Transmediating the Survey for Teacher Candidates--an Invitation for #NCTE13

Instead of simply reporting for participants what happened in my classes when students engaged in transmediations, I want to invite #NCTE13 participants to share some of their own.

Ideally, students and I would have the shared experience of having read a full text, but for the sake of demonstration I will invite you to read and respond to the following short excerpt from Whitman's "By Blue Ontario's Shore"(1856):

Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be

                                a poet here in the States?

The place is august, the terms obdurate.

Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (1856)

1) Consider what this question and observation mean for you in your own teaching context.  What might they mean for your students?

2) Share that understanding in the comments by uploading a text, image, or short clip of music.

NCTE 2013: Re-Inventing the Literature Survey for English/Education -- Friday 9:30-10:45

Session Code:	A.13
Title:	Re-Inventing the Literature Survey for English/Education
Level:	Secondary, College, Teacher Education
Topic of Interest:	Literature
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Description:	Will examine the prospects for English Education and Literature Pedagogy at the secondary and post-secondary levels that emerge at the convergence of secondary English teacher candidates, the British/American Literature Surveys, and the new Common Core Standards for English/Language Arts.
Participant(s):	Chair: John Staunton Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti - Speaker: James Lang director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Worcester, Massachusetts - Turning Points in Teaching/Learning the Survey Speaker: Andrew Smyth Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven - Teacher Candidates in the Shakespeare Course Speaker: John Staunton Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti - Transmediating the Survey for Teacher Candidates Speaker: Chris Walsh Boston University, Massachusetts - The Blank Syllabus
Location:	Sheraton, Sheraton/Constitution Ballroom B, Second Floor
Time:	Friday 11/22 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM

Forging/Mastering Pedagogies of Teaching Art and Literature

Monday 7/22 begins two weeks of intensive work with EMU grad students and teacher candidates.  Special thanks to Live Creature and apprentice-extraordinaire Jack Staunton for setting up the work space in Pray Harrold with me.

  Below is a found art arrangement he created in 2010

Check back for updates and artwork from the grown ups in the course and an ongoing Image Audit of our inquiries together.

CEE13 Teachers and Students as Co-Conspirators

"Teachers and  Students as Co-Conspirators:  Reading Dangerously and Dangerous Reading"

The presentation on Saturday 2:15-3:15 in ENGR E203 will examine the place of talk, text(s), and ethics in the literature classroom, and features case studies of university and high school English classroom teachers incorporating “dangerous reading”—challenged/banned literature—and “reading dangerously”—practices of teaching/learning which resist comfortable and traditional interpretive stances.

The presentation will offer a hybrid inquiry approach—part research presentation, part hands-on demonstration—of what happens when teachers and students read and talk about banned/challenged/controversial literature.  Drawing upon the pedagogical methods and curricular materials of several classroom English teachers who attempted to teach/read dangerously as they incorporated ‘controversial’ literature in their classrooms, the presentation will seek to move the critical discussion of teaching controversial literature beyond the often binary considerations of censorship and free speech to engage the perspective of ethical criticism and social justice in literature classroom.  Part of our context was a series of recent book challenges within several SE Michigan districts of classic and YA texts, but also of the expressive and interpretive writing produced by secondary students in response to these literary texts as well as the difficult material conditions of their own lives.  The “dangerous reading” of the title encompasses both student and literary texts about controversial topics.

The practices of “reading dangerously” will be showcased through key excerpts of the classroom conversations about this literature: first, of conversations between teacher and students in a secondary classroom about select passages from frequently challenged YA text; and then, of the critical discussion of classroom teachers about the issues raised by those conversations.  This double framing of such conversations will help highlight the real and perceived challenges (and opportunities) teachers experience in fostering new classroom spaces where teachers and students are not silenced or do not fall prey to self-censorship. 

Participants will have an opportunity to examine data through multiple critical lenses and use some techniques of discourse analysis (Gee 2004) to locate additional points of contact between dangerous reading and reading dangerously.