Hobson

Research Narrative

Over the past four years, I have invested in research into teaching that aligns with
adolescent literacies and that creates access for all youth to equal opportunities in the world. I
have invested in research that facilitates critical and collaborative learning spaces where
classroom communities use their various cultural knowledge to interrogate the work of writers
within and across cultures. In both research from the field of adolescent literacies and in my
work with adolescents, I have consistently found that adolescents prefer hands-on multimodal
engagement with their learning. Modes include the auditory (listening), visual (seeing),
kinesthetic (interacting physically), linguistic (written), gestural (body language and expression),
sensory (smells, tastes) (Cloonan et al, 2011). Multimodal includes various combinations of
these modes in either texts or contexts. As my colleagues and I explain in our recent manuscript
accepted for publication with the New Educator, adolescents operate within multiple social
and cultural contexts, consisting of combinations of oral, visual, written, kinesthetic, and digital
modes (Jewitt, 2014). The reality each day for adolescents is consistent encounters with visual,
auditory, kinesthetic, linguistic, gestural, and sensory texts. Given the broad range of their
literacies when interacting with these texts, it is no surprise that texts that draw on many
modes and forms of interaction are essential in a classroom. Indeed, if we want youth to
become deep analytical readers and writers of every kind of text, I believe we have an
obligation to build instruction upon their cultures, literacies, languages, and interests.

I teach students about Fan Fiction, in which youth join on-line writing communities
where they take popular characters from films and video games and novels and re-write their
stories by placing them in new contexts and creating new plots for them (Ito, 2008). I teach
about the power of graphic novels for inspiring language learning and closer reading. I teach
about the inspiration of Anime comics that lead adolescents to pursue Japanese language and
cultures (Black, 2009). Inevitably, an undergraduate or graduate student will say, oh yeah, I do
that. Indeed, with on-line cultures such as these, adolescents have access to authentic writing
communities that provide them a place to publish and try out their writing and a place to
receive feedback on their writing content and style.

I research my practice in order to help pre-service teachers design instruction that
builds upon such literacies and that re-creates such authentic reading and writing communities
in the classroom. Furthermore, I pursue and research multimodal instruction that inspires
critical interrogation of the representations writers create individually and collaboratively,
representations that can both empower and disenfranchise. For example, I often invite pre-
service teachers to watch a music video that intends to break down stereotypes, but ends up
re-inscribing these same stereotypes. Together, pre-service teachers and I draw from a range of
critical questions to use our different understandings of popular culture to deconstruct the
many messages texts convey. Together, we design instruction that inspires close text analysis
drawing upon critical and multimodal analysis of a range of texts and genres.

In my most recent manuscript, in press for 2016 publication in the New Educator, two of
my colleagues and I embarked upon an in-depth analysis of a class we had collaboratively
designed and enacted with our UPenn Project CALL teaching team. The class focused on a Chalk
Talk experience through which pre and in-service teachers drew upon a range of modes
blackboard writing, silent writing onto large in class post-its in response to blackboard posts,

and a large group discussionto take up a main inquiry into teaching that helps adolescents
critically examine the relationships between race, class, languages, and cultures.

Through a process of identifying critical incidents (Drennon & Cervero, 2002) and
applying open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), we learned that each mode supported deeper
relationship-building, vulnerability, and authenticity in sorting through these risky concepts for
ourselves. We also found that the small group blackboard discussions and the silent chalk talk
writing led to productive contact zones (Pratt, 1991) in which students learned to ask hard
questions, practice being allies, and reflect on their own assumptions about other peoples
languages and cultures.

I played a significant role in the data analysis and writing of this paper. I served as the
initial analyst of the data, providing the vision and an outline for the paper, leading all writing
meetings, transcribing notes, and re-vamping the vision as we went. My colleagues and I then
divided up each section of data and developed the analysis for that section further. We also
divided up the conceptual frameworks and the introduction and conclusion. I drafted the
introduction and conclusion, and they wrote a description for the conceptual frameworks and
methods. The reviewers requested a significant set of missing data for our revision, which I was
able to locateall blackboard posts for the class of 31 students and their later written portfolio
reflections at the end of the course. I then analyzed all of this data and significantly revised the
paper, drawing on that in-depth data analysis. My colleagues provided editing support and
whatever additional reflections they had from students they had mentored. I also provided the
content for discussions with the reviewers for the third round regarding a disagreement
between reviewers, which led to a resolution, drawing from additional analysis I orchestrated
that united the reviewers.

Many in the field of multimodality have identified the usefulness of a range of modes
given the affordances and constraints of any given mode, but this work demonstrates the layers
of vulnerability and trust that can be forged within and across cultures through this particular
scaffolding of modes.

