Writing & Literacies On Air

This episode features:

- Meagan J. Meehan, @artsycr8tor - University of Buffalo (SUNY)

Meagan J. Meehan is an artist and author who holds a Bachelors in English Literature from New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), a Masters in Communication from Marist College, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Curriculum, Instruction and the Science of Learning at University at Buffalo (SUNY). Meagan’s research focuses on using Entertainment-Education to increase vