Gerald Campano - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Gerald Campano

Research & Policy: “Education without Boundaries”: Literacy Pedagogies and Human Rights

Language arts, Sep 1, 2016

Research in The Teaching of English, Nov 1, 2019

We are living in increasingly challenging times in our technologically mediated world, with expan... more We are living in increasingly challenging times in our technologically mediated world, with expanded capacities for digital connection, networked activism, and civic participation operating alongside explicit xenophobia and racism in mainstream media, rising nationalism amplified in online communities, and the erosion of beliefs about the value of a free press. Educators have suggested that media literacy, with its focus on helping people learn to "access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication" (National Association for Media Literacy Education, 2019, para. 1), is vital for young people to live and thrive in this digitally connected landscape (e.g., Buckingham, 2003;. However, many are unsure whether current efforts are sufficient in today's world. Given the contemporary challenges facing young people as we head into the 2020s, many scholars and educators are advocating for critical approaches to digital and media literacies that make explicit the relationships between media, power, and ideology and encourage youth to create their own counternarratives using digital technologies (e.g.

Research in The Teaching of English, Feb 1, 2023

In the penultimate issue of our editorship, we have packed the pages of RTE with rich materials b... more In the penultimate issue of our editorship, we have packed the pages of RTE with rich materials by authors who we hope will inspire you as much as they have inspired us. All three of our feature articles pay close attention to the ways dominant discourses and institutions shape the connections between literacy, identity, and emotion. In the rst article, "Agency, Identity, and Writing: Perspectives from First-Generation Students of Color in eir First Year of College, " Jie Y. Park explores the links between identity, agency, and awareness in the writing practices of rst-generation college students of color, suggesting that these students wrote from autobiographical and discoursal positions that revealed deep awareness of themselves as writers situated in particular ways. In the second article, "All in a Day's Play: How a Child Resists Linguistic Racism and Constructs Her Identity, " Denise Dávila features a day-in-the-life case study of a 7-year-old bilingual Mexican American girl as she used linguistic stylizations to counter dominant discourses in sociodramatic play in an informal educational setting, particularly her use of microa rmations to support her peers' linguistic, racial, and cultural identities. In our nal feature article, "Experiences of Alienation and Intimacy: e Work of Secondary Writing Instruction, " ea Williamson draws on New Materialist theories of alienation and connection to examine how the working conditions in a high school English class are o en dehumanizing, o ering a lens for thinking about how educators might approach writing instruction to create more intimate and connected conditions for young people's writing labor. In this month's In Dialogue column, we feature a conversation among a group of critical multimodal scholars titled "Mapping Our Truths-Envisioning the Future of Multimodal Research for Racial Justice. " Funded by the American Educational Research Association, Jennifer D. Turner, Marva Cappello, and Angela Wiseman gathered researchers interested in how visual and multimodal methodologies can promote educational equity and racial justice, bringing them together to map out a national agenda. e resulting In Dialogue is structured as a kitchen-table discussion that brought together some members of the group-Reka Barton,

Research in The Teaching of English, May 1, 2023

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder an... more Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift. -Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Research in The Teaching of English, Nov 15, 2018

In April 1977, the Combahee River Collective-a collective of Black feminists who had been meeting... more In April 1977, the Combahee River Collective-a collective of Black feminists who had been meeting together since 1974-issued a statement that represented the scholarship, activism, and lives of Black women who felt left behind by the imperatives of the Civil Rights and women's movements Taylor, 2017). Named for military action led by Harriet Tubman in 1863 that freed over 750 enslaved Africans, the Combahee River Collective has since become a beacon for contemporary radical collectivities working together toward justice and social change. Collectivities matter. The power of the collective is important for the research that we conduct, the ways that we write about "the word and the world" , and the the methods that we use to study language, literature, literacies-and the lives of students, teachers, and society. Even when research in the teaching of English is not specifically radical or activist in scope, much of it is conducted with others. While traditions of research collaboration are nothing new in social science inquiry, what strikes us about today's emerging collectives is their intentionality, the ways that solidarities are negotiated inside and outside of the collective, and their expressed commitments not only to conducting research together, but also to living, doing, and making meaning together. This is not to say that collectivities in English teaching and research, or collaborative inquiry, are without their complexities. In the introduction of their notable edited volume, Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research, Carol D. Lee and Peter Smagorinsky (2000) note the important shift from studying the individual to studying the material and cultural histories of social groups; at the same time, they warn scholars not to gloss over the tensions inherent in collective interaction. They conclude that "the idea of community . . . does not necessarily refer to a sense of harmony, but rather to a shared set of social practices and goals that become differentiated among subgroups" (Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000, p. 5). In other words, collectivities are characterized by the inherent variability of human perspectives-they do not necessarily need to be unified in practice in order to be transformative.