In my publication that came out in Feb. 2015 in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult
Literacy, I again pursued the power of multimodal teaching. Only in this publication, my
colleague, a former high school teacher and I explored how ethnodrama might have enhanced
her goals for multicultural teaching. In the pursuit of productive multicultural learning, we
juxtaposed my study of a section of an ethnodrama pedagogy I created with high school
students with a moment in her practice when she taught Heart of Darkness that re-inscribed
cultural stereotypes. As the lead writer, I drew upon my findings to make suggestions for the
power of ethnodrama in overcoming teacher-centric, dominant readings of inherently racist
texts. We concluded that diversifying texts and including a range of multimodal texts as she had
was a strong decision but that in order to interrogate the primary text especially, students
needed four ethnodramatic questions: 1. What story is the writer telling? 2. How is the writer
telling that story? 3. How would we tell that story? 4. What are the cultural implications of any
story we might tell?

When juxtaposed with a more traditional classroom, my data analysis and findings from
my ethnodrama pedagogy, designed in a drama elective, open new ground for a simplified
approach to reading and interrogating complex rhetorical patterns within and across texts. Such
critical interrogation of a multimodal text set engages a broader range of adolescent identities,

cultures, languages, questions, and needs. It permits adolescents to explore the relationships
between texts and cultural impacts, between literature and the writing of history, between
language that privileges and re-inscribes and language that challenges and transforms
possibilities for social relationships.

These relationships between texts and cultural contexts are at the center of my 2014
publication with Penn Graduate School of Education: Perspectives on Urban Education Journal.
In this manuscript, I delineated my teaching of Grammar and the Writing Process through an
introductory multimodal project through which I invited students to research the language
acquisition processes of several youth from across young adult literature novels and to capture
their findings in the form of an iMovie. Student learning about writing and writing pedagogies
through the in-depth digital analysis of the language acquisition processes of these youth
inspired powerful inquiries into language in context, its social, cultural, and political dimensions.
Indeed, the layers of learning about themselves as readers, writers, and language users, and
about adolescent grammatical design of rhetoric in the midst of life changing contexts helped
the undergraduate pre-service teachers understand that adolescents are not just learning how
to write correctly; they are as Adrienne Rich has noted, writing for their lives. Students were
able to explore the many ways that these adolescents came to learn how to read and write and
the implications of their language choices for their survival in their worlds.

My practitioner inquiry demonstrates the power of such ethnodrama pedagogies in
helping expose pre-service teachers to a wide range of case studies of English Language
Learners and their struggles to acquire language proficiency amidst messages that punish them
for the languages they speak and that silence them by imposing one set of grammar rules upon
them. This research demonstrates undergraduate learning about the multiple literacies and
languages of youth and the multiple modes undergraduates themselves encountered that also
facilitate youth abilities to adapt their language learning to a wider range of contexts. Indeed,
as the semester progressed, even as the undergraduates learned standardized grammar rules,
they maintained their deep awareness of the fluid nature of language, the danger of imposing
one language as right, and the possibilities of researching with adolescents the work of
language in context, and whom or what may be privileged by any given grammatical design.

I have several submitted manuscripts that continue in this same vein. With each
manuscript, I take up more dimensions of the power of ethnodramatic and multimodal
teaching. In a manuscript submitted to Curriculum and Inquiry, I take up the challenge of
engaging youth in close textual analyses, clarifying the role of drama in inspiring cross-cultural
relationship building through close-text dramatic analysis. The section of data from the
ethnodrama pedagogy I delineate in this paper both demonstrates the power of drama to
inspire student-centered close text analysis and the challenges of sustaining that student
ownership and close-text analysis. Just today, 1.1.16, the reviewers responded with helpful
feedback for how to improve this piece. They needed me to forefront and streamline the
framing points from the literature review as well as the analysis from the research, with less
emphasis on my teaching. They also provided helpful commentary on the need to situate the
findings within broader feminist understandings of heteronormativity. This is an area I look
forward to pursuing. These are manageable revisions, which I will pursue and submit to another
journal.


In another manuscript, submitted to the Research in the Teaching of English, I have
worked hard to situate a larger data set from my dissertation within its potential contribution
to engaging students as ethnographers of the relationships between texts and cultural contexts.
Feedback from reviewers points to the need for more direct commentary from students and to
a more in-depth literature review across the fields of drama and ethnography. Based on what I
find in this more robust reading of each of these fields, I will either stick to my argument that
ethnodrama can speak to gaps in the field of ethnography in its possibilities for collaborative
and transparent data analysis, or I will simplify my argument and focus on ethnodrama and
critical literacy. Either way, the feedback from two submissions and two sets of reviewers has
prepared me for the next journal, English Education which the editors recommend for this
piece.

