Using Multiliteracies to Engage and Empower Students with Complex Support Needs

Using Multiliteracies to Engage and Empower Students with Complex Support Needs This dissertation is comprised of two studies: • Creating New Learning Spaces Using Multiliteracies with Students with Complex Support Needs • Transforming Narrative Identity through Multiliteracies Students with complex support needs (SCSN) are frequently denied access to meaningful and challenging literacy instruction. These studies explore how student- authored narratives in the individualized education plan (IEP), implemented during a multiliteracies curriculum, can simultaneously engage and empower SCSN. These studies are based on the qualitative research that I conducted from November 15, 2018 to February 11, 2018 at a special day class for SCSN in a public high school. I implemented a multiliteracies curriculum during student-authored narrative for use at the IEP meeting, which is typically held every year for students labeled with disabilities by the school system. Creating New Learning Spaces Using Multiliteracies with Students with Complex Support Needs explores the new learning spaces that were created by multiliteracies in the areas of problem-solving, growing complexity in the use of language and tools, and self-knowledge. Further, this study suggests that multiliteracies created new patterns of teacher-student interactions, which led to student engagement, initiation, and joy of learning. This article describes the details of my qualitative research using grounded theory and is written for an academic journal for literacy scholars. Transforming Narrative Identity through Multiliteracies relates the transformation of one student’s narrative identity (stories told about the student by himself and others) during the study. Multiliteracies enabled student agency, and offered this student with complex support needs an opportunity to change his narrative identity from deficit to pride and competence. This case study tracks the changes in a) the cultural narrative and b) the social participation to determine changes in the narrative identity of the student. This article is narrative in style and written keeping in mind special educators and administrators. The purpose of the article is to alert special educators to hidden narratives in the IEP document and their classroom practices

Real-Time Storytelling with Events in Virtual Worlds

We present an accessible interactive narrative tool for creating stories among a virtual populace inhabiting a fully-realized 3D virtual world. Our system supports two modalities: assisted authoring where a human storyteller designs stories using a storyboard-like interface called CANVAS, and exploratory authoring where a human author experiences a story as it happens in real-time and makes on-the-fly narrative trajectory changes using a tool called Storycraft. In both cases, our system analyzes the semantic content of the world and the narrative being composed, and provides automated assistance such as completing partially-specified stories with causally complete sequences of intermediate actions. At its core, our system revolves around events -â?? pre-authored multi-actor task sequences describing interactions between groups of actors and props. These events integrate complex animation and interaction tasks with precision control and expose them as atoms of narrative significance to the story direction systems. Events are an accessible tool and conceptual metaphor for assembling narrative arcs, providing a tightly-coupled solution to the problem of converting author intent to real-time animation synthesis. Our system allows simple and straightforward macro- and microscopic control over large numbers of virtual characters with diverse and sophisticated behavior capabilities, and reduces the complicated action space of an interactive narrative by providing analysis and user assistance in the form of semi-automation and recommendation services

Contextualising empowerment practice: negotiating the path to becoming using participatory video processes

Participation and empowerment are major drivers of social policy, but participatory projects often happen within contested territory. This research interrogates the assumed participation-empowerment link through the example of participatory video. Fieldwork unpacks the particular approach of Real Time, an established UK project provider. Disrupting representational framing, the emergent relational processes catalysed were explored in context, to address not whether participatory video can increase participants’ influence, but how and in what circumstances. This thesis therefore builds more nuanced understanding of empowerment practice as the negotiated (rhizomic) pathway between social possibility and limitation. Following Deleuze, a becoming ontology underpinned study of project actors’ experiences of the evolving group processes that occurred. An action research design incorporated both collaborative sense-making and disruptive gaze. Analysis draws on interpersonal and observational data gathered purposively from multiple perspectives in 11 Real Time projects between 2006 and 2008. Five were youth projects and six with adults, two were women-only and one men-only, two with learning-disabled adults and four aimed at minority-ethnic participants. Participatory video as facilitated empowerment practice led to new social becoming by opening conducive social spaces, mediating interactions, catalysing group action and re-positioning participants. Videoing as performance context had a structuring and intensifying function, but there were parallel risks such as inappropriate exposure when internal and external dialogical space was confused. A rhizomic map of Real Time’s non-linear practice territory identifies eight key practice balances, and incorporates process possibilities, linked tensions, and enabling and hindering factors at four main sequential stages. Communicative action through iteratively progressing video activities unfolded through predictable transitions to generate a diversifying progression from micro to mezzo level when supported. This thesis thus shows how participatory video is constituted afresh in each new context, with the universal and particular in ongoing dynamic interchange during the emergent empowerment journey

