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).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/b91q-rc04 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Nuzzo, Natalie Maria |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
Page generated in 0.2853 seconds