Research in The Teaching of English, May 1, 2019

Studying is not limited to the university. It's not held or contained within the university. Stud... more Studying is not limited to the university. It's not held or contained within the university. Study has a relation to the university, but only insofar as the university is not necessarily excluded from the undercommons that it tries so hard to exclude. -Fred Moten (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 113) As we close our first volume year, we would like to first and foremost express our gratitude to our reviewers and editorial board members, who have taken time out of their busy lives to give thoughtful feedback on manuscripts submitted to Research in the Teaching of English. Reviewing is one of the least visible and most selfless services in academia, yet it plays an invaluable dialogical and pedagogical role in pushing our collective work in the field. We would also like to thank everyone who has submitted their work to RTE. We are heartened by the robust intellectual diversity of the pieces we have received, as well as the genuine commitment of so many literacy and ELA scholars to equity and increasing the educational opportunities of students across the life span. This commitment is exemplified in this issue's research articles, which all work to understand research problems in ways that benefit their participants while considering more fully the humanity of the people discussed in their work. Vaughn W. M. Watson and Alecia Beymer examine the multiple literacies youth of color engage in their songwriting about the city where they live, Detroit, to call attention to how youth reorient deficitizing narratives to focus on the strengths of their communities. They develop the idea of "praisesongs of place" to understand the critical work youth do through their multimodal composing to "build new conceptualizations of futures of their city" and to assert their roles as leaders in shaping those futures. By inquiring into students' memorable writing experiences at the college level, Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner reaffirm the importance of personal connection in writing projects across disciplines. They find that facilitating opportunities for students to link their interests and experiences to writing is a "key factor for developing and sustaining student agency and identity in higher education." Danielle Lillge investigates the experience of English teachers participating in and implementing learning from professional

Research in The Teaching of English, Nov 1, 2021

How do we enter into the topic of literacy and imperialism, which is simultaneously omnipresent a... more How do we enter into the topic of literacy and imperialism, which is simultaneously omnipresent and often so invisible in our field? Perhaps concretely: by inviting readers to consider several scenes of American imperialism and colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, respectively. We begin in 1906, three years after the official ending of the "Philippine-American War"-in quotation marks because more recent scholars have argued it might be more accurately understood as a genocide, having resulted in the deaths (by some estimates) of over one million Filipinx. Resistance to American colonial occupation persisted throughout the archipelago, including in the restive Moro (Muslim inhabitants of Mindanao) and Lumad (indigenous people of Mindanao) south, which, to this day, remains a neocolonial society. On the small island of Jolo, off the larger island of Mindanao, Tausug villagers retreated to a volcanic crater, Bud Dajo, to escape American soldiers, many of whom had perfected the act of killing in the wars with Native Americans during the conquest of North America, while developing new technologies of torture in the Philippines, such as what would later be known as waterboarding. The crater had historically served as a sanctuary for the villagers from Spanish conquistadors. But for four days in March, the villagers' blades were no match for American machine-gun fire. Just about every villager was murdered, roughly 1,000 in total and around five times more than at Wounded Knee, including whole families: parents, children, and infants. An iconic photograph of white supremacist violence depicts American soldiers posing over mounds of villagers' corpses in a large trench. According to the historian Daniel Immerwahr (2019), W. E. B. Du Bois considered displaying the photograph in his own classroom in order to, in Du Bois's own words, "impress upon students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean" (p. 106). Around the same time as the Bud Dajo massacre, we might imagine an American teacher writing in a journal about their teaching mission abroad. They were one of 550 or so Thomasite educators who arrived in the Philippines in 1901 on the USS Thomas to establish a public education system in English, and to "civilize America's little brown brothers" through "benevolent assimilation," as Gerald

Announcing the Alan C. Purves Award Recipients (Volume 49): Critical Approaches to Language Research with the Potential to Change Educational Practice: This Year’s Purves Award Honorees

Research in the Teaching of English, Jan 31, 2017

Methods for Community-Based Research

Research and Policy: Grassroots Inquiry: Reconsidering the Location of Innovation

Language arts, Nov 1, 2013

The Social Production of Adolescent Risk and the Promise of Adolescent Literacies

Review of Research in Education, Mar 1, 2009

Research in The Teaching of English, Feb 1, 2019

Research in the Teaching of English

To collaborate (from the Latin com and laborare) is to join together in labor, to fuse manifold t... more To collaborate (from the Latin com and laborare) is to join together in labor, to fuse manifold threads into a grander tapestry of becoming. We envision the future as collaborative: as the meeting of minds sparks ideas, as the synthesis of perspectives across difference creates avenues toward deepened understandings. This theme of collaboration emerges from reflections on our collective labor: as teachers, learners, scholars, and activists, we navigate multiple, intersecting, and mutually constitutive roles. We collaborate with students, colleagues, teachers, and community partners to conduct research, publish articles, present at conferences, teach classes, and facilitate workshops. Our efforts unfold across simultaneously spatial and temporal dimensions: we inhabit the interstices of pasts, presents, and futures, traversing social, cultural, personal, and political boundaries. Significantly, our collaborative pedagogies and practices come into being at the nexus of teaching and learning: by writing collaboratively, learners can encounter divergent ways of thinking, melding others' voices with their own to craft new possibilities and engender synergies greater than our individual contributions. Such is the power of collaboration: for it is in working together that we can generate knowledge and create change in our communities. For this issue's In Dialogue, we invited Maha Bali, Ashley S. Boyd, and Remi Kalir to reflect on the histories of collaborative reading and writing and to envision the futures of education research, teaching, and service. In continuing our commitments to equity, collectivities, and ways of knowing, we bring to the center of our discourse voices, ideas, perspectives, and experiences that have been placed in the margins. We invited the authors to collaboratively compose the In Dialogue using annotations to document their developing conversation. Through this shared discourse, the authors constellate insights into the intertwined dimensions of literacy-personal, cultural, historical, and political-and explore the transformative potential of writing collaboratively across cultural difference.

Research in the Teaching of English

As transborder crises like climate change and COVID-19 endure, children worldwide are at the fore... more As transborder crises like climate change and COVID-19 endure, children worldwide are at the forefront of our collective consciousness. In a 2020 policy brief, for example, the United Nations warned of the considerable impact of the pandemic on young people across the globe. Noting the ways in which children from diverse geographic locations are made "hyper-visible" in public discourses today (Fernandes & Garg, 2020), we find this moment an apt one to contemplate how the barriers facing those most vulnerable to systemic injustices transcend the immediacies of the present. While experiences of childhood vary worldwide, anchored by material realities as well as situated notions of "the child" proliferating in different social contexts (Wells, 2009), educational inequities-themselves shaped by racism, uneven geographic relations within and between world regions, and enduring imperial and colonial legacies-have long rendered schools "constraining and oppressive" places for Black children, Brown children, Indigenous children, and others marginalized along intersectional lines. Such disparities are further deepened by the centering of dominant childhoods across curricula, policy, and pedagogy as orienting models for who children (and what childhood itself) should be. Drawing on subaltern perspectives and critical understandings of place (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) in the literacy field, we suggest that fixed notions of idealized and imperiled childhoods permeating educational systems worldwide predate current conditions and may yet outlast them; these undermine our ability not just to create a more equitable "geography of opportunity" for all children, as Tate (2008) might put it, but to imagine it as well. In this issue, we suggest that a commitment to the theme of childhoods across borders might renew our capacities to build and envision global conditions in which a plurality of childhoods might flourish. This signals our attention to the myriad experiences and constructions of childhoods across societies, and how these are rooted in socio-spatial contexts shaped both

Research in the Teaching of English

In a scene from the television series Lovecraft Country (Green & Sackheim, 2020), Letitia "Leti" ... more In a scene from the television series Lovecraft Country (Green & Sackheim, 2020), Letitia "Leti" Lewis calls the spirits of eight Black ancestors that have been trapped in her recently purchased home, along with the ghost of Hiram Epstein, their murderer. Hiram, the previous homeowner and a former scientist fired for "dangerous human experimentation," coordinated with the local police captain to capture, experiment, torture, and murder these eight Black residents in his home. As Hiram haunts and tries to harm Leti, she calls on these ancestors to help her cast Hiram away. "You are not dead yet. You can still fight," she proclaims as Hiram closes in on her. Leti and the ancestors circle around Hiram, hold hands, and chant a spell to cast him out. Their bloody and brutalized bodies, dismembered by Hiram's experimentation, become whole again in solidarity and strength. Hiram disintegrates. This scene is exemplary of both the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, 2000)-the collection of customs, beliefs, and values through which Black people call out and disrupt individuals and systems of oppression that deny us humanity and dignity-and the recognition of a world system that is "dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide" (Robinson, 2000, foreword by Kelley, p. xiii; Stern & Hussain, 2015). In this scene, we witness the power of Black life (and Black afterlives) even in death, and the intergenerational forms of Black resistance exemplified by Leti and these ancestors against harm and indignity. While the show is steeped in science fiction, we recognize the parallels between the experimentation on and police brutality against Black people featured in this drama set in the 1950s and today's police in(action) and the handling of COVID-19 that disproportionately harms Black life. Yet in Lovecraft Country, we witness how the ancestors in Leti's home heal as they confront the harm they experienced and disintegrate their captor. As in this artistic scene in Lovecraft Country, this issue of RTE concludes with an In Dialogue essay by Gwendolyn Baxley and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz that centers on the nexus of the Black Radical Tradition and healing through poetry. Poetry is a tool to speak truth to power, call out injustice, and envision new realities (Lorde, 2020; Neal, 1969). This essay highlights poetics as a means of healing, resisting,

Research in the Teaching of English

When this issue of Research in the Teaching of English goes live online or arrives in our hands, ... more When this issue of Research in the Teaching of English goes live online or arrives in our hands, many-if not all-of us will have been experiencing grief brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic that has kept us in our homes, away from our families, our communities, and our students across the K-20 educational system. Unfortunately, we have collectively experienced loss, illness, and uncertainty during this time. We have witnessed infection and death rates disproportionately linked to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the United States. We have lived to see how the hold of white supremacy still devastates BI-POC who bear the brunt of systemic injustices. During this period of isolation, anti-Black violence has brought many to protest the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, declaring that #BlackLivesMatter. We have heard loud voices denouncing the practice of detaining Latinx immigrant children and youth in cages. We have implored leaders to acknowledge anti-Asian rhetoric and hate crimes linking Asian communities to the origins of COVID-19. And our Indigenous communities have been overwhelmingly ignored in their need for much needed resources to combat COVID-19. Across the United States, and the globe, BIPOC have demanded justice, actively seeking coalition and solidarity within and across racial and ethnic communities. While it is easy to urge solidarity across racially and ethnically diverse groups, we must remember that these solidarities are not new phenomena. It is well documented that BIPOC communities have worked in solidarity through coalitional and intersectional movements for decades (

Mobilizing prefigurative hybrid literacies for decolonial resistance: three transnational examples

Elsevier eBooks, 2023

Research in the Teaching of English

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we have often found ourselves struggling ... more Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we have often found ourselves struggling to understand how to make meaning of the inexplicable. The contentious political response to the virus and our persistent failure to ensure educational equity are just two facets of the ekpyrosis-Greek for great conflagration-of the present. Other crises are evident in our work around the nation and the world: the climate emergency; the persistence of gun violence, war, and genocide; the mental health crisis among young people (and people of all ages); rampant inflation exacerbated by corporate greed; a lack of affordable and safe housing. These compounding factors make the present moment extraordinarily difficult for most-especially those in many of the communities where we teach, mentor, serve, and live. Stories have always been a way that humans make sense of the world during the most difficult times. Stories transmit a sense of who we are as humans living within this biosphere. The articles in this issue feature research on the ways young people create stories to make sense of their own lives and to imagine more equitable futures. In spite of the trauma and oppressive circumstances young people must navigate, they are also immensely creative. They read and write the self into existence, restorying narratives that erase, exclude, and mischaracterize them. If it is true, as Hannah Arendt once noted, that "storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are," then researching the role of stories (and restories) in the teaching of English can point the way toward cathartic hope. In the first article of this issue, "'It's Our Job as People to Make Others Feel Valued': Children Imagining More Caring and Just Worlds through Superhero Stories," Francisco Luis Torres highlights the agency of children making sense of ongoing societal conditions and imagining otherwise through the lens of their own superhero comics. Through co-teaching a fifth-grade literacy unit on superheroes

Research in the Teaching of English

A new decade is here, and with it persistent questions for the field of literacy studies. The fie... more A new decade is here, and with it persistent questions for the field of literacy studies. The field itself-through its programs, research agendas, journals, and professional associations-has been grappling with pressing societal issues and how to open new spaces for new ideas, with varying degrees of success (Toliver, Jones, Jiménez, Player, Rumenapp, & Munoz, 2019). To remain sustainable in the current times as a counternarrative (Mora, 2014) to policies and practices that perpetuate white supremacy and far-right ultranationalism, we need to decenter and decentralize our views of how we understand literacy as a global construct. This involves bringing to light efforts to retheorize it that are happening outside of traditional knowledge centers (Mora, 2016b). We need to recognize that overlooking certain regions of the world is detrimental to the literacy academic community at large, for our field cannot move forward if our frameworks for literacy are still ingrained with marginalizing views of different regions. When we talk about decentering and decentralizing as two related ideas, we emphasize the need to move the conversation away from historically dominant groups (decenter) and geographical locales (decentralize). Decentering and decentralizing means that, for example, we need to reconsider how many ideas and theories that we rely on stem from colonial knowledge centers in the Global North and Anglo communities (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, to a certain extent). This necessitates rethinking our relationship with the different languages at play in terms of knowledge production-such as the dominance of English. This shift in relationship implies, revisiting McLuhan, that English is a neutral medium to share messages coming from different parts of the world, but itself needs to be situated historically and

Research & Policy: “Education without Boundaries”: Literacy Pedagogies and Human Rights

Language arts, Sep 1, 2016

Research in The Teaching of English, Nov 1, 2019

We are living in increasingly challenging times in our technologically mediated world, with expan... more We are living in increasingly challenging times in our technologically mediated world, with expanded capacities for digital connection, networked activism, and civic participation operating alongside explicit xenophobia and racism in mainstream media, rising nationalism amplified in online communities, and the erosion of beliefs about the value of a free press. Educators have suggested that media literacy, with its focus on helping people learn to "access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication" (National Association for Media Literacy Education, 2019, para. 1), is vital for young people to live and thrive in this digitally connected landscape (e.g., Buckingham, 2003;. However, many are unsure whether current efforts are sufficient in today's world. Given the contemporary challenges facing young people as we head into the 2020s, many scholars and educators are advocating for critical approaches to digital and media literacies that make explicit the relationships between media, power, and ideology and encourage youth to create their own counternarratives using digital technologies (e.g.

