Poetics as Joyful Resistance: Exploring Juan Felipe Herrera’s Jabberwalking, engages in narrative teacher research to examine how the philosophies and practices of Juan Felipe Herrera’s hybrid text on poetry, composition, and creativity, titled Jabberwalking (2018), might extend the pedagogical principles and practices in teaching poetry to resist the norm of literary criticism as the purpose of teaching poetry. By examining three curricular experiences where the pedagogical principles of Jabberwalking guide my teaching practices, I document both students’ and my learning using narrative and spatial justice methodologies. The findings reveal that Jabberwalking may function as not only a pedagogical Thirdspace (Soja, 1996) that works against colonial norms around standardization and high-stakes assessment but may be a belief system about teaching literature and language. When I began this research, a problem that I encountered was the lack of scholarship in response to Jabberwalking. A survey of the literature in response to Herrera’s text, an English y Español retelling of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” reveals that the principal source of criticism consists of reviews. This dissertation contributes to the field by being the first of its kind to consider his philosophies on writing as a pedagogical style guide as well as a tool to work against institutionalized norms around standardized writing instruction. Since the focus of this study was to examine the pedagogical principles and practices that invite in diverse learners and decolonize and expand the literacy practices most often used in writing/literature classrooms, I used narrative research to re-tell the stories of ten participants who reflect the diverse student and teacher population of New York City schools. Through Zoom interviews with a total of ten New York-based teachers from a broad range of personal and professional experiences, I examine Jabberwalking, a text that straddles the polarity of the literary borderland (Templeton, 2019) for its pedagogical implications. My purpose was to examine what happened when the pedagogical principles of Jabberwalking were implemented in three separate curricular experiences that were facilitated in 2019–2022: one site was an improvisational music-oriented workshop in response to Jabberwalking, a second site was a Zoom-based Jabberwalking teaching and learning practices workshop, and a third site was a workshop that incorporated a project-based version of Jabberwalking. Two to three hour-long Zoom retrospective interviews with the ten participants from each of the three workshops were conducted. Their writing or projects produced from the workshop-based writing prompts were then analyzed to consider how or if their work reflects the principles of Jabberwalking I intended to incorporate. I also reflected on my own pedagogical practices because of the interviews and analysis of student work from these three curricular experiences. I transcribed and coded an average of forty pages of interview data for each participant, for a total of over four hundred pages of interview transcription analysis. Each of my research questions were addressed in different ways, depending on the site. I found the following themes in the data for each site: a) Jabberwalking as text, b) Jabberwalking as pedagogical method, c) the detrimental impact of standardization and high-stakes assessment, and d) changes in pedagogy and performance standards since 2020. Through the lens of poetics and the theoretical underpinnings of nonsense (Templeton, 2019), and the candid, expansive stories of the participants, this study arrives at a definition in process that formulates a new understanding of pedagogical possibility utilizing Herrera’s methods. This research has important implications for teachers, students, and policymakers that help us understand how Jabberwalking can present learners of all abilities with new methods of composition to inspire critical, analytical, and restorative writing through a sense of “serious play” (Burgess, 2019).

Informed by post-humanism, my research examines the entanglement of more-than-human forces at the Bread Loaf School of English. The oldest professional development institution of its kind, the Bread Loaf School of English has invited teachers to spend six-weeks each summer studying at its mountain campus since the summer of 1920. When the physical campus was forced to close indefinitely on the eve of its one-hundredth anniversary at the start of the pandemic, the loss of this physical space prompted meditations on over a century of institutional tradition as teachers shared their stories of the mountain campus. Bread Loaf’s landscape is teeming with narrative—stories that blossom like wildflowers each summer before fading with the coming winter. Within those narratives, like the Deleuzoguattarian “orchid and wasp,” the human and non-human transform one another in an intra-active entanglement of bodies. What happens when we pause and attempt to follow the threads of these entangled narratives in order to better understand how more-than-human bodies meet, collide, and contaminate one another over time to constitute the assemblage of the Bread Loaf School of English? The rich tapestry that begins to unfold offers a model for more-than-human storytelling well beyond the mountain, spanning the manifold landscapes teachers return to at the end of the summer.

