Listening to and with the lives of adolescents

It's been far too long since I posted an entry here. I have no one to blame but myself... but for good measure I'll also give a little credit to the very long and not always voluntary todo list that consumed me for the past many months.

But another reason is a very good one -- the publication of a new volume that brings a focus of arts and aesthetics to the work my research team and I have been doing over the past several years. Arts, Media, and Justice: Multimodal Explorations with Youth features contributions from graduate students, youth researchers, arts educators, and established literacy scholars who take up various contours of the intersections of the titular concepts of the book. The book is co-edited with Tiffany DeJaynes, a wonderful colleague and friend who is up to some amazing work of her own with high school students turned budding qualitative researchers.

Building from this volume, that draws on the Reimagining Futures Project, last year some colleagues, graduates students and I launched the Youth, Media, and Educational Justice Project -- a consortium that we are building in an effort to bring participatory approaches to the study and support of the lives of court-involved youth, including the young people involved in the Juvenile Justice system with whom we have been working for the past near decade (and a bit longer than that for some of us...!) as well as young people in foster care who will likely age out while still in the the care of the child welfare system.

What, pray tell, might this have to do with adolescent literacies? In this work we are deeply informed by the basic ideas that have always grounded my study of young people's literate lives:

• youth are engaged in myriad forms of expression and communication (thus rendering the use of "illiterate" utterly moot); 
• found within adolescents' literacies are markers of affiliation and connection (to communities, to people, to texts, and more);
• the varied contours of youths' literate lives are replete with evidence of their ways of knowing -- of knowing about the world, of making themselves known in the world.

We bring to this set of underlying assumptions new questions about belonging and becoming, questions that gain new urgency in the current and ongoing discourses of laws and policies that place adolescents' wellbeing at a far remove from decision making. Most notably, these concerns are brought into stark relief in the ongoing and deeply divided debates about the NYPD's #stopandfrisk policies, including today's ruling on the policy.

We take as our mission four entry points into the pursuit of educational justice for court-involved youth in which our position and posture is that of listening both to and with young people:

• Media making
• Mentoring
• Research
• Education

I, along with my YMEJ team members, will be blogging about these and related ideas over on our YMEJ blog. I encourage you to follow and also to keep up with us on Twitter.


Next up here -- a short post about some of the excellent reads I encountered this summer, all of which touched, in some way, on adolescents' ways of communicating, knowing, being, becoming, and belonging...

Wishing you a restorative August in the meantime.

Seeking provocations and reclaiming the numbers game

"And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom." -- Anaïs Nin

In she walked. Already I was braced. And was not disappointed. She unleashed her net of despair, insistent on the savior story; the bootstraps-blindside-redemption narrative.

I sat, with jaw clenched and teeth gnashed, interjecting occasionally when her questions led her to draw absurd conclusions from the responses. She already knew the story she wanted to tell: her questions felt like artifice.

But my anger and hurt/surprise at what seemed like a missed opportunity to tell a compelling story presented an opportunity for tremendous pride. I watched with a full heart as a young man of 20 years held his ground and conveyed his convictions with a resounding calm. I was reminded, by him and familiar and new graduate students, that I am truly part of a team of like-minded, earnest, creative others. The "risk to blossom" must be taken.

This woman, this reporter, presented a provocation -- a reminder that our work is about creating the spaces to cultivate and nurture forth the creative capacities of the youth with whom we work. I am naïve if I forget that the histories and institutional affiliations of "our" youth -- who are involved with the justice system - will be of great interest to distant others. But how might we communicate, effectively and passionately, that these are normal, everyday, engaged, playful, thoughtful young people who are not only so much more than their institutional labels, they often defy those labels entirely.

I was describing this year's project to a former student on the steps in between buildings this week. She noted that in her recent experience working for an academic research center, research like ours was not what was being funded or sought out by the funding agencies. They want numbers. So let's give them numbers:
- the frequency of smiles between youth and adults, participants and facilitators
- how long it takes someone to feel comfortable enough to offer a peer encouragement
- the average number of affirmations and to whom they are directed
- how often and how many genre risks a young person takes - in their composing, consuming, and distribution of texts
- how many, within a given educational space, feel a sense of belonging

And let us reclaim outcomes in the realm of participation - real participation and not merely the behaviors that have been sanctioned by "experts" -- and look for value added in how youth contribute to shaping the curriculum of the educational spaces in which they participate; of course, this assumes educators will allow them this invitation. Could we imagine outcomes that sought greater humaneness among members of a classroom community? Or the mere recognition that one is a member of a community...