Research in The Teaching of English, Feb 1, 2023

In the penultimate issue of our editorship, we have packed the pages of RTE with rich materials b... more In the penultimate issue of our editorship, we have packed the pages of RTE with rich materials by authors who we hope will inspire you as much as they have inspired us. All three of our feature articles pay close attention to the ways dominant discourses and institutions shape the connections between literacy, identity, and emotion. In the rst article, "Agency, Identity, and Writing: Perspectives from First-Generation Students of Color in eir First Year of College, " Jie Y. Park explores the links between identity, agency, and awareness in the writing practices of rst-generation college students of color, suggesting that these students wrote from autobiographical and discoursal positions that revealed deep awareness of themselves as writers situated in particular ways. In the second article, "All in a Day's Play: How a Child Resists Linguistic Racism and Constructs Her Identity, " Denise Dávila features a day-in-the-life case study of a 7-year-old bilingual Mexican American girl as she used linguistic stylizations to counter dominant discourses in sociodramatic play in an informal educational setting, particularly her use of microa rmations to support her peers' linguistic, racial, and cultural identities. In our nal feature article, "Experiences of Alienation and Intimacy: e Work of Secondary Writing Instruction, " ea Williamson draws on New Materialist theories of alienation and connection to examine how the working conditions in a high school English class are o en dehumanizing, o ering a lens for thinking about how educators might approach writing instruction to create more intimate and connected conditions for young people's writing labor. In this month's In Dialogue column, we feature a conversation among a group of critical multimodal scholars titled "Mapping Our Truths-Envisioning the Future of Multimodal Research for Racial Justice. " Funded by the American Educational Research Association, Jennifer D. Turner, Marva Cappello, and Angela Wiseman gathered researchers interested in how visual and multimodal methodologies can promote educational equity and racial justice, bringing them together to map out a national agenda. e resulting In Dialogue is structured as a kitchen-table discussion that brought together some members of the group-Reka Barton,

Research in The Teaching of English, May 1, 2023

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder an... more Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift. -Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Research in The Teaching of English, Nov 15, 2018

In April 1977, the Combahee River Collective-a collective of Black feminists who had been meeting... more In April 1977, the Combahee River Collective-a collective of Black feminists who had been meeting together since 1974-issued a statement that represented the scholarship, activism, and lives of Black women who felt left behind by the imperatives of the Civil Rights and women's movements Taylor, 2017). Named for military action led by Harriet Tubman in 1863 that freed over 750 enslaved Africans, the Combahee River Collective has since become a beacon for contemporary radical collectivities working together toward justice and social change. Collectivities matter. The power of the collective is important for the research that we conduct, the ways that we write about "the word and the world" , and the the methods that we use to study language, literature, literacies-and the lives of students, teachers, and society. Even when research in the teaching of English is not specifically radical or activist in scope, much of it is conducted with others. While traditions of research collaboration are nothing new in social science inquiry, what strikes us about today's emerging collectives is their intentionality, the ways that solidarities are negotiated inside and outside of the collective, and their expressed commitments not only to conducting research together, but also to living, doing, and making meaning together. This is not to say that collectivities in English teaching and research, or collaborative inquiry, are without their complexities. In the introduction of their notable edited volume, Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research, Carol D. Lee and Peter Smagorinsky (2000) note the important shift from studying the individual to studying the material and cultural histories of social groups; at the same time, they warn scholars not to gloss over the tensions inherent in collective interaction. They conclude that "the idea of community . . . does not necessarily refer to a sense of harmony, but rather to a shared set of social practices and goals that become differentiated among subgroups" (Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000, p. 5). In other words, collectivities are characterized by the inherent variability of human perspectives-they do not necessarily need to be unified in practice in order to be transformative.

Research in The Teaching of English, May 1, 2019

Studying is not limited to the university. It's not held or contained within the university. Stud... more Studying is not limited to the university. It's not held or contained within the university. Study has a relation to the university, but only insofar as the university is not necessarily excluded from the undercommons that it tries so hard to exclude. -Fred Moten (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 113) As we close our first volume year, we would like to first and foremost express our gratitude to our reviewers and editorial board members, who have taken time out of their busy lives to give thoughtful feedback on manuscripts submitted to Research in the Teaching of English. Reviewing is one of the least visible and most selfless services in academia, yet it plays an invaluable dialogical and pedagogical role in pushing our collective work in the field. We would also like to thank everyone who has submitted their work to RTE. We are heartened by the robust intellectual diversity of the pieces we have received, as well as the genuine commitment of so many literacy and ELA scholars to equity and increasing the educational opportunities of students across the life span. This commitment is exemplified in this issue's research articles, which all work to understand research problems in ways that benefit their participants while considering more fully the humanity of the people discussed in their work. Vaughn W. M. Watson and Alecia Beymer examine the multiple literacies youth of color engage in their songwriting about the city where they live, Detroit, to call attention to how youth reorient deficitizing narratives to focus on the strengths of their communities. They develop the idea of "praisesongs of place" to understand the critical work youth do through their multimodal composing to "build new conceptualizations of futures of their city" and to assert their roles as leaders in shaping those futures. By inquiring into students' memorable writing experiences at the college level, Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner reaffirm the importance of personal connection in writing projects across disciplines. They find that facilitating opportunities for students to link their interests and experiences to writing is a "key factor for developing and sustaining student agency and identity in higher education." Danielle Lillge investigates the experience of English teachers participating in and implementing learning from professional

