10.30.2009

multimodality and learning conference 2010 - call for papers

Multimodality and Learning Conference: Environments, Rhetoric, Recognition, Play, and Methods

July 6th and 7th 2010
Institute of Education, Bloomsbury, London, UK
Aim and scope
The overall aim of the conference is to explore multimodal perspectives on learning and to open up theoretical, methodological and pedagogical questions and debate. The conference will be of interest to educational practitioners, research students, researchers and academics from a variety of disciplines including semiotics, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and design.

Call for papers
We welcome symposia and individual papers on multimodality and learning that address the conference themes outlined in the attachment:  Thematic strands. Abstracts can be submitted using the forms available at: www.multimodality.org.uk. Further information on submitting an abstract will be posted on the website shortly.
All abstracts will be peer-reviewed. Deadline 5pm on 26th February 2010.

Registration
Conference fee: £200 full fee; Students £100. Lunch and light refreshments included, acommodation not included. Registration deadline 31 May 2010

Key dates
26th February 2010 Deadline for submission of abstracts 31st May 2010 Deadline for registration 6th and 7th July 2010
Conference Organizing committee: Centre for Multimodal Research, Institute of Education, University of London – Richard Andrews, Jeff Bezemer, Andrew Burn, Sophia Diamantopoulou, Carey Jewitt, Gunther Kress, Diane Mavers, Caroline Pelletier

10.25.2009

digital media and learning conference - call for papers, deadline: 10.30.2009

DML: First Annual Digital Media and Learning Conference
Conference Theme: "Diversifying Participation"
Call for papers - Deadline: October 30, 2009


Conference Committee: Henry Jenkins, David Theo Goldberg, Heather Horst, Mimi Ito, Jabari Mahiri and Holly Willis

Keynote speakers: Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins

(from the call)

DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION
A growing body of research has identified how young people's digital media use is tied to basic social and cultural competencies needed for full participation in contemporary society. We continue to develop an understanding of the impact of these experiences on learning, civic engagement, professional development, and ethical comprehension of the digital world.

Yet research has also suggested that young people's forms of participation with new media are incredibly diverse, and that risks, opportunities, and competencies are spread unevenly across the social and cultural landscape. Young people have differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own identities and their place in the world. In some cases, different forms of participation and access correspond with familiar cultural and social divides. In other cases, however, new media have introduced novel and unexpected kinds of social differences, subcultures, and identities.

It is far too simple to talk about this in terms of binaries such as "information haves and have nots" or "digital divides". There are many different kinds of obstacles to full participation, many different degrees of access to information, technologies, and online communities, and many different ways of processing those experiences. Participatory cultures surrounding digital media are characterized by a diversity that does not track automatically to high and low access or more or less sophisticated use. Rather, multiple forms of expertise, connoisseurship, identity, and practice are proliferating in online worlds, with complicated relationships to pre-existing categories such as socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, race, or ethnicity.

We encourage sessions that describe, document, and critically analyze different forms of participation and how they relate to various forms of social and cultural capital. We are interested in accounts of the challenges and obstacles which block or inhibit engagement to different forms of online participation. We also encourage session proposals that engage with successful intervention strategies and pedagogical processes enabling once marginalized groups to more fully exploit the opportunities for learning with digital media. Conversely, we are interested in hearing more about how marginal and subcultural communities find diverse uses of new and emerging technologies, pushing them in new directions and navigating a complicated relationship with "mainstream" forms of participation. Specifically, we seek to understand the following:
  • What can research on more diverse communities contribute to our understanding of the learning ecologies surrounding new media?
  • What are the technologies, practices, economic, and cultural divides that lead to segregation, "gated" information communities, and differential access?
  • When and how do diversity and differentiation in participation promote social and cultural benefits and opportunities, and when do they create schisms that are less equitable or productive?
  • What strategies have proven successful at broadening opportunities for participation, overcoming the many different kinds of segregation or exclusion which impact the online world, and empowering more diverse presences throughout cyberspace?
  • Are there things occurring on the margins of the existing digital culture that might valuably be incorporated into more mainstream practices?
In addition to these questions directly addressing the conference theme, we welcome submissions that address innovative new directions in research and practice relating to digital media and participatory learning.

Read more on conference website.

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10.21.2009

new book on comparative education


if you're interested in international perspectives on educational policy and practice, then this is the book for you:

Critical Approaches to Comparative Education: Vertical Case Studies from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas
Edited by: Frances Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett

Description:
This book unites a dynamic group of scholars who examine linkages among local, national, and international levels of educational policy and practice. Utilizing multi-sited, ethnographic approaches, the essays explore vertical interactions across diverse levels of policy and practice while prompting horizontal comparisons across twelve sites in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The vertical case studies focus on a range of topics, including participatory development, the politics of culture and language, neoliberal educational reforms, and education in post-conflict settings. Editors Vavrus and Bartlett contribute to comparative theory and practice by demonstrating the advantages of ‘thinking vertically.’

