abstract: Given the profound influence that schools have on students’ genders and the existing scholarly research in the field of education studies which draws clear implications between practices of schooling and sanctioning and promoting particular gender subjectivities, often in alignment with traditional norms, I conduct a critical ethnography to examine the practices of gender in one eighth grade English language arts (ELA) classroom at an arts-missioned charter school. I do this to explore how ELA instruction at an arts charter school may provide opportunities for students to do gender differently. To guide this dissertation theoretically, I rely on the process philosophy of Erin Manning (2016, 2013, 2007) to examine the processual interactions among of student movement, choreography, materiality, research-creation, language, and art. Thus, methods for this study include field notes, student assignments, interviews and focus groups, student created art, maps, and architectural plans. In the analysis, I attempt to allow the data to live on their own, and I hope to give them voice to speak to the reader in a way that they spoke to me. Some of them speak through ethnodrama; some of them speak through autoethnography, visual art and cartography, and yet others through various transcriptions. Through these modes of analysis, I am thinking-doing-writing. The analysis also includes my thinking with fields – the fields of gender studies, qualitative inquiry, educational research, English education, and critical theory. In an attempt to take to the fields, I weave all of these through each other, through Manning and other theorists and through my ongoing perceptions of event-happenings and what it means to do qualitative research in education. Accordingly, this dissertation engages with the various fields to reconsider how school practices might conceive the ways in which they produce gender, and how students perceive gender within the school space. In this way, the dissertation provides ways of thinking that may unearth what was previously cast aside or uncover possibilities for what was previously unthought. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2019

This work was possible through the support of my personal and professional families. Personally, my husband Brad was my continual encourager through each phase of this journey. This accomplishment is as much his as mine. Also, through this process I feel I have matured at the hands of the Lord through His careful, peaceful leading within the many nuanced steps of completing the doctoral program. Professionally, the ladies forming my doctoral committee have been more than advisors, but mentors. Their thoughtful counsel helped me feel capable throughout the many phases of becoming a researcher and scholar, yet they offered insight always with attention to the aspects of life that keep us whole outside of our work

This dissertation study focused on complications and opportunities that surface for classroom learning in the intersections of a teacher’s methods, students’ literacies, and digital space. Though researchers have discussed adolescents’ literacies and participation in out-of-school digital spaces, there persists a need to explore and document the ways educators and students use classroom digital spaces. This study examined the teaching and learning experiences of one teacher and eight students as they collaborate, compose, and produce a literature-based digital role-play. Research questions focused on how the activity of a classroom digital role-play might connect with current literacy reforms, in what ways the teacher’s incorporation of the digital space might shape her classroom identity and pedagogy, and in what ways students’ digital participation might reflect, extend, and negotiate their school-ascribed identities as non-proficient learners. To address these questions, I collected data between March and June 2014 in a 10th grade English language arts classroom of a rural, Midwest public high school. This particular course was designed as an academic literacy support for students labeled as non-proficient school readers. I amassed my data collection from multiple interviews with teacher and student participants, series of classroom observations, student writings, surveys, classroom documents, teaching journals, classroom audio-recordings, and field notes. I analyzed these data using a combination of qualitative methods: ethnographic approaches, narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, and virtual methods. I first created a narrative portrait and analysis of the teacher and students to illuminate participants’ multiple social identities. I next used methods of discourse analysis to examine the teacher and students’ language use in the classroom and digital spaces, to extend my understanding of the way their speech and writing helps them to construct social identities. My findings complicate the way teachers might approach the use of digital spaces. Data reveal ways that the digital role-play space presents disruptions to the teacher’s ways of thinking about her classroom identity and practices. My findings also suggest that the use of a classroom digital space affords opportunities for students to explore their classroom social identities; the digital space flattens traditional school hierarchies in which the teacher leads and students learn. My study is potentially significant in that I explore the way the teacher and students experience and make meaning from the blend of their classroom interactions and digital literacy practices. Further, I argue that folding a digital space into daily classroom life reveals significant possibilities for classroom collaboration, distributed knowledge, and shared learning among students and teacher.

Contemporary English language arts (ELA) teachers engage students who have been born into a digital world where emergent literacies challenge the traditionally authoritative perspectives and physical boundaries of books and classrooms. This qualitative case study inquired into the classroom experiences of three senior English language arts teachers located in two western Canadian provinces in our digital-based communications age. Analyzed through a cultural studies lens, this inquirys data were collected through the methodological triangulation of classroom observation, semi-structured interview, and online journal responses. The studys findings reveal the significance of the three selected teachers textual stances and pedagogy to their students new literacies in this time of epochal communications and cultural change. A broadening horizon of textual choice and compositional possibilities complicated each of the three teachers classroom practice in a subject area whose content, traditionally, relies upon reading and responding to print-based canonical texts. Each of these teachers was working In medias res to understand which texts and textual practices should be held on to, and which could be relinquished for the benefit of their students language learning. A major concern that emerged for each of these three educators was a perceived loss of deep critical readings by their students. This concern was counter-balanced for the subject area specialists by an emergent understanding of the affordances of a broadening set of texts and textual practices a developing awareness that students critical literacies can emerge in a rhizomal manner, and that teachers and students can co-author their literacy experiences within the (con)text of the ELA classroom. For these three participants, teaching ELA has become an ellipsis in a digital-based age where certain previously privileged texts and a sense of authority need to be relinquished in order to achieve the co-constructed understanding of word and world so valued by these educators and their students. / Secondary Education

