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Publications by Alexandra Cavallaro

Literacy in Composition Studies , 2019

Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between lit... more Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between literacy education and citizenship production (e.g. Guerra, Wan). Despite often being neglected in conversations about literacy education and citizenship training, prison education programs and incarcerated students have a unique relationship to citizenship and can make an important contribution to that scholarship. By putting literacy studies in conversation with queer studies and critical prison studies, I argue that we as literacy educators and teachers can train ourselves to notice and push back against the harmful ideologies underlying the discourse around prison literacy education programs and citizenship education. This attention to language is essential because it has a material effect on the incarcerated students we teach, as well as the futures we imagine for our classes, programs, and the wider landscape of prison education.

Community Literacy Journal

This piece explores how collaborations in the writing classroom are challenged and altered when t... more This piece explores how collaborations in the writing classroom are challenged and altered when that classroom is located in a medium-security prison. This text (itself a collaboration between the instructors and ten of our incarcerated students) unpacks how communication is regulated by the institutional authority of the prison and explores how the innovations demanded by the prison’s technological constraints can provide agency to people who are systematically disenfranchised. Through a combination of written text and audio podcasts, we focus on two different dimensions of that process: collaborations between students and teachers and collaborations between the students themselves.

enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture

English Education, Jul 2014

Youth Community Inquiry: New Media for Community and Personal Growth, 2014

Conference Presentations by Alexandra Cavallaro

The affordances of multimodal composition are more widely available than ever before; as a result... more The affordances of multimodal composition are more widely available than ever before; as a result, facility with multiple media is now almost a requirement for full literacy and rhetorical power (Kress, 2009; Shipka, 1999; Wysocki, 2008). Accordingly, the University of Illinois course “Writing Across Media” (WAM) was designed to help students develop these technical and rhetorical skills through argumentation in a variety of media, including graffiti, podcasts, maps, comics, and video. In the spring of 2014, two WAM instructors adapted the course to be taught not in Champaign-Urbana but at a medium-high-security prison in eastern Illinois, a process that required extreme flexibility in the face of both material and rhetorical constraints imposed by the carceral setting. In this presentation, Speakers 3 and 4 explore how the complex negotiations of teaching this course highlight the need for intervention in the discourse about the relationship between incarcerated people and technology.

We approach the issue via three separate segments that are themselves multimediated--conscious of the ways that discussing our work as “intervention” risks reproducing problematic power dynamics and further suppressing already-marginalized voices (Plemons 2014), we work to foreground the voices of our students through audio and, warden willing, perhaps even video recordings. In our first segment, we begin by discussing the ways that multimodal and digital writing can act as an intervention in the carceral setting (Jacobi 2007, Pompa 2011), focusing on the ways in which that intervention is complicated and bears both reward and risk. While multimodal writing helped our students to imagine expanded possibilities for creating arguments, those possibilities came with more risks, as the administration viewed the content of multimodal writing to be more threatening than traditional, print-based texts. We then address the popular myth that their isolation causes incarcerated people to be technologically illiterate (e.g. Law 2014), unpacking the ways this myth reinforces the idea that incarcerated people cannot regain status as full members of society. Tracing the non-institutional, third-space (Wilson 2000) methods through which our students educate themselves about technology, we will take up how patchy access structures incarcerated men’s relationship with that technology in sometimes-unexpected ways. Finally, we examine how our students’ struggles writing papers for our class reflects how technology has become entangled in the writing process, and the ways in which the idea of multiple writing processes depends on having particular affordances that incarcerated people are generally denied. It is our hope that taken together, these three segments point to ways in which multimodality opens up space for intervention both in oppressive prison discourses and in cultural conceptions of prisoners as locked out of technological progress.

The University of Illinois course “Writing Across Media” (WAM) springs from the idea that most me... more The University of Illinois course “Writing Across Media” (WAM) springs from the idea that most messages do not come to us as traditional 8.5-by-11” print texts. The course description argues that to be a fully literate citizen in the twenty-first century—to intervene effectively in the discourses around us—requires the ability to read critically and to write strategically in a variety of media. Because the affordance of multimodal composition are available more widely than ever before, scholars in writing studies have focused on the myriad potentials for multimodal composition (Ball, Kress, Shipka, Wysocki). Little scholarship, however, has investigated the material constraints that put students at a disadvantage when they lack full access to the range of resources necessary to fully engage with questions of multimodality.

In spring 2014, two WAM instructors developed a version of the course to be taught at a medium-high-security prison in eastern Illinois. This process necessitated a number of alterations to the course content, some anticipated, some un-. This panel, composed of those instructors and one of their formerly incarcerated students, traces how material constraints become rhetorical constraints and what the implications are both for the agency of incarcerated persons and for our conception of multimodality at large.

Paper 1 addresses questions of privilege, agency, and power that result from the conflicting goals of the course and the institution in which it is being taught. The course is intended to encourage subversion and to arm students with the tools needed to speak back to authority, but these goals are antithetical to the purpose of the prison. This paper argues for a multimodal pedagogy that places these conflicts at the heart of the curriculum itself, allowing instructors and students to interrogate how the intersections of power and privilege affect the creation and consumption of media.

Paper 2 explores the effects of the material constraints imposed on instructors in the prison setting, revisiting the notion of multimodal composition instructors as “gatekeepers.” In the prison setting, material conditions (such as the lack of internet access) limit students’ ability to both consume and create content, repositioning instructors as gatekeepers not to university education as a whole, but as the near-sole source of information and resources for students. This paper explores the ways that students exercised agency within these material constraints, shaping the gatekeeping role of the instructors.

Paper 3 explores how material conditions affect the learning attitudes and self-images of incarcerated students, including how institutional constraints work to increase the division between traditional campus students and their incarcerated counterparts, though technically both belong to the same university learning community. This paper argues that despite the challenges, working within these constraints has fostered collaborations that traditional campuses might learn from, and as we slowly work to change the prison industrial complex from the inside-out, we might help illuminate methods that other underrepresented groups might utilize to become full members of their academic communities.

Blog Entries by Alexandra Cavallaro

Talks by Alexandra Cavallaro

Literacy in Composition Studies , 2019

Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between lit... more Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between literacy education and citizenship production (e.g. Guerra, Wan). Despite often being neglected in conversations about literacy education and citizenship training, prison education programs and incarcerated students have a unique relationship to citizenship and can make an important contribution to that scholarship. By putting literacy studies in conversation with queer studies and critical prison studies, I argue that we as literacy educators and teachers can train ourselves to notice and push back against the harmful ideologies underlying the discourse around prison literacy education programs and citizenship education. This attention to language is essential because it has a material effect on the incarcerated students we teach, as well as the futures we imagine for our classes, programs, and the wider landscape of prison education.

Community Literacy Journal

This piece explores how collaborations in the writing classroom are challenged and altered when t... more This piece explores how collaborations in the writing classroom are challenged and altered when that classroom is located in a medium-security prison. This text (itself a collaboration between the instructors and ten of our incarcerated students) unpacks how communication is regulated by the institutional authority of the prison and explores how the innovations demanded by the prison’s technological constraints can provide agency to people who are systematically disenfranchised. Through a combination of written text and audio podcasts, we focus on two different dimensions of that process: collaborations between students and teachers and collaborations between the students themselves.

enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture

English Education, Jul 2014

Youth Community Inquiry: New Media for Community and Personal Growth, 2014

The affordances of multimodal composition are more widely available than ever before; as a result... more The affordances of multimodal composition are more widely available than ever before; as a result, facility with multiple media is now almost a requirement for full literacy and rhetorical power (Kress, 2009; Shipka, 1999; Wysocki, 2008). Accordingly, the University of Illinois course “Writing Across Media” (WAM) was designed to help students develop these technical and rhetorical skills through argumentation in a variety of media, including graffiti, podcasts, maps, comics, and video. In the spring of 2014, two WAM instructors adapted the course to be taught not in Champaign-Urbana but at a medium-high-security prison in eastern Illinois, a process that required extreme flexibility in the face of both material and rhetorical constraints imposed by the carceral setting. In this presentation, Speakers 3 and 4 explore how the complex negotiations of teaching this course highlight the need for intervention in the discourse about the relationship between incarcerated people and technology.

We approach the issue via three separate segments that are themselves multimediated--conscious of the ways that discussing our work as “intervention” risks reproducing problematic power dynamics and further suppressing already-marginalized voices (Plemons 2014), we work to foreground the voices of our students through audio and, warden willing, perhaps even video recordings. In our first segment, we begin by discussing the ways that multimodal and digital writing can act as an intervention in the carceral setting (Jacobi 2007, Pompa 2011), focusing on the ways in which that intervention is complicated and bears both reward and risk. While multimodal writing helped our students to imagine expanded possibilities for creating arguments, those possibilities came with more risks, as the administration viewed the content of multimodal writing to be more threatening than traditional, print-based texts. We then address the popular myth that their isolation causes incarcerated people to be technologically illiterate (e.g. Law 2014), unpacking the ways this myth reinforces the idea that incarcerated people cannot regain status as full members of society. Tracing the non-institutional, third-space (Wilson 2000) methods through which our students educate themselves about technology, we will take up how patchy access structures incarcerated men’s relationship with that technology in sometimes-unexpected ways. Finally, we examine how our students’ struggles writing papers for our class reflects how technology has become entangled in the writing process, and the ways in which the idea of multiple writing processes depends on having particular affordances that incarcerated people are generally denied. It is our hope that taken together, these three segments point to ways in which multimodality opens up space for intervention both in oppressive prison discourses and in cultural conceptions of prisoners as locked out of technological progress.

The University of Illinois course “Writing Across Media” (WAM) springs from the idea that most me... more The University of Illinois course “Writing Across Media” (WAM) springs from the idea that most messages do not come to us as traditional 8.5-by-11” print texts. The course description argues that to be a fully literate citizen in the twenty-first century—to intervene effectively in the discourses around us—requires the ability to read critically and to write strategically in a variety of media. Because the affordance of multimodal composition are available more widely than ever before, scholars in writing studies have focused on the myriad potentials for multimodal composition (Ball, Kress, Shipka, Wysocki). Little scholarship, however, has investigated the material constraints that put students at a disadvantage when they lack full access to the range of resources necessary to fully engage with questions of multimodality.

In spring 2014, two WAM instructors developed a version of the course to be taught at a medium-high-security prison in eastern Illinois. This process necessitated a number of alterations to the course content, some anticipated, some un-. This panel, composed of those instructors and one of their formerly incarcerated students, traces how material constraints become rhetorical constraints and what the implications are both for the agency of incarcerated persons and for our conception of multimodality at large.

Paper 1 addresses questions of privilege, agency, and power that result from the conflicting goals of the course and the institution in which it is being taught. The course is intended to encourage subversion and to arm students with the tools needed to speak back to authority, but these goals are antithetical to the purpose of the prison. This paper argues for a multimodal pedagogy that places these conflicts at the heart of the curriculum itself, allowing instructors and students to interrogate how the intersections of power and privilege affect the creation and consumption of media.

Paper 2 explores the effects of the material constraints imposed on instructors in the prison setting, revisiting the notion of multimodal composition instructors as “gatekeepers.” In the prison setting, material conditions (such as the lack of internet access) limit students’ ability to both consume and create content, repositioning instructors as gatekeepers not to university education as a whole, but as the near-sole source of information and resources for students. This paper explores the ways that students exercised agency within these material constraints, shaping the gatekeeping role of the instructors.

Paper 3 explores how material conditions affect the learning attitudes and self-images of incarcerated students, including how institutional constraints work to increase the division between traditional campus students and their incarcerated counterparts, though technically both belong to the same university learning community. This paper argues that despite the challenges, working within these constraints has fostered collaborations that traditional campuses might learn from, and as we slowly work to change the prison industrial complex from the inside-out, we might help illuminate methods that other underrepresented groups might utilize to become full members of their academic communities.

This article explores how an English teacher, students, and administrators at a public high schoo... more This article explores how an English teacher, students, and administrators at a public high school in Chicago participated in a multimodal writing project that negotiated the space between hope and critique, ultimately placing the community at the center of the curriculum. This project aims to illuminate how narrative renderings of possibility-or the lack thereof-construct understandings of reality, and how multimodality might be used to help teachers and students share their own visions with one another and with the public. Finally, this article suggests ways in which English educators, researchers, and students might collaborate to create productive spaces wherein disparate narratives can coexist.

English in Education, 2014

It was a cold evening in February 2013, four years after we had begun our research on how a multi... more It was a cold evening in February 2013, four years after we had begun our research on how a multimodal writing pedagogy that focused on community issues might help us better understand the place of hope and community in the teaching of English. One of us (Cavallaro) found herself chatting online, via Google Chat, with Naomi Garcia, a former high school student in the Chicago community of Paseo Boricua, near Humboldt Park, and a coauthor of this article. After reading and responding to several drafts, Garcia expressed delight, saying that she "loved everything that was written . . . . I got chills, I smiled, [and] I cried." Moreover, she noted, it was an "eye-opener" to see the "self [she] used to be." Through reading about and viewing images of her past self, Garcia was able to observe how much had changed for her since she had leftthe Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School (PACHS). Now, although she tries to write regularly, maintaining an active presence...