Table of Contents:
PART I: APPROPRIATING EDUCATIONAL POLICIES AND PROGRAMS * Localizing No Child Left Behind:  Supplemental Educational Services (SES) in New York City * The Décalage and Bricolage of Higher Education Policymaking in an Inter/national System:  The Unintended Consequences of Participation in the 1992 Senegalese CNES Reform * AIDS and Edutainment:  Inter/National Health Education in Tanzanian Secondary Schools * PART II: EXPLORING PARTICIPATION IN INTER/NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE * Questioning Participation:  Exploring Discourses and Practices of Community Participation in Education Reform in Tanzania * Living Participation: Considering the Promise and Politics of Participatory Educational Reforms in Brazil * Transformative Teaching in Restrictive Times: Engaging Teacher Participation in Small School Reform during an Era of Standardization * PART III: EXAMINING THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DIVERSITY * “Migration Nation”: Intercultural Education and Anti-Racism as Symbolic Violence in Celtic Tiger Ireland * “Don’t You Want Your Child to Be Better than You?”:  Enacting Ideologies and Contesting Intercultural Policy in Peru * Citizenship and Belonging in an Age of Insecurity:  Pakistani Immigrant Youth in New York City * PART IV: MANAGING CONFLICT THROUGH INTER/NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION * The Relief-Development Transition:  Sustainability and Educational Support in Post-Conflict Settings * Perpetuated Suffering:  Social Injustice in Liberian Teachers’ Lives * Positioning Arabic in Schools:  Language Policy, National Identity, and Development in Contemporary Lebanon

10.20.2009

Exploring Childhood Studies - Call for papers

Exploring Childhood Studies: A Graduate Student Conference

The graduate students of the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden invite submissions for papers and poster presentations for their first formal graduate student conference on April 9, 2010. Graduate students from all disciplines who are engaged in research relating to children and childhood are encouraged to submit proposals.

In an attempt to define this emerging and diverse field, the Exploring Childhood Studies conference proposes defining Childhood Studies by "doing" childhood studies; the conference will explore the field by offering explorations within it. We seek papers from all disciplines that keep the child, children, and childhood as their central focus, providing critical thought and insight while locating them in different contexts, fields, and ideologies.

Call for papers - Deadline: Oct. 31, 2009
More information

10.17.2009

Newark Mayor Cory Booker pt.2 (10/16/09)

was watching this clip (below) of cory booker talking with conan, and was especially moved by this quote:
"people think that life is about the big victory. but in my opinion, life is about the small acts of decency, kindness, and love that over a lifetime add up to transformative change."

10.16.2009

decoding college application process

interesting to think about what is said, and not said in this Today Show segment about deciphering the college application process. maybe i've been doing too much "hidden curriculum" reading, but i'm thinking about how this process is mediated so differently across the wide range of schools, not to mention kids who are home schooled. i was the first in my family to go to college in the US and i did a lot of the deciphering for myself, although i vaguely remember my guidance counselor being generally supportive. it helped, i think, that she was able to build on the voracious way in which i approached the process. (if only i could get that organizational zeal back now...!) but how to scaffold the process before the college application?



and, what is missing from these decoding tips?

...

10.09.2009

Charlotte Linde - Saturday Series Lecture

What:  Charlotte Linde will give a talk titled, Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory
Date: October 10th, 2009
Time: 11:00am
Location: 277 Grace Dodge Hall, Teachers College

Linde describes the ways in which institutions use narratives to remember their past, and to work their past in the present. The work is based on an ethnographic study of how narratives are used in a large insurance company to construct both collective and individual identity and memory. Her study looks both at the microstructure of narratives, showing how they are shaped by the institutions within which they are told, and at the large scale effect of narratives in creating individual and institutional identities.

Sponsored by the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies

10.03.2009

bar code art

taking something meant to be invisible or what goes unnoticed and repurposing it by (re)imagining it as a modality for creating art. fantastic!

10.02.2009

rethinking classrooms by listening - new tc press book


Check out this new book by Katherine Schultz!
(also author of Listening: A Framework for Teaching Across Differences and co-editor of School's Out!: Bridging out-of-school literacy with classroom practices)


Rethinking Classroom Participation: Listening to Silent Voices



about the book:

Many educators understand how to gauge learning by paying close attention to student talk. Few know how to interpret and attend to student silence as a form of participation. In her new book, Katherine Schultz examines the complex role student silence can play in teaching and learning. Urging teachers to listen to student silence in new ways, this book offers real-life examples and proven strategies for “rethinking classroom participation” to include all students—those eager to raise their hands to speak and those who may pause or answer in different ways.

Available October, 2009 from Teachers College Press

31st Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum - Deadline extended!

There's still time to submit to the Ethnography Forum - deadline extended to October 4, 2009

Creativity, Crisis and Qualitative Research: Re-imagining Education in a Changing World

February 26 - 27, 2010

Center for Urban Ethnography
University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education
3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA

a little about this year's theme:
We live in an era of rapid changes, and this year has had especially dramatic ones: a global economic crisis, the inauguration of the first African-American President of the United States, and the massive popularization of iPhone-type mobile web devices, to name a few. In U.S. education, for example, charter schools and more and more public schools are experimenting with new ways of doing teaching and learning, from online course formats to “small school” models to ways of making do with smaller budgets and staff. How have the social, economic, cultural, and technological changes of our time influenced our ways of teaching and learning, inside and outside of school, as well as our “ways of knowing” as researchers and practitioners? And how do we create new ways of teaching, learning, researching, and knowing, amidst change?

Plenary speakers:
Samy Alim, University of California at Los Angeles
Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College, and Susan Lytle, University of Pennsylvania
Doug Foley, University of Texas at Austin
Bonny Norton, University of British Columbia


Find out more here.

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