Research in The Teaching of English, Nov 1, 2021

How do we enter into the topic of literacy and imperialism, which is simultaneously omnipresent a... more How do we enter into the topic of literacy and imperialism, which is simultaneously omnipresent and often so invisible in our field? Perhaps concretely: by inviting readers to consider several scenes of American imperialism and colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, respectively. We begin in 1906, three years after the official ending of the "Philippine-American War"-in quotation marks because more recent scholars have argued it might be more accurately understood as a genocide, having resulted in the deaths (by some estimates) of over one million Filipinx. Resistance to American colonial occupation persisted throughout the archipelago, including in the restive Moro (Muslim inhabitants of Mindanao) and Lumad (indigenous people of Mindanao) south, which, to this day, remains a neocolonial society. On the small island of Jolo, off the larger island of Mindanao, Tausug villagers retreated to a volcanic crater, Bud Dajo, to escape American soldiers, many of whom had perfected the act of killing in the wars with Native Americans during the conquest of North America, while developing new technologies of torture in the Philippines, such as what would later be known as waterboarding. The crater had historically served as a sanctuary for the villagers from Spanish conquistadors. But for four days in March, the villagers' blades were no match for American machine-gun fire. Just about every villager was murdered, roughly 1,000 in total and around five times more than at Wounded Knee, including whole families: parents, children, and infants. An iconic photograph of white supremacist violence depicts American soldiers posing over mounds of villagers' corpses in a large trench. According to the historian Daniel Immerwahr (2019), W. E. B. Du Bois considered displaying the photograph in his own classroom in order to, in Du Bois's own words, "impress upon students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean" (p. 106). Around the same time as the Bud Dajo massacre, we might imagine an American teacher writing in a journal about their teaching mission abroad. They were one of 550 or so Thomasite educators who arrived in the Philippines in 1901 on the USS Thomas to establish a public education system in English, and to "civilize America's little brown brothers" through "benevolent assimilation," as Gerald

Announcing the Alan C. Purves Award Recipients (Volume 49): Critical Approaches to Language Research with the Potential to Change Educational Practice: This Year’s Purves Award Honorees

Research in the Teaching of English, Jan 31, 2017

Methods for Community-Based Research

Research and Policy: Grassroots Inquiry: Reconsidering the Location of Innovation

Language arts, Nov 1, 2013

The Social Production of Adolescent Risk and the Promise of Adolescent Literacies

Review of Research in Education, Mar 1, 2009

Research in The Teaching of English, Feb 1, 2019

Research in the Teaching of English

To collaborate (from the Latin com and laborare) is to join together in labor, to fuse manifold t... more To collaborate (from the Latin com and laborare) is to join together in labor, to fuse manifold threads into a grander tapestry of becoming. We envision the future as collaborative: as the meeting of minds sparks ideas, as the synthesis of perspectives across difference creates avenues toward deepened understandings. This theme of collaboration emerges from reflections on our collective labor: as teachers, learners, scholars, and activists, we navigate multiple, intersecting, and mutually constitutive roles. We collaborate with students, colleagues, teachers, and community partners to conduct research, publish articles, present at conferences, teach classes, and facilitate workshops. Our efforts unfold across simultaneously spatial and temporal dimensions: we inhabit the interstices of pasts, presents, and futures, traversing social, cultural, personal, and political boundaries. Significantly, our collaborative pedagogies and practices come into being at the nexus of teaching and learning: by writing collaboratively, learners can encounter divergent ways of thinking, melding others' voices with their own to craft new possibilities and engender synergies greater than our individual contributions. Such is the power of collaboration: for it is in working together that we can generate knowledge and create change in our communities. For this issue's In Dialogue, we invited Maha Bali, Ashley S. Boyd, and Remi Kalir to reflect on the histories of collaborative reading and writing and to envision the futures of education research, teaching, and service. In continuing our commitments to equity, collectivities, and ways of knowing, we bring to the center of our discourse voices, ideas, perspectives, and experiences that have been placed in the margins. We invited the authors to collaboratively compose the In Dialogue using annotations to document their developing conversation. Through this shared discourse, the authors constellate insights into the intertwined dimensions of literacy-personal, cultural, historical, and political-and explore the transformative potential of writing collaboratively across cultural difference.