Reclamation of the stuff that seems to attract and affirm the monetary risks funders are willing to take; actions that leverage the ideas that capture the broader social imagination by transforming it with tales of fantastical imaginaries -- this is the new frontier of socially conscious, morally committed, pedogically inspired research about the literate lives of adolescents.

CFP: Visual Interpretations conference at MIT

humanities + digital conference 2010

"Visual Interpretations" - Aesthetics, Methods, and Critiques

Of Information Visualization in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

May 20-22, 2010 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology/HyperStudio

http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/h-digital/

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? 
And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research?

HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as "humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)

We welcome submissions from practitioners and theorists of digital humanities as well as such connected disciplines as art, design, visual culture, museum studies, and computer science.

Topics include:
·       Expressive and artistic dimensions of visualizations
·       Subjectivity and objectivity in information visualization
·       Dynamic/multidimensional visualizations and user collaboration
·       Social media and contextualized visualization
·       Cultural history of visual epistemology
·       Limits and affordances of the translation from data to visualization
·       2D and 3D visualizations of historical/social/political data
·       Visualization across media and the archive
·       Digital visual literacy & accessibility
·       Relationships between database and interface
·       Alternative modes of data representation.

Submissions:
We are inviting submissions for the following conference formats:
·       Papers with 15 minutes of presentation and short discussions (12 slots)
·       Short presentations, so called “6/4s” with 6 minutes of presentation and 4 minutes of discussion (18 slots available)
·       Mini-Workshops, 30 minutes each (6 slots)
·       Demos and Posters (30 slots)

Deadline for submissions:  March 31, 2010
Organizers:
MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities (http://hyperstudio.mit.edu)
MIT Communications Forum (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/)

For more information: http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/h-digital/ or contact: h.digital@mit.edu

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

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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31st annual ethnography in education research forum

***CALL for PAPERS***
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 2, 2009
NOTIFICATION: early November, 2009
REQUIRED PREREGISTRATION FOR PRESENTERS: December 1, 2009

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?

There has been much talk of change in our societies, from suggestions of a post-racial era, to predictions of minority-majority demographic shifts and class mobility, to initiatives for financial reorganization and school accountability. In such times of crisis, or opportunity, ethnographers and qualitative researchers are uniquely positioned to be able to find, understand, and share creative new ways of learning and knowing. At this 31st annual Ethnography in Education research forum, we hope to hear about and share creative re-imaginings and new ways of doing education, with an eye towards the future of education reform, research, and practice.

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

All proposals may be submitted online beginning August 14:
http://www.gse.upenn.edu/cue/forum.php

nctear 2010 - cfp and info

NCTEAR 2010

Assembly for Research Midwinter Conference

METHODOLOGY MATTERS: MOVING LITERACY RESEARCH FORWARD

February 19th-21st, 2010; University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Co-sponsored by Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Co-Chairs: Amanda Godley, sj Miller, and Amanda Thein

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
The 2010 conference theme focuses on new research methodologies that have
emerged in response to new questions in literacy research, such as the
relationship between literacy and identity, longitudinal literacy
development, and out-of-school literacies. The conference theme also aims to
address current practical, theoretical, and methodological challenges in
literacy research, such as collecting rich data within classrooms and
managing tensions between "scientifically-based" research and in-depth
qualitative research. Our keynote speakers will speak to the affordances and
challenges of various literacy research methodologies, including memoir,
oral history, classroom discourse analysis, policy research and
teacher/faculty collaborations.

We welcome proposals that describe literacy researchers' methodological
insights and challenges through descriptions of specific studies,
explorations of emerging theories of research, and considerations of
practical and ethical research dilemmas.

Proposals (no more than 2 single-spaced pages) should address the following:
The research question(s), methodology, findings/issues/questions for
discussion, and how the research will contribute to the conference
conversation. If your paper is a conceptual/theoretical one, please describe
your theoretical framework and argument and tell how it will contribute to
the conference conversation. We strongly encourage the participation of
classroom teachers and graduate students, so if you are currently a
classroom teacher or graduate student, please indicate so in your proposal.
Please send all proposals to NCTEAR@pitt.edu. The deadline for submission of
proposals is September 30, 2009.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, check out the conference website at:
http://nctear2010pittsburgh.wetpaint.com/

QUESTIONS? Email NCTEAR@pitt.edu

knowing by doing?

as fears about the dark side of social networking abound, one question continues to persist for me: to what extent does someone (a researcher of adolescents' literacies, for example) benefit from participating in the digital communicative landscape when aiming to make sense of that landscape within the lives of aforementioned adolescents?