This study used a mixed-methods design to determine instructional strategies that best enhance pre-service teachers’ valuing of digital storytelling as a method to teach the narrative writing process; to consider how digital storytelling increases pre-service teachers’ valuing of the role of reflection in the writing process; and to explore how pre-service teachers’ become more aware of the relationship between words and images to convey meaning. The study also considered aspects of the project that result in pre-service teachers valuing digital storytelling to teach the writing process and investigated how engaging in a digital storytelling project helps pre-service teachers better understand the connection between the planning process in the text-based environment and the planning process in the digital environment. Results indicated that constructing digital stories in a supportive learning environment led pre-service teachers to be more aware of the role that reflection plays in writing process and to value digital storytelling as an effective method to teaching writing and integrate digital technology in the classroom. Participating in the project increased pre-service teachers’ understanding of the connection between the planning process in the text-based environment and the planning process in the digital environment. Use of a storyboard served as a reflective planning tool that enabled pre-service teacher to better understand the connection between words and images to convey meaning and extended the planning process into the digital environment. Pre-service teachers valued the digital storytelling project as a model for teaching the writing process in the digital environment, as a method for self expression and for sharing stories within a community of learners, and as a strategy for integrating digital technology in the classroom.

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A pedagogy of multiliteracies, which has been advocated by numerous literacy specialists working in the field of literacy education, attributes literacy as multiple, dynamic and socially situated. Further, a pedagogy of multiliteracies stresses the multimodal features of communication, and students instructed from this pedagogical perspective explore the visual, gestural, spatial and auditory modes, as well as the linguistic ones of speech and writing. Finally, a pedagogy of multiliteracies was developed with the goal of creating a more equitable education system, in which learner diversity can be represented in the literacies of the English Language Arts classroom. In consideration of this goal, a multiliteracies pedagogy prompts teachers to include those literacy practices that students engage with outside of school in the English Language Arts classroom. The purpose of this research was, firstly, to learn about the literacies which secondary teachers are exploring with their students in the English Language Arts, teachers’ motivation for doing so, and how these literacies are being instructed. Secondly, factors that influence the enactment of this pedagogy in the English Language Arts as seen in the literature on the topic were explored. These factors were standardized tests, teacher education, access to resources and finally, teacher culture. The design of case study was used to answer the research questions, and qualitative research methods were employed to collect and analyze data provided by participants, all practicing English Language Arts teachers at the secondary level. The types of data collected included interviews, observations, field notes taken during the interviews and observations and finally, teaching artifacts such as assignment sheets. The findings of my study suggested that although many teachers are incorporating a range of literacies in their classes, the features of these literacies and the literacy skills needed to interpret multiple modes were not often addressed in the classroom. Participants noted the inclusion of a variety of literacies in their programs as a means to engage students in the skills and materials traditionally featured in the English Language Arts, or to expand on themes apparent in literature and connect these themes to contemporary culture. In addition, few participants considered the ideological elements inherent in literacy education in their integration of multiliteracies in their classes, nor did many of these teachers describe the need for students to develop critical literacy skills. The impediments that appeared to limit the enactment of this pedagogy were entrenched teachers’ views about literacy learning, lack of education in the foundational theory of this pedagogy, and lack of time for professional development, collegial sharing, and amassing resources that could support teachers towards incorporating a range of literacies in their programs. Despite the identification in much of the literature of standardized tests as a major impediment to the realization of this pedagogical approach in the classroom, such tests did not appear to significantly influence the participants’ implementation of multiple literacies in their classes. The findings of this study suggest that the teachers were incorporating a range of literacies in their English Language Arts programs, yet the teachers making these inclusions were not motivated by a desire to achieve the aims of increased equity in literacy education or to develop students’ understanding of the multimodal features of communication. Consequently, many of the goals of this pedagogy were not being realized in the English Language Arts classrooms of the research participants.

The presence in state standards of the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain (referred to Bloom 1 in this study) and A Taxonomy of Learning, Teaching, and Assessing (referred to as Bloom 2 in this study) was examined in this qualitative investigation. Standards for the English language arts eighth grade curriculum were chosen for examination in order to maximize the opportunity for all Bloom levels to appear; all states have language arts standards and eighth grade is the highest grade level at which NCLB testing is mandated. The standards documents of the 36 stated that have language arts standards unique to eighth grade comprised the analyzed data source and were accessed from state education websites. Descriptive narrations of cognitive levels, benchmarks, indicators, strands, sub-strands, writers of the standards, and any and all references to Bloom 1 and Bloom 2 were investigated. Inter-coder reliability was calculated to address the major research question regarding the clarity of reference to cognitive level of the standards. The qualitative content analysis research methodology chosen to answer the study's research questions culminated in the emergence of four major themes. 1) The extent to which the state standards were classifiable according to Bloom 1 or Bloom 2 depended largely upon consonance in assumptions made by the coders regarding a presumed conditions component for the standards; state standards lack condition components specifying what learners are presented with or have access to at the time the competency stated in the standard is demonstrated. 2) Eighth grade English language arts state standards incorporate cognitive learning levels of Bloom 1 and/or Bloom 2 through the range of Bloom levels. The verb "use" was noted as the most frequent taxonomic verb appearing in the standards. 3) Only five states directly referenced Bloom 1 or Bloom 2 in the documents' introduction/overview, table of contents, document guides, acknowledgements, appendices, and/or bibliography. 4) Of the 2,566 standard statements examined, 96 percent appear to be above the lowest Bloom 1 (Knowledge) and Bloom 2 (Remember) level, employing the researcher's assumed condition component. Overall, results showed that while some states incorporate Bloom 1 and/or Bloom 2, a majority of the standards appear to be written in the lower levels of the Bloom taxonomies. The researcher suggested strategies such as collaboration, consulting, training, and surveying students, parents, teachers, administrators, state committees, and agencies on knowledge of and inclusion of the Bloom taxonomic frameworks in order to improve the clarity of the intended cognitive levels set by the state standards.