Research in the Teaching of English

As transborder crises like climate change and COVID-19 endure, children worldwide are at the fore... more As transborder crises like climate change and COVID-19 endure, children worldwide are at the forefront of our collective consciousness. In a 2020 policy brief, for example, the United Nations warned of the considerable impact of the pandemic on young people across the globe. Noting the ways in which children from diverse geographic locations are made "hyper-visible" in public discourses today (Fernandes & Garg, 2020), we find this moment an apt one to contemplate how the barriers facing those most vulnerable to systemic injustices transcend the immediacies of the present. While experiences of childhood vary worldwide, anchored by material realities as well as situated notions of "the child" proliferating in different social contexts (Wells, 2009), educational inequities-themselves shaped by racism, uneven geographic relations within and between world regions, and enduring imperial and colonial legacies-have long rendered schools "constraining and oppressive" places for Black children, Brown children, Indigenous children, and others marginalized along intersectional lines. Such disparities are further deepened by the centering of dominant childhoods across curricula, policy, and pedagogy as orienting models for who children (and what childhood itself) should be. Drawing on subaltern perspectives and critical understandings of place (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) in the literacy field, we suggest that fixed notions of idealized and imperiled childhoods permeating educational systems worldwide predate current conditions and may yet outlast them; these undermine our ability not just to create a more equitable "geography of opportunity" for all children, as Tate (2008) might put it, but to imagine it as well. In this issue, we suggest that a commitment to the theme of childhoods across borders might renew our capacities to build and envision global conditions in which a plurality of childhoods might flourish. This signals our attention to the myriad experiences and constructions of childhoods across societies, and how these are rooted in socio-spatial contexts shaped both

Research in the Teaching of English

In a scene from the television series Lovecraft Country (Green & Sackheim, 2020), Letitia "Leti" ... more In a scene from the television series Lovecraft Country (Green & Sackheim, 2020), Letitia "Leti" Lewis calls the spirits of eight Black ancestors that have been trapped in her recently purchased home, along with the ghost of Hiram Epstein, their murderer. Hiram, the previous homeowner and a former scientist fired for "dangerous human experimentation," coordinated with the local police captain to capture, experiment, torture, and murder these eight Black residents in his home. As Hiram haunts and tries to harm Leti, she calls on these ancestors to help her cast Hiram away. "You are not dead yet. You can still fight," she proclaims as Hiram closes in on her. Leti and the ancestors circle around Hiram, hold hands, and chant a spell to cast him out. Their bloody and brutalized bodies, dismembered by Hiram's experimentation, become whole again in solidarity and strength. Hiram disintegrates. This scene is exemplary of both the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, 2000)-the collection of customs, beliefs, and values through which Black people call out and disrupt individuals and systems of oppression that deny us humanity and dignity-and the recognition of a world system that is "dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide" (Robinson, 2000, foreword by Kelley, p. xiii; Stern & Hussain, 2015). In this scene, we witness the power of Black life (and Black afterlives) even in death, and the intergenerational forms of Black resistance exemplified by Leti and these ancestors against harm and indignity. While the show is steeped in science fiction, we recognize the parallels between the experimentation on and police brutality against Black people featured in this drama set in the 1950s and today's police in(action) and the handling of COVID-19 that disproportionately harms Black life. Yet in Lovecraft Country, we witness how the ancestors in Leti's home heal as they confront the harm they experienced and disintegrate their captor. As in this artistic scene in Lovecraft Country, this issue of RTE concludes with an In Dialogue essay by Gwendolyn Baxley and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz that centers on the nexus of the Black Radical Tradition and healing through poetry. Poetry is a tool to speak truth to power, call out injustice, and envision new realities (Lorde, 2020; Neal, 1969). This essay highlights poetics as a means of healing, resisting,

Research in the Teaching of English

When this issue of Research in the Teaching of English goes live online or arrives in our hands, ... more When this issue of Research in the Teaching of English goes live online or arrives in our hands, many-if not all-of us will have been experiencing grief brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic that has kept us in our homes, away from our families, our communities, and our students across the K-20 educational system. Unfortunately, we have collectively experienced loss, illness, and uncertainty during this time. We have witnessed infection and death rates disproportionately linked to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the United States. We have lived to see how the hold of white supremacy still devastates BI-POC who bear the brunt of systemic injustices. During this period of isolation, anti-Black violence has brought many to protest the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, declaring that #BlackLivesMatter. We have heard loud voices denouncing the practice of detaining Latinx immigrant children and youth in cages. We have implored leaders to acknowledge anti-Asian rhetoric and hate crimes linking Asian communities to the origins of COVID-19. And our Indigenous communities have been overwhelmingly ignored in their need for much needed resources to combat COVID-19. Across the United States, and the globe, BIPOC have demanded justice, actively seeking coalition and solidarity within and across racial and ethnic communities. While it is easy to urge solidarity across racially and ethnically diverse groups, we must remember that these solidarities are not new phenomena. It is well documented that BIPOC communities have worked in solidarity through coalitional and intersectional movements for decades (

