Mandie Bevels Dunn | University of South Florida (original) (raw)

Papers by Mandie Bevels Dunn

Reading Research Quarterly, 2022

Teachers’ efforts to build literacy classrooms inclusive of experiences of trauma and loss requir... more Teachers’ efforts to build literacy classrooms inclusive of experiences of trauma and loss require attending to affective sensations and displayed emotions as culturally constructed and socially produced. Yet teachers’ personal loss experiences and their influence on literature instruction remain understudied, with literacy scholarship in this area typically focusing on students’ loss experiences. Using in-depth interviews with secondary English teachers who had lost a loved one, I analyzed how affect and emotion moved through teachers’ understandings of teaching literature following loss. Teachers’ accounts made visible their interpretations of emotional rules for addressing loss, including responsibility for students’ needs, care for students, and uncertainty surrounding emotions in the classroom. Teachers described emotions as attaching to particular bodies according to their understanding of their identities as teachers. This paper explains how teachers navigate the many sensations present when teachers and students read literature together, as human beings who also lose people they love.

English Teaching; Practice and Critique, 2021

Purpose-This study aims to explore how teachers changed literature instruction in English languag... more Purpose-This study aims to explore how teachers changed literature instruction in English language arts (ELA) classrooms following personal loss, and identifies factors influencing those changes. The author argues teachers regulated their responses to literature according to emotional rules they perceived to be associated with the teaching profession. Understanding teachers' responses helps educators, teacher educators and educational researchers consider what conditions and supports may be required for teachers and students to share emotions related to loss in authentic ways in ELA classrooms.

Design/methodology/approach-To examine changes teachers made in literature instruction following personal loss, the author conducted a thematic analysis of 80 questionnaire responses.

Findings-The author found teachers changed literature instruction related to three areas: teachers' relationship to students, teachers' instruction surrounding texts and teachers' reader responses. Responses highlighted how teachers adhered to emotional rules, including a perception of teachers as authorities and caretakers of children. Teachers considered literature instruction to require maintaining focus on texts, and avoided emotional response unless it aided textual comprehension.

Originality/value-Scholars have argued for literature instruction inclusive of both loss experiences and also emotional response, with particular focus on students' loss experiences. This study focuses on teachers' experiences and responses to literature following loss, highlighting factors that influence, and at times inhibit, teachers' authentic sharing of experiences and emotions. The author argues teachers require support to bring loss experiences into literature instruction as they navigate emotional response within the relational dynamics of the classroom.

National Center for Education Statistics (2020), approximately 84 percent of teachers are white a... more National Center for Education Statistics (2020), approximately 84 percent of teachers are white and 76 percent are women. Living through a pandemic as women educators who study grief has elevated our urgency for cultivating an intersectional grief-informed systemic approach to teacher leadership. Our grief-informed stance is foregrounded by "intersectionality, " or what Black feminist legal studies scholar, Crenshaw (2016) articulates as the "intersectional impact of racism, sexism, and classism" because it is impossible to ignore that Black people in the US are dying at disproportionately higher rates from COVID-19. In the past decade, there has been a growing body of literature on teacher leadership. This scholarship brings much-needed attention to the role of teacher leaders within schools and districts, especially with regard to licensure requirements, career advancement opportunities, professional learning communities, school improvement plans, student success, and culturally responsive school leadership (Khalifa et al., 2016; Killion et al., 2016; York-Barr & Duke, 2004). We wholeheartedly agree that teachers are well positioned and are also severely underutilized in making some of the most critical decisions concerning school and districts. At the same time, we are deeply concerned with the lack of systemic attention for meeting the grief needs of teachers, especially amid a grief-stricken climate. Furthermore, even among teachers who are grieving, the burden of grief is inequitably distributed. Specifically, intersectionality issues amplify grief among Black women teachers. According to Killion et al. (2016), "a systemic approach to teacher leadership elevates the significance, visibility, and viability of teacher leadership as a means of improving teaching and learning" (p. 20). Furthermore, they argue, there are four main components that make up a system of teacher leadership: (1) a clear definition, (2) conducive conditions, (3) dispositions, and (4) assessment of the impact of teacher leadership. Further, they argue it's necessary to name these four components because "there remains insufficient practical guidance for developing systemic approaches that advance and sustain viable teacher leadership" (p. 4). We agree. In The Urgency of Intersectionality, Crenshaw (2016) asserts that "if we can't see the problem, we can't fix the Teacher leadership that supports the needs of classroom educators who are experiencing and reacting to loss is an area of growing need. What systems and practices might promote wellness? Connecting Intersectionality and Grief in Teacher Leadership We have been engaging in research about grief among teachers before the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, as we explain in more detail in our "positionality" below. According to the US

English Education, 2021

In this essay, the author reflects on the importance of accepting and expressing emotion in teach... more In this essay, the author reflects on the importance of accepting and expressing emotion in teach-ers’ lived experiences. By centering emotion work in preservice teacher praxis, teacher educators can make emotion work visible and assign value to it.

Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 2020

Scholarship in English Education has suggested that English teachers can invite experiences of de... more Scholarship in English Education has suggested that English teachers can invite experiences of death and loss into English classrooms as part of curricular engagement because students' identities and experiences should be witnessed in classrooms (e.g., Dutro, 2019). Scholarship on literature response and instruction has emphasized that readers should make personal connections and respond emotionally to texts. Drawing on feminist understandings of emotion, this interview study investigated what work teachers do in efforts to engage the topics of death and loss as part of English language arts curriculum when they themselves are affected by personal loss. Findings revealed that amidst emotional responses to texts they characterized as "overwhelming," teachers do considerable emotion management to fulfill what they perceive as professional norms and to enact what they believe to be important to literature instruction. This study therefore attends to challenges teachers might face when asked to engage topics of death and loss as part of literature instruction and provides insight into how English Education researchers and educators might support teachers in efforts to address topics of death and loss in their English language arts curriculum.

Forum: SozialForschung, 2020

In this article, we share our different perspectives using the philosophical lens of phenomenolog... more In this article, we share our different perspectives using the philosophical lens of phenomenology to shape a hermeneutic research methodology considering the experiences of English teachers using arts-based or aesthetic pedagogy. The consideration includes the use of poetry, film, and other texts, and we approach this exploration of method and pedagogy from alternative philosophical stances (AHMED, 2006; MERLEAU-PONTY, 1993 [1964]; VAN MANEN, 2018). What unites the two studies is a sense of the importance of teachers' experiences in meaning-making and interpretation as they work to convey instruction to their students through texts that speak to lived experience in a variety of ways.

English Journal, 2020

Two teacher educators share strategies that address teachers’ grieving and loss by reading litera... more Two teacher educators share strategies that address teachers’ grieving and loss by reading literature with students.

Recent research in English education has emphasised dialogically organised instruction to promote... more Recent research in English education has emphasised dialogically organised instruction to promote learning talk; yet little is known about teachers’ perceptions of their efforts to teach dialogically. This study draws on video-cued interviews to examine how secondary preservice English teacher Emma experiences trying to teach dialogically and the conflicting demands it elicits for her. Findings indicate that she must navigate competing discourses including the curriculum, the ideas of her mentor teacher, her beliefs about dialogic teaching and her university schooling. Emma’s accounts revealed that satisfying these at once was not achievable, and that her endeavour to become a dialogic teacher was rife with conflict.

Written Communication, 2018

Writing studies scholarship has long understood the need for context-based studies of student wri... more Writing studies scholarship has long understood the need for context-based studies of student writing. Few studies, however, have closely examined how students use intertextual relationships in the context of learning to compose argumentative essays. Drawing on a 17-day argumentative writing unit in a ninth-grade humanities classroom, this article uses the concept of “intertextual trace” to explore how students make intertextual connections in their writing and negotiate the social dynamics of classroom learning. Intertextual analysis of students’ final essays revealed overlapping tracings and resonances across multiple resources, showing how and the ways in which students create arguments and respond to exigencies within a classroom setting. Analysis of thematic, structural, and lexical tracings also showed students making intertextual connections through repeating, reordering, responding to, and extending the texts offered by their teacher and peers. In so doing, students served as curators—shaping ideas, curricular offerings, and language into final argumentative essays—who were able to develop agency in and through their writing.

Olsen, A. W., VanDerHeide, J., Goff, B., & Dunn, M. B. (2018). Examining Intertextual Connections in Written Arguments: A Study of Student Writing as Social Participation and Response. Written Communication, 35(1), 58-88. DOI: 10.1177/0741088317739557

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emeral... more If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.

Various instructional approaches have been laid out for conceptualizing argumentation talk and wr... more Various instructional approaches have been
laid out for conceptualizing argumentation talk
and writing in English classrooms. One
prominent, and historically durable, approach
is formalist—teachers slot the teaching of
argument into a form-based approach, usually
using the 5-paragraph theme. This model too
often fails to persuade students of the
significance of argumentation—the social, ethical,
and other work that argument writing and
talk does in the world. Drawing on research
examples from our ongoing work on argument
talk and writing in English classrooms, we
articulate a second model, a dialogic framework,
conceptualizing argument writing as a
multivoiced conversational turn in which the
writer responds to previous utterances and
anticipates future utterances.

Editorials by Mandie Bevels Dunn

Most teachers of English language learners are not fl uently bilingual, and many don't receive fo... more Most teachers of English language learners are not fl uently bilingual, and many don't receive formal professional development in teaching emergent bilingual students. Thus, they aren't always adequately prepared to meet the challenges of working with this growing demographic of K-12 students. Alvarez argues that teachers' greatest resources are the students themselves, with both a facility in their home language and ties to their home communities.

In this collection, Claire Lutkewitte and her contributors explore both writing for and about mob... more In this collection, Claire Lutkewitte and her contributors explore both writing for and about mobile technologies and writing with mobile technologies.

Research in the Teaching of English, 2017

By joining NCTE, your membership introduces you to a diverse and knowledgeable community of peers... more By joining NCTE, your membership introduces you to a diverse and knowledgeable community of peers. Whether you are passionate about a special interest area or looking to connect with colleagues on a local level, you'll find it here.