Seeking Imaginative and Intellectual Freedom: Using the Speculative Essay to Critique the Mythology of Educational Standardization

Qualitative researchers have a wealth of approaches available to them. From case study, cross-cultural narrative inquiry, and phenomenology to arts-informed inquiry, creative writing, and critical media studies, qualitative research offers visual, textual, theoretical, applied, critical, and imaginative perspectives. This panel showcases the theorizing and application of qualitative approaches from emerging qualitative researchers. Situated in critical youth studies, Weeks sets a foundational question about representation in his analysis of the film Love, Simon. He uses a queer theory framework to explore how gay representation interacts with heteronormativity and homonormativity. Anderson takes up this question of representation in her investigation into two first-grade teachers’ use and selection of multicultural literature. She explores how their intrinsic motivation leads their self- reflective practices. Zhang similarly asks about representation but in a college Chinese language classroom setting. Her case study of a Chinese language university teacher in Georgia explores the interconnected relationship between language and culture in teaching using Chinese traditional operas. Toledo then shifts our focus to students’ perspectives about their own experiences and learning in her multiple case study analysis of a simulated Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting with pre-service special education teachers. In the final paper, Cramsey uses an arts-based speculative essay approach to understand, critique, and suggest hopeful alternatives to the problem of the mythologized status of educational standardization. As a whole, this panel invites us to ask larger questions about standardization, normativity, and majoritarian narratives and the need for hopeful reimaginings about media, schooling, and intellectualism

Power in Schooling

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Pushing Methodological Boundaries~Liberating Academic Writing

In this symposium, multiethnic researchers from Georgia Southern University’s Ed. D. in Curriculum Studies program explore creative ways to push methodological and representational boundaries to liberate dissertation writing by diving into life and writing into contradiction in schools, families, and communities in the U. S. South. Through visual/graphic/multimedia presentations, reader’s theater, fictional narrative, freedom songs, poems, spoken word, drama, and play, the presenters will illustrate diverse forms of dissertation research and representations such as cultural studies/multipersectival cultural studies, critical geography/critical dis/ability studies, critical race narrative inquiry, personal~passionate~participatory inquiry, auto/biographical inquiry/currere, critical narrative inquiry, cross-cultural narrative inquiry, narrative multicultural inquiry, critical race photographic narrative inquiry, critical multiracial/mixed racial fictional auto/biographical inquiry, ethnographical inquiry, visual methodologies, visual/digital/sensory ethnography, visual/performative/graphic/picture/fictional narrative, photovoice, soundwalk, mobile podcasting, geotagging, poetic inquiry, womanist currere, critical portraiture, oral history, aesthetic/art-based inquiry, counternarrative, subaltern, indigenous, documentary, critical geography, speculative essay, speculative fiction, speculative memoir, speculative play, speculative poetry, and painting. Innovative writings engendered from the inquiries will be also demonstrated. Potentials, challenges, and future directions of various inquiries and representations are also discussed. Individual Presentations Within the Session: Presentation #1: Push Methodological Boundaries~Performing Dissertation Research~Liberating Academic Writing Ming Fang He & Peggy Shannon-Baker, Georgia Southern University Presentation #2: Teaching with Passion and Compassion in An Era of Fear, Injustice, and Political Uncertainty: A Narrative Inquiry into Elementary Teachers’ Experience in Georgia Erin Scroggs, Georgia Southern University Presentation #3: Black Skin, Darkened Curriculum: The Black Children’s Experience of Mainstream Schooling in Racialized Systems in the U. S. South Chanda Hadiman, Georgia Southern University Presentation #4: A Memoir: Being Mixed, Black And Filipino, and Multiracial in the U. S. South Georgia Middle School Nicole Moss, Georgia Southern University Presentation #5: “Their HighestPotential:” Oral Histories of Willow Hill Elementary--A Historically Black School in Georgia Laquanda Love, Georgia Southern University Presentation #6: Black Mothers, Black Sons: A Memoir Alethea Coleman, Georgia Southern University Presentation #7: Hyphenated Identity and Negotiated Intersectionality: A Memoir of A First-Generation Nigerian-American Male Teacher in An Inner City Title I Elementary School in Georgia Gerald Nwachukwu, Georgia Southern University Presentation #8: Educating Black Males in Black-Lives-Matter Movement Space Kimberly Hollis, Georgia Southern University Presentation #9: Counterstories: Black Male Teachers in Rural Georgia Brittany Jones-Turman, Georgia Southern University Presentation #10: Dissertation-Works-in-Progress Amanda Gonzales, Janet Cooks, Carmen Baker, Andrea Cramsey, Khristian Cooper, Lucia Benzor, Marianna Louise Anderson, and Cynthia Smith, Georgia Southern Universit