"Because I Live Here": Negotiating Selves through Storytelling

This paper reports on a three-month study of bi-weekly storytelling sessions with African American 3rd graders in an urban school, and seeks to develop an understanding of how the cultural storytelling promoted particular identities and ways of being as well as how students took up or resisted those identities. Elements of performance theory, with its focus on the decontextualization and recontextualization of texts, and critical discourse analysis as it relates to identities and social power, frame the analysis of how three students 'story' themselves through retellings of and responses to the tales they hear. These cases demonstrate how social identities were in constant negotiation in the storytelling space in ways that were awarded varying degrees of what Bauman and Briggs refer to as access, legitimacy, competence, and value.Conducted on behalf of the Black Storytellers Alliance. Supported by the Northside Seed Grant program (NSG), a program of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), University of Minnesota

Changing digital media environments and youth audiovisual productions: A comparison of two collaborative research experiences with south Madrid adolescents

SAGE: David Poveda, Marta Morgade, Changing Digital Media Environments and Youth Audiovisual Productions: A Comparison of Two Collaborative Research Experiences with South Madrid Adolescents, Young 26.4 (2018): 34-55 Copyright © 2018SAGE. Reprinted by permission of SAGE PublicationsThis article compares two studies conducted in Madrid in a seven–eight years span in which secondary school students (14–15 years of age) were asked to collaboratively create digital audiovisual narratives. In the first project, adolescents seemed to consider their audiovisual materials as transparent and with self-evident meanings. In the second project, adolescents problematized meaning and reflexively examined the design of audiovisual media. We explore two distinct but complementary factors that might help interpret the differences: (a) rapid historical changes in the digital narratives adolescents are exposed to and engage with and (b) methodological differences in the way adolescents were supported and guided during the creation of their audiovisual narratives. Through this analysis, we draw on an ethnographically grounded notion of ‘mediatization’ that helps unpack both rapid transformations in adolescent’s digital mediascape and how digital practices are socially co-constructed in collaborative projects with youth

“It wasn’t like we were serious”: laughter in the mediated action of race talk

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2013. Major: Education, curriculum and instruction. Advisor: Dr. Cynthia Lewis. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 227 pages, appendices A-D.Classrooms tend to be theorized as serious spaces (Lensmire, 2011), and in them, laughter represents an occasional break from learning or an off-task moment that disrupts it altogether (Hansen, 2012). While a growing number of studies have re-imagined critical literacy to include embodied reactions to texts, few have examined laughter in critical classrooms as possible embodied and critical engagement. This study takes up that challenge. Using the theory and method of mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001a), this work draws attention to laughter as young people negotiated identities and texts in a critical classroom and explores, specifically, how three male students from different races engaged in what they called “racist joking” during a three-month collaboration on a documentary film about immigration. By focusing analysis on moment-to-moment interactions, MDA seeks to explain the mediational means (in this case, laughter) by which social actors carry out mediated actions (in this case, race talk) within sites of engagement (Scollon, 2001a). Mediated actions are also framed by a broader nexus of practice that includes the historical bodies of participants, interaction order, and discourses at work within a social space (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). In this way, MDA affords an analysis of moment-to-moment interactions embedded within larger timescales and histories as it seeks to understand the production and reproduction of social identities in interaction (Norris, 2011). The setting for this study was a high school English classroom focused on the analysis and production of documentary film and other media. The urban, high-poverty school had a racially and ethnically diverse student enrollment, with 90% students of color. Data collection was grounded in ethnographic methods and included field notes, audio and video recordings, interviews, student productions, and classroom artifacts. Findings reveal that the young men became recognized as individuals who make “racist jokes” and, by some, “racist” because of those jokes. Yet through the mediational means of laughter, the boys brought attention to racism as they negotiated and critiqued aspects of race produced around their film. The young men explored racist language without being labeled racist in a serious way, because they already labeled themselves racist in a humorous one. As a result, they created a discursive space to play with changing forms of racism and resemioticize (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), or transform, racist statements into signs of membership—all while collaborating on a film that sought to counter the stereotypical contexts of their jokes. By using mediated discourse analysis to better understand how laughter mediates students’ race-related interactions and productions in critical classrooms, this study has implications for how the lived experiences of young people, particularly those marginalized in spaces of learning, may be at odds with a current vision of critical literacy centered on critical response. This work underscores the need for educators and researchers to pay attention to how youth are generating identities, meanings, and ways of knowing through laughter