Perceptual fail: Female power, mobile technologies and images of self

Like a biological species, images of self have descended and modified throughout their journey down the ages, interweaving and recharging their viability with the necessary interjections from culture, tools and technology. Part of this journey has seen images of self also become an intrinsic function within the narratives about female power; consider Helen of Troy “a face that launched a thousand ships” (Marlowe, 1604) or Kim Kardashian (KUWTK) who heralded in the mass mediated ‘selfie’ as a social practice. The interweaving process itself sees the image oscillate between naturalized ‘icon’ and idealized ‘symbol’ of what the person looked like and/or aspired to become. These public images can confirm or constitute beauty ideals as well as influence (via imitation) behaviour and mannerisms, and as such the viewers belief in the veracity of the representative image also becomes intrinsically political manipulating the associated narratives and fostering prejudice (Dobson 2015, Korsmeyer 2004, Pollock 2003). The selfie is arguably ‘a sui generis,’ whilst it is a mediated photographic image of self, it contains its own codes of communication and decorum that fostered the formation of numerous new digital communities and influenced new media aesthetics . For example the selfie is both of nature (it is still a time based piece of documentation) and known to be perceptually untrue (filtered, modified and full of artifice). The paper will seek to demonstrate how selfie culture is infused both by considerable levels of perceptual failings that are now central to contemporary celebrity culture and its’ notion of glamour which in turn is intrinsically linked (but not solely defined) by the province of feminine desire for reinvention, transformation or “self-sexualisation” (Hall, West and McIntyre, 2012). The subject, like the Kardashians or selfies, is divisive. In conclusion this paper will explore the paradox of the perceptual failings at play within selfie culture more broadly, like ‘Reality TV’ selfies are infamously fake yet seem to provide Debord’s (1967) illusory cultural opiate whilst fulfilling a cultural longing. Questions then emerge when considering the narrative impact of these trends on engendered power structures and the traditional status of illusion and narrative fiction

‘Why am I in all of these pictures?’ From learning stories to lived stories:The politics of children’s participation rights in documentation practices

Caralyn Blaisdell - ORCID: 0000-0002-5491-7346 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5491-7346In this paper, we report on Phase One of a small action research project that examined how Learning Stories were put into practice at one Scottish nursery. Specifically, the paper looks at young children’s participation rights and how they were enacted within the authorship of the stories. The project used an action research approach in which qualitative data about participants’ current experiences with the stories was used to spark reflection, experimentation and change in documentation practices. Drawing on Phase One data from young children, parents and practitioners at the nursery, our findings illustrate the complex enactment of children’s participation rights, including children’s right to information, freedom of expression and their right to express their views and have those views taken into account. The paper concludes that more work needs to be done in the field of Learning stories to (a) acknowledge the complex political and material considerations at play in the creation of pedagogical documentation and (b) to accommodate children’s own authorship, through flexible, non (or less) written methods.The research was funded by The Froebel Trust: Registered Charity No. 1145128 Company Limited by Guarantee Registered in London No. 7862112.https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2021.2007970aheadofprintaheadofprin

When They See Us in the Pages: The Representation of Black and Brown Males in Children’s Literature

This study seeks to explore ways in which Black and Brown males are depicted in picturebooks. This study is guided by the concept of cultural code-meshing-— the blending and concurrent use” (Young, 2009, p. 50) of all the cultural languages that are mine (e.g., rap quotes, artistic media, and academic writing). The following question guided this study: How are race, racism, and power depicted in Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut and Windows? The theoretical framework that guides the study is Critical Race Theory (CRT), which aids in understanding how ideas of race, racism, and power are operationalized in various spaces. The sample consists of two picturebooks, Windows authored by Julia Denos and illustrated by E.B. Goodale, and Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, authored by Derrick Barnes and illustrated by Gordon C. James. I use the critical content analysis approach as it is effective for understanding how various forms of privilege and oppression exist in society. I use textual and visual analysis to make visible various discourses operating through the print text and visual imagery within the two picturebooks. Through a deductive approach, I observe data from both books and analyze the data through the tenets of CRT to understand how race, racism, and power are communicated through print text and visual imagery. Of the six tenets of CRT, there were four tenets found operationalized in the study: counter storytelling/unique voices of color, race as a social construction, permanence of racism, and the critique of colorblindness. Exploring the representation of Black and Brown males in children’s literature will contribute to the field of education—and by extension the role of children’s book publishing in education—by advancing conversations around the selection and utilization by adults of picturebooks for young children. Understanding how messages surrounding Black and Brown males are communicated through the words and images within picturebooks can inform the ways in which future picturebooks are created, published, awarded, selected, and used in various spaces, including classrooms

Telling interactive stories: A practice-based investigation into new media interactive storytelling

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Telling Interactive Stories is a practice-based thesis, which theoretically and practically probes the field of digital fictional interactive storytelling. The submission takes the form of the interactive cinema installation Crossed Lines together with a written element of the thesis which interrogates historical, contextual, theoretical, technical and critical aspects of the field of interactive narrative using new media. Crossed Lines is an original fictional interactive AV piece, amalgamating multiform plots, a multi-screen viewing environment, an interactive interface and an interactive story navigation form. The installation tells the stories of nine characters in a way that the viewer can constantly explore and switch between all nine forms, using a telephone keypad and handset as an interface, and can simultaneously observe all characters’ presence between the nine remote locations. Several research methodologies are utilised to analyse and evaluate the installation. Quantitative methodologies include the use of user tracking systems where the computational output of the installation provides measurements and timings of user choices and behaviours. Qualitative methodologies include theoretical and visual analysis, and in depth analysis of user responses using interviews, questionnaires, video recordings and cuttingedge eye-tracking technologies