i recall having a similar conversation about gaming and literacy research and wondering whether one had to play video games in order to research gaming in the lives of youth. thinking back to that conversation now, i am reminded of a video i saw recently on edutopia in which mimi ito is being interviewed about her digital youth study. in it, ito describes three ways that she observed youth engaging in informal learning outside of school with technologies:
hanging out
messing around
geeking out

each of these "ways in" - what ito and her colleagues refer to as "genres of participation" - is associated with various sets of practices and postures and social communities. as i thought about these distinctions (see video and full report for on these genres), i began to wonder about how researchers fit into (or don't) these participation genres. and to what extent and in what ways do we locate ourselves within these already hybrid spaces and moments of digital participation...

writing and literacies sig - website and newsletter

check out the writing and literacies sig website - join us this year for an excellent program in san diego!
also check out our latest newsletter, chock full of members' pub info, links, and info about this year's business meeting featuring eva lam and paul kei matsuda.

and now, a wordling of this year's program (based on the titles) - enjoy :)

at a glance: writing and literacies sig sessions at aera, 2009

1. Genres and Structures in Writing
Session type: Paper Discussion (formerly known as Roundtables)
Time: Tue, Apr 14 - 10:35am - 11:15am Place: San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina, Marriott Hall Salon 4

2. Hybridity, Multimodality, and New Forms of Composing
Session type: Symposium
Time: Wed, Apr 15 - 8:15am - 10:15am Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28D

3. Literacies Between Borders and Across Contexts
Session type: Paper Session
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 8:15am - 10:15am Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

4. LitScapes: Mapping the Terrain of Youth Identities, Spaces, and Texts
Session type: Symposium
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 10:35am - 12:05pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

5. National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy Presents Authors of Its Series “On…” Series
Session type: Interactive Symposium
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

6. Sociocultural and Historical Perspectives on Literacy
Session type: Paper Session
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 25B

7. Theorizing and Implementing New Directions in Writing and Literacy Research
Session type: Interactive Symposium
Time: Wed, Apr 15 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28D

8. Twenty-Five Years of New Literacy Studies: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Session type: Symposium
Time: Wed, Apr 15 - 10:35am - 12:05pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28D

9. Writing and Literacies SIG Business Meeting
Session type: Business Meeting
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 6:15pm - 8:15pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

10. Writing Identities
Session type: Paper Discussion (formerly known as Roundtables)
Time: Tue, Apr 14 - 11:25am - 12:05pm Place: San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina, Marriott Hall Salon 4

cycles

we could argue that everything in life, in large part, has a cycle, a rhythm, a predictable heartbeat... and when that momentum is disrupted or derailed, the chain reaction can have unimaginable consequences for which we are left unprepared. in ethnographic work, relationships and local knowledge are the lifeblood of the experience. this is even more true when the work is participatory in nature, and involves multiple people with multiple perspectives, interests, intentions, and histories. so when this rhythm, this lifeblood is thinned, or halted, or cut off for even an instant, the impact is significant...

recently, i was sharing some of my experiences doing participatory research with youth with a class of graduate students in a qualitative methods class. i talked about the various projects i've been involved with over the last decade and what "participatory" has meant across those contexts. and more specifically, how i establish rapport with the youth who are involved with my research. i hadn't really articulated these aspects of my work before, and was excited to have the chance to reflect on these
here's some of what i came up with:
- a pedagogy of play
- multiple modes of participation
- researcher vulnerability
- willingness to let the focus of inquiry evolve and change

i wrote a bit about this in the handbook chapter that's coming out soon, and i'm working on expanding these aspects in a methods piece i'm writing about participatory research in a digital age. i'll also be using this space to tease out these ideas in the near future. for now, i must return to the final stages of a paper that is long overdue to our discussant in prep for the anthro meetings this week...!

hope, with strings attached, might not really be hope at all

earlier this summer, i was invited back to the program where i have been a participant observer and teacher for the last two+ years to serve in a different capacity: as a guest speaker in a class about college. it was one of the rare times when i've readily discussed my role as a faculty member while at this organization, but was happy to share what insights i could about my own college experiences and as someone who contributes to admissions decisions at the graduate level. all of the participants in the class had been at the program for at least three months and had either already obtained their high school diplomas or had taken the GED test. most of the young men in the class were awaiting scores.