Mobilizing prefigurative hybrid literacies for decolonial resistance: three transnational examples

Elsevier eBooks, 2023

Research in the Teaching of English

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we have often found ourselves struggling ... more Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we have often found ourselves struggling to understand how to make meaning of the inexplicable. The contentious political response to the virus and our persistent failure to ensure educational equity are just two facets of the ekpyrosis-Greek for great conflagration-of the present. Other crises are evident in our work around the nation and the world: the climate emergency; the persistence of gun violence, war, and genocide; the mental health crisis among young people (and people of all ages); rampant inflation exacerbated by corporate greed; a lack of affordable and safe housing. These compounding factors make the present moment extraordinarily difficult for most-especially those in many of the communities where we teach, mentor, serve, and live. Stories have always been a way that humans make sense of the world during the most difficult times. Stories transmit a sense of who we are as humans living within this biosphere. The articles in this issue feature research on the ways young people create stories to make sense of their own lives and to imagine more equitable futures. In spite of the trauma and oppressive circumstances young people must navigate, they are also immensely creative. They read and write the self into existence, restorying narratives that erase, exclude, and mischaracterize them. If it is true, as Hannah Arendt once noted, that "storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are," then researching the role of stories (and restories) in the teaching of English can point the way toward cathartic hope. In the first article of this issue, "'It's Our Job as People to Make Others Feel Valued': Children Imagining More Caring and Just Worlds through Superhero Stories," Francisco Luis Torres highlights the agency of children making sense of ongoing societal conditions and imagining otherwise through the lens of their own superhero comics. Through co-teaching a fifth-grade literacy unit on superheroes

Research in the Teaching of English

A new decade is here, and with it persistent questions for the field of literacy studies. The fie... more A new decade is here, and with it persistent questions for the field of literacy studies. The field itself-through its programs, research agendas, journals, and professional associations-has been grappling with pressing societal issues and how to open new spaces for new ideas, with varying degrees of success (Toliver, Jones, Jiménez, Player, Rumenapp, & Munoz, 2019). To remain sustainable in the current times as a counternarrative (Mora, 2014) to policies and practices that perpetuate white supremacy and far-right ultranationalism, we need to decenter and decentralize our views of how we understand literacy as a global construct. This involves bringing to light efforts to retheorize it that are happening outside of traditional knowledge centers (Mora, 2016b). We need to recognize that overlooking certain regions of the world is detrimental to the literacy academic community at large, for our field cannot move forward if our frameworks for literacy are still ingrained with marginalizing views of different regions. When we talk about decentering and decentralizing as two related ideas, we emphasize the need to move the conversation away from historically dominant groups (decenter) and geographical locales (decentralize). Decentering and decentralizing means that, for example, we need to reconsider how many ideas and theories that we rely on stem from colonial knowledge centers in the Global North and Anglo communities (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, to a certain extent). This necessitates rethinking our relationship with the different languages at play in terms of knowledge production-such as the dominance of English. This shift in relationship implies, revisiting McLuhan, that English is a neutral medium to share messages coming from different parts of the world, but itself needs to be situated historically and

We approach the invitation of this handbook chapter-to discuss multimodality in reading research-... more We approach the invitation of this handbook chapter-to discuss multimodality in reading research-with an acknowledgment that multimodal frameworks have a long history and numerous intellectual lineages that precede their influence in literacy studies. By "put[ting] images, gestures , music, movement, animation, and other representational modes on equal footing with language" (Siegel, 2006, p. 65), multimodal lenses offer an avenue for re-reading "literacy" beyond school-based notions of reading and writing, and underscore how individuals and collect-ivities mobilize literacy practices within and across specific contexts and in relation to power asymmetries. They also invite us to look forward, to consider how phenomena such as trans-national migration, global neoliberal policies, and activist movements of resistance might be aligned with, and inform, the next phase of multimodal literacy research. One of the well-established contributions of multimodality to reading research is a more expansive understanding of what constitutes a text (

Handbook of Reading Research, Volume V, 2020

We approach the invitation of this handbook chapterto discuss multimodality in reading researchwi... more We approach the invitation of this handbook chapterto discuss multimodality in reading researchwith an acknowledgment that multimodal frameworks have a long history and numerous intellectual lineages that precede their influence in literacy studies. By "put[ting] images, gestures, music, movement, animation, and other representational modes on equal footing with language" (Siegel, 2006, p. 65), multimodal lenses offer an avenue for re-reading "literacy" beyond school-based notions of reading and writing, and underscore how individuals and collectivities mobilize literacy practices within and across specific contexts and in relation to power asymmetries. They also invite us to look forward, to consider how phenomena such as transnational migration, global neoliberal policies, and activist movements of resistance might be aligned with, and inform, the next phase of multimodal literacy research.