same can happen.  We’re so invested in collecting data, writing our dissertations, and job hunting that it’s easy to feel unprepared for the next step: being a new faculty member.  Boice’s book offers insight into teaching, researching, and writing – all in moderation.  Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Boice’s book come highly recommended, as does Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia by Emily Toth.  I read them both a couple of years ago, and I plan to reread them again in the coming months.

I’m very excited to finish my doctorate and begin my career as a literacy researcher.  As I make that transition, I thought it may be useful to share some of the resources that helped me in graduate school.  Any other books, websites, or tools you would like to add?

Photo Credit: lowjumpingfrog

A year ago, I shared my working dissertation abstract. I’m now writing my final dissertation chapter, and I wanted to share an updated version of my dissertation abstract.  Between now and my spring 2011 defense, it may change slightly, but this reflects where I’m at now.

The Nexus of Continuity and Change: Digital Tools, Social Identities, and Cultural Models in Teacher Professional Development

Prompted by calls for research on technology-focused professional development, this dissertation investigates how teachers’ participation in learning communities influences technology integration within the secondary English curriculum. The year-long multiple-case embedded research study draws on cognitive anthropology and sociocultural theory to examine how English teachers’ everyday discourse reveals their cultural models, pedagogical beliefs, and instructional practices with literacy and technology. In addition, it attends to the role of dialogic narratives in shaping teachers’ identities in ever-changing learning environments. Situated within a reform-oriented approach to professional development, the analysis focuses on teachers’ discourse at a micro level to understand how their pedagogy is shaped by macro-concepts, social institutions, and cultural shifts. While digital tools can shape adolescents’ engagement in participatory learning, multimodal authoring, and critical thinking, findings from this study indicate that the ways in which these practices take root in the English curriculum are still very much dependent upon teachers’ beliefs, values, and skills. Technology integration can be supported by professional development that features: hands-on learning with digital tools and new literacies; sustained dialogue around teachers’ curricular goals and students’ learning outcomes; the ongoing analysis of students’ digitally mediated work; a view of knowledge as a social construction rather than as a commodity; a recognition that school-based discourse shapes teacher identity; and an understanding that teachers’ cultural models about language, literacy, and technology impact their pedagogy.

As one of the assistant editors of the Wisconsin English Journal, I’m delighted to share that we just published the fall 2010 issue.

From the editorial board:

We invite you to visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.  We also invite you to consider submitting an article or book review for publication in future issues. The Wisconsin English Journal (WEJ) welcomes articles on all subjects related to teaching English in middle and high schools. In the coming year, we plan to feature an article or articles in each issue that focus on a theme.

For spring 2011, we have chosen the theme: Teaching English Language Learners. We welcome articles on teaching reading, writing, or literature to students who are learning a second or third language while in your classroom/s. Articles on other topics are welcome as well. The due date for the spring issue is February 1, 2011 and the due date for the unthemed fall issue is August 1, 2011.

We believe that the juried journal process that we have organized is vital to developing excellent articles for readers. We hope that all of you will be willing to be journal reviewers and help us support authors. Because we are a juried journal with each article receiving at least two anonymous reviews, the journal may hold more power for those concerned about the publication’s impact on their careers.

Please consider submitting an article to the Wisconsin English Journal. We look forward to receiving and reviewing your texts.

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!