i went in prepared to engage the group in a discussion about what college meant to them, what role they saw it playing in their lives, and how they envisioned the path to achieving their higher education goals. i should note here, if i haven't done so already, that i am excited about the existence of this class within the context of a program for court-involved youth, for whom educational opportunities are significantly less accessible than they ought to be. (more on that another time)

our conversation humbled me in a way that i didn't expect to be humbled. i used a "college by the numbers" approach to initiating conversation and allowing time for their questions. on a large chart paper i wrote down prompts like, "age you entered school," "# of years you've spent attending formal education," "# of mentors you've had," etc. my goal was to point out the vast range of experiences each participant undoubtedly has already had that he might build upon when moving forward; i wanted them to see that they weren't starting at zero; they had/have a wealth of experiences to draw on when writing entrance essays, going on interviews, making plans for the future. as the program notes, they (and i) strove to create experiences of success while participants were enrolled in classes here. we moved through these exercises together and then the conversation took a turn. i asked them to consider the questions: "what kind of life do i want to lead? what will get me there?"

what resulted was a conversation laden with angst:
-how can i pursue my education when i keep getting stopped for just walking in my neighborhood?
- i can't just leave my family; my friends; my life
- i want freedom. how will going to college help me with that? how can i have freedom when everyone and everything around me won't let me have it?
- in here isn't the same as out there
- the people around me, the neverending police searches - they'll lead me straight to prison

- i want to lead a life that's free; a life of freedom.

with words like this, who can sleep?

Where the FUCK did you learn to drive? Jerkoff!
Words spoken by a baseball cap wearing, ruddy complexioned, Bluetooth headsetted driver of a navy blue SUV to my turbaned cab driver in response to the bopping and weaving the cabbie was guilty of as he tried to jot down a phone number of a car for sale while driving at high speeds down the West Side Highway, all the while as I clutched the Mac I was transporting for use in our digital media class.

You’ll never have to lift anything heavy with all these men around in here.
Words spoken by a female staff member at the alternative to incarceration program where I conduct fieldwork and occasionally teach classes as I walked in with my arms full of the cardboard box containing the Mac I had risked my life for just a few minutes earlier.

It’s not me, but it’s me, you know? You'll see...
Words spoken by a graduate of the above noted program after giving me his Myspace url.

JESUS is my boss
Words embroidered into the navy blue cap worn by a man who looked at me strangely as I was recording field notes into my digital voice recorder as I headed home from fieldwork on the subway.

looking up and down and turning around

i looked up today and for the first time noticed that atop a house in my neighborhood is a beautiful rooftop deck. this is significant because i have lived in my house for six and a half years and know my neighborhood well - or so i thought. but today, while walking back from the grocery store, i thought to look up at an intersection where apparently i had never looked up before. so i spent the rest of the walk home looking up and noticing other things (some of which shouldn't be seen by the random passer-by...) and looking only slightly like a lost tourist and made it safely home with only a brief slip-n-slide on a patch of ice that hadn't quite melted away. i looked up. this one act, this one shift of line of sight, opened up new information and the story of my neighborhood has been expanded.

as a kid i was told to look right, left, and right again before crossing the street. i was told to watch my back, look straight ahead, don't look down (which always made me look down). as a child, when i was much smaller than the rest of the people in my house, i was told to look up but after i could navigate through every day activities on my own, i guess i forgot to look up as often as i look left, right, back, front, and down.

as qualitative researchers, we are taught to interview, collect artifacts, be participant observers and prepare fieldnotes, conduct focus groups... what haven't we thought to do? what situations can we create or put ourselves in that might render new insights into the questions that keep us up at night (or is that me?)? after reading the wonderful growing up with television, by joellen fisherkeller, a couple of students in my tv & youth class wondered how significant three case studies could be in the vast landscape of research related to the role/impact of tv in the lives of youth. i used to answer that query by advocating the richness and texture that comes from deep inquiry into phenomena, made possible through the use of ethnography, case studies and the like. but now i find myself asking a question in response: (how) can we afford to keep asking the same questions and using the same instruments/methods/positionalities/roles...? especially when the stories that are out in the ether are in desperate need of rewriting.

hopefully this will all make more sense in 9.5 hours at which time i co-present the first of two papers this weekend. maybe it will be ok if i just look up and present with my back to the audience...

myspace s.o.s.

when i logged onto my myspace account yesterday, i was dismayed - nay, heartsick - that all the messages in my inbox from a fellow myspacer were GONE! this person's profile has been deleted, which meant that all of our myspace message correspondence is gone, as well. so i offer this as a warning to those who may be relying on that messaging function as a source of data or who want to keep a record of some kind: cut and paste into a more stable format!

and, assuming that everyone already knows all of this, b/c i am somewhat of a ms neophyte, i ask: help! does anyone know how to retrieve these lost messages? is it doable? and why, oh, why do i not heed the call to back up my work - in whatever format it may exist?