With one other manuscript, Ethnodrama as Participatory Action Research, submitted to
Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, I critique a colleagues work with
ethnodrama as professional development. Having worked closely with this colleague to use
ethnodrama to open conversations with audiences about the rigors and challenges of teaching
and navigating schools in these times, I align ethnodrama with participatory action research,
noting in what ways his work and my facilitation of his work dovetails with PAR principles and in
what ways we are still reaching to sustain PAR with audiences. Charles Vanovers
ethnodramatic effort to use teacher stories to open conversations with educators from a range
of positions and backgrounds about teaching is one of the more powerful examples of
professional development I have experienced. By reviewing the possibilities and challenges of
this work, my goal is to inspire others to use ethnodrama in their own contexts of research and
teaching.

Finally, I have continued to invest a good deal of time, data analysis, and writing to a
collaborative book my colleagues from Penn and I are developing, now titled Living an Inquiry
Stance: Explorations in the Practice of Adolescent Literacy Teacher Education. The book has
ebbed and flowed with each new iteration of the professional lives of the nine-member team,
and I am happy to say that we are nearing a completed proposal for submission to Teachers
College Press, with all chapter writing now clarified and underway. This book illuminates the
power of living honest inquiries with teachers and with adolescents amidst a time in education
when certainty at all costs is privileged.

I have submitted my pieces to top journals in the hopes of receiving the best feedback I
can for how to improve as a researcher and writer. While waiting over long periods for their
feedback, I have been freed up to embark upon new research. Last Spring, I secured IRB
approval to write about my teaching of ENG 307: New Media Literacies in ELA. Indeed, this
course is near and dear to my heart as it has permitted me to explore a broader range of
multimodal practices that align with adolescent literacies. In particular, in my research thus far,
I am examining the evolution of pre-service teacher pedagogical content across several
different platforms. What fascinates me about this class is the way that students develop their
aesthetic abilities and in turn their pedagogical capacities and abilities to envision and articulate
the sophisticated layers to their teaching. I love that this is transpiring before they enter the
field. Their confidence and excitement as creators and producers of their pedagogical desires I
believe holds great promise no matter what the environmental constraints.


Additionally, I have just completed a 3-week study with nine adolescents, ages 12-18.
These youth joined me at a PBS station, where they used drama to build community and to
surface questions about their communities, filmed interviews with their peers and families to
pursue their questions, and applied editing software to analyze their data and to create a film.
This study holds much potential for illuminating the power and possibilities of drama,
interviews, and editing software for catalyzing close-text analysis, critical interrogation of issues
facing communities, and youth-led community organizing. This study follows on the heels of my
dissertation work and the feedback I am receiving from reviewers. With this study, I am moving
closer to my goals as a researcher and a practitioner.

Across my research and the feedback I am receiving, I keep learning more about the
challenges in my practice of teaching adolescents. Indeed, I am dependent on multiple modes
that align with adolescent literacies in order to inspire and sustain student-centered instruction
through which students experience ownership and engagement as researchers who understand
and can apply close text analysis in the service of their vision. I have many breakthroughs with
each study of my practice, but I am not there yet. Reviewers of recent manuscripts keep
agreeing with me that my instructional design is not as student-centered as I am reaching for it
to be. The learning opportunities for students are steep, intellectually rigorous, and rewarding,
but I am still learning about the power of the right combinations of frameworks and multiple
modes for helping teachers like me put tools in the hands of adolescents and then step back so
that students can apply those tools in the service of student-inspired, driven, real world
research.
Indeed, that is my vision for teachers, to learn about the power of integrating real world
research into any of their instructional designs and writing projects. Adolescents need to know
they have a voice that matters. They need to be able to interrogate the messages of writers for
whom or what is privileged. They also need to know how to use and interrogate their research
processes by joining the conversations happening in their fields of interest and in the larger
world that impacts them and others.


Black, R. (2009). Online fan fiction, global Identities, and imagination. Research in
the Teaching of English, 43(4), 397-425.

Cloonan, A. (2011). Creating multimodal metalanguage with teachers. English Teaching:
Practice and Critique, 10(4), 23-40.

Drennon, C. & Cervero, R. (2002). The politics of facilitation in practitioner inquiry groups.
Adult Education Quarterly, 52, 193-209.

Ito, M. (2008). Participatory learning in a networked society: Lessons from the Digital Youth
Project. Presentation for the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Educational
Research Association Presidential Session. Retrieved August 15, 2008 from
http://www.itofisher.com/mito/publications/participatory_l.html

Jewitt, C. Space. Retrieved May 30, 2014, from
http://multimodalityglossary.wordpress.com/space/



Pratt, M.L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91, 3340