This autoethnography traces the ten-year journey of one teacher’s interest in and exploration of the experiences in English classes of high-achieving quiet students. Named Quiet Intellects (QIs), these students rarely or do not speak during the many district- and curricula- mandated evaluative tasks in my district that demand their oral contributions. To understand the reasoning that may have led to the current emphasis on student voice in my district, I first investigated the historical place and purpose of student talk in English classrooms. I reviewed extensive conversations I had with English department colleagues that were meant to help us understand the impact of our district’s call for more student talk on our quiet students. From there, I conducted a critical observation of one common English department assessment driven by student talk. Finally, I compiled and analyzed the information obtained from a decade of discussions with QIs regarding their experiences of mandated oral tasks. QIs call into question the value of collaborative learning, articulate clearly their preference for writing over speaking, and bring to light the lack of preparation and coaching available for tasks that require speaking. Additionally, my study suggests the existence of two distinct groups of QIs. The silence of one group seemed to be driven by the pressure within the environment of the English classroom of high-stakes assessments requiring their oral contributions, which heightened their fear of peer and teacher judgment, error, and conflict with classmates when they spoke. These students proved to be quite talkative outside of the classroom. The second group, on the other hand, were quiet in all speaking situations, even with close friends and family members. Further investigation is needed, but this study emphatically demonstrates the need to interrogate classroom routines, practices, and curricular edicts for student evaluative tasks that favor sound over silence, demand student talk, and contribute to the silence and silencing of QIs. In the meantime, a balanced pedagogy that teaches skills of silence in tandem with skills of speaking is essential in a society that respects the sense and sounds of all voices.

published_or_final_version / English Centre / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

Prior to 1986, there was no media studies of any type prescribed at secondary schools in the Transvaal. However, individual teachers and schools have recognised the need for children to receive instruction in the media. This saw the introduction of varying forms of informal media studies into the classroom. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban.

This thesis reports on research into micro-interactions within the reading literacy event Reading on the Mat in three Grade One classrooms. This event is the core of literacy learning in Foundation Phase classrooms in formerly ‘white’, government-funded primary schools in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, and takes place daily for every child. It is literacy practice resembling Group Guided Reading. The research focused on teachers’ identity-forming decisions, actions and discourses as a way of examining micro-interactions within the literacy event. Hymes’s work on the ethnography of communication provided categories for the investigation. Using an ethnographic approach, I entered the sites of the study as a participant observer. There I focused on the central literacy event, in which a group of children and the teacher sit in close proximity. I made field notes, video recordings and audio recordings in three sets of visits spanning the full school year. These were supplemented by teacher interviews, consideration of reports and assessments, and an analysis of the text types used on the Mat, for example, graded readers, flash cards and phonics primers. Beginning with Hymes’ S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G. mnemonic, cycles of analysis using multiple instruments foregrounded the data. The central finding of this research is that in Reading on the Mat children are offered identities through strong normative work and embedded practices. Teachers promote positive identities for children as successful readers and create positive affect for reading activities. This positive positioning work is however undercut by three factors: first, the fact that activities on the Mat focus on decoding text fragments rather than interrogating whole texts. The resultant identity offered to children is one of code breakers alone. A finding subsidiary to this, but important for pedagogic practice, is that teachers’ choice of text types is the most powerful determinant of children’s code breaker identity. A second factor that undercuts children’s identity as successful readers is that, although they are active, they have little agency. This derives from the strong assessment focus of teachers on the Mat and their questioning practices. A third factor which undercuts the positive identity children are offered in this literacy event is that, by focusing primarily on decoding fragmented text and on assessment opportunities, teachers avoid engaging with issues of differentiation and disregard cultural and linguistic differences. Teachers’ choices, therefore, while creating a positive climate in the classroom and developing emergent readers who are effective decoders, construct children as limited literate subjects. The same choices enable teachers to ignore learner diversity. / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in