Sunday, August 31, 2014
Third new book in our series! "English Teaching and New Literacies Pedagogy"
From the back cover:
[This collection] is about the fusion of media and narrative, and explores theoretical and practical dimensions of young people’s engagement with contemporary forms of text. It showcases a range of critical interpretative approaches for integrating multimedia narratives into English teaching contexts, including animated films such as Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing, digital novels such as Inanimate Alice and 5 Haitis, and a virtual treatment of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. English teachers across grade levels will recognize the valuing of literature and will appreciate the practical pedagogy and fostering of creativity as students are encouraged to explore new forms of narrative. In the context of developing expertise in knowing how multimodal texts work, students can apply that knowledge in their own authoring of digital multimedia narratives.Contents include:
- Len Unsworth: Toward a Metalanguage for Multimedia Narrative Interpretation and Authoring Pedagogy: A National Curriculum Perspective from Australia
- Angela Thomas: Using Contemporary Picture Books to Explore the Concept of Intermodal Complementarity
- Angela Thomas: Digital Fiction
- Thomas Apperley & Catherine Beavis: A Model for Critical Games Literacy
- Paul D. Chandler: Enabling Students to Be Effective Multimodal Authors
- Len Unsworth: The Image/Language Interface in Picture Books as Animated Films: A Focus for New Narrative Interpretation and Composition Pedagogies
- Annemaree O’Brien: Using Focalisation Choices to Manipulate Audience Viewpoint in 3-D Animation Narratives: What Do Student Authors Need to Know?
- Martin Waller: Social Media, Education, and Contentious Literacies
- Angela Thomas, Jenny White & Ros Lippis: Teaching Inanimate Alice
- Julie Bain & Len Unsworth: Empowering Older Adolescents as Authors: Multiliteracies, Metalanguage, and Multimodal Versions of Literary Narratives
- Winyu Chinthammit & Angela Thomas: Augmented Reality in the English Classroom
- Angela Thomas, Kerreen Ely-Harper & Kate Richards: Virtual Macbeth: Using Virtual Worlds to Explore Literary Texts.
Another lovely new book in our series: "Community-Based Multiliteracies and Digital Media Projects"
Within community-based digital literacies work, a fundamental question remains unanswered: Where are the stories and reflections of the researchers, scholars, and community workers themselves? We have learned much about contexts, discourses, and the multimodal nature of meaning making in literacy and digital media experiences. However, we have learned very little about those who initiate, facilitate, and direct these community-based multiliteracies and digital media projects. In Community-Based Multiliteracies & Digital Media Projects: Questioning Assumptions and Exploring Realities, contributors discuss exemplary work in the field of community-based digital literacies, while providing an insightful and critical perspective on how we begin to write ourselves into the stories of our work. In doing so, the book makes a powerful contribution to digital literacies praxis and pedagogy - within and outside of community-based contexts.A particular strength of the various chapters in this collection is that the authors do not shy away from talking about things that went awry or didn't work out so well (and reasons why), along with what did work. There are so many practical insights for non-profit community groups in this book that will help to smooth project development and implementation, as well as theoretical insights that help us to think more clearly about what it means to be part of/work with communities.
Contents incude:
- Foreword - Lalitha Vasudevan: The Complicated Work of «Making the Familiar Strange» in Community-Based Literacies Research and Practice
- Heather M. Pleasants and Dana E. Salter: Writing Oneself into the Story
- Amy Hill: Digital Storytelling and the Politics of Doing Good: Exploring the Ethics of Bringing Personal Narratives into Public Spheres
- Ed Lee and Liz Miller: Entry Point: Participatory Media-Making with Queer and Trans Refugees: Social Locations, Agendas and Thinking Structurally
- Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner: Our Stories, Ourselves: Exploring Identities, Sharing Experiences and Building Relationships through Patient Voices
- Diana J. Nucera andJeanette Lee: I Transform Myself, I Transform the World Around Me
- Jason Edward Lewis and Skawennati Fragnito: You Want to Do What with Doda’s Stories? Building a Community for the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling in Digital Media
- Jesikah Maria Ross: Adventures in Community Media: Experiments, Findings, and Strategies for Change
- Rob Simon, Jason Brennan, Sandro Bresba, Sara DeAngelis, Will Edwards, Helmi Jung and Anna Pisecny: The Teaching to Learn Project: Investigating Literacy through Intergenerational Inquiry
- Josh Schachter and Julie Kasper: Finding Voice: Building Literacies and Communities Inside and Outside the Classroom
- Ouida Washington and Derek Koen: Visions Beyond the Bricks: Reflections on Engaging Communities to Support Black Male Youth
- Kofi LarwehandJonathan Langdon: Seeing the Synergy in the Signals: Reflections on Weaving Projects into Social Movement Mobilizing through Community Radio.
- Dana E. Salter and Heather M. Pleasants: Afterword.
And reviews are already streaming in for this collection and include comments such as:
"What I so appreciate about this important volume is that the authors take up as central the kinds of conversations that too often only happen off the record. Fearlessly, they explore the messiness of research on digital media literacies. They ask what to do when things don’t go as planned, when deeply personal stories go public, when intentions bump up against realities within the politics of ‘doing good.’ We all need to think deeply about these issues together, and to speak of them out loud and on the record. We need methods to embed reflection and critical analysis of process into multiliteracies research, which is precisely the mandate this collection delivers on, with clarity and courage." (Dr. Elisabeth Soep, Senior Producer and Research Director, Youth Radio)
"By playing at the intersection of the digital literacy and community context, the editors and their co-authors move beyond traditional conversations about the pedagogical and programmatic mechanics of utilizing digital media to the criti-cal examination of digital literacies in specific contexts and the associated chal-lenges that accompany this work. As a STEAM educator and community advocate, I believe that through their work, Heather M. Pleasants and Dana E. Salter have created an invaluable space to interrogate some of the key questions facing those hoping to empower educators and students to utilize digital media to change and improve their world." (Dr. Brian Williams, Director, Alonzo A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence, and Assistant Professor, Early Childhood Education, Georgia State University)
"This is a beautifully conceptualized collection. The editors have invited experienced, self-reflective, community-based practitioners to ‘write themselves into the story’ of their work and the result is a nuanced conversation about the intricacies, ambiguities, challenges, and the inspiration of collaborating across boundaries to create media that matter. The insights shared and questions explored are invaluably generative. They help us think critically about the ethics, integrity, and purposes of our labor. They remind us that reflection into process is not for the footnotes; rather, it is central to the story of social justice work." (Darcy Alexandra, visual anthropologist, writer, educator, and documentary practitioner, Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland)
New book in our series: "Youth Community Inquiry: New Media for Community and Personal Growth"
Youth Community Inquiry offers a detailed look at how young people use new media to help their communities thrive. Chapters address questions about learning, digital technology, and community engagement through the theory of community inquiry. The settings range from a small farming town, to a mostly immigrant community, to inner-city Chicago, and include youth from ages eight to 20. Going beyond works on social media in a narrow sense, the projects in these settings involve the use of varied technologies, such as GPS/GIS mapping tools, video production, use of archives and databases, podcasts, and Internet radio. The development of inquiry-based activities serves as a record of the diverse experiences and a guide to future projects. The book concludes with an overview of a curriculum that readers may adapt for their own settings.Edited by three internationally renown scholars whose body of work in community inquiry has long shaped and informed this important field, the book's contents include:
- Bertram C. Bruce: Community Inquiry
- Ching-Chiu Lin and Karyn M. Mendoza: Youth Interests and Digital Media: 4-H Podcasting
- Program in Urbana Middle School
- Alex Jean-Charles: New Media Technology: Tools of Expression/Repression in Communities
- Nama R. Budhathoki, Bertram C. Bruce, Jill Murphy and Kimberly Rahn: Beyond Human Sensors: The Learning Instincts of Youth Using Geospatial Media
- William Patterson and Shameem Rakha: "Now I Am College Material": Engaging Students Through Living Reflections of Self-Identity as a Form of Pedagogy
- Sally K. Carter, Shameem Rakha and Chaebong Nam: TAPping In: Education, Leadership, and Outright Gumption
- Chris Ritzo and Mike Adams: Teen Tech, East St. Louis: Navigating New Community Partnerships
- Jeff Bennett and Robin Fisher: The Learning Never Stops: Creating a Curriculum That Resonates Beyond the Classroom
- Patrick W. Berry, Alexandra Cavallaro, Elaine Vázquez, Carlos R. DeJesús and Naomi García:(Re)voicing Teaching, Learning, and Possibility in Paseo Boricua – Chaebong Nam: Youth Asset Mapping: The Empowering and Engaging Youth Project (E2Y)
- Jeanie Austin, Joe Coyle, Rae-Anne Montague: Creating Collaborative Library Services to Incarcerated Youth
- Iván M. Jorrín-Abellán: A Needle in a Haystack: Evaluating YCI
- Angela M. Slates and Ann Peterson Bishop: "It Takes a Community": Community Inquiry as Emancipatory Scholarship, Indigenous Agency, Performative Inquiry, and Democracy Education
- Martin Wolske, Eric Johnson and Paul Adams: Citizen Professional Toolkits: Empowering Communities Through Mass Amateurization
- Lisa Bouillion Diaz: Youth Community Informatics Curriculum.
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Call for book proposals for our series: New Literacies
Those of you in the northern hemisphere who have enjoyed a restful and restorative summer and who are ready to get back into work with gusto, and those of you in the southern hemisphere who are heading into a lessening of winter and starting to feel your blood quicken in your veins, might want to think about working on a book proposal to submit for consideration for publication in our series with Peter Lang.
The series--New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies--focusses on publishing single-authored and edited books that focus on some aspect of new literacies. For us, new literacies are best described as newly developed or newly understood "socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)” (Lankshear and Knobel 2006: 64). The series does have a definite lean towards sociocultural theorisations of literacy practices, but not exclusively so. To obtain a sense of what's already been published in this series, and the kinds of things we're looking for, click here, then type "new literacies" into the series title window. Our scope is really quite open.
In terms of putting together a book proposal, the following template offers a starting place.
Book proposal template
1. Proposed book title
2. Author details
3. Summary description of and rationale for proposed book (a paragraph or two)
4. Statement regarding intended audience or readership
5. Competing books in the area
Identify closest competitors and explain how your book will differ from these.
6. Course relevance
If possible, sketch ideas for specific university courses and the like where this book can be used. Part of submitting a successful proposal is showing a market exists for it.
7. Background to the proposed book
This is a more extended explanation of the proposed book. This section may well have a bibliography
8. Features
Explicitly identify things in the proposed book that make it distinctive
9. Recent Relevant Publications
List relevant publications that show you have an established track record
10. Provisional Outline of Contents
Provide a chapter-by-chapter account of the proposed book; include proposed author names if proposing an edited collection
11. Approximate Word Length
95,000 words (including the bibliography/ies is a good length to aim at)
12. Timetable
Indicate a realistic date for completion of the manuscript
Additional tips
- Describing your proposed book in terms of it being based on your doctoral research, or on a conference symposium, won’t work in your favour
- Write your proposal with an international audience in mind (e.g., don’t use terms like “sophomore” or regional acronyms; don’t assume widespread knowledge of a regional policy)
- Be as succinct and to-the-point as possible (5 single-spaced pages for an entire proposal is a typical median length)
You can also get in touch with Michele (knobelm@mail.montclair.edu) and ask for advice or sample proposals, too. Email her your finished proposals and we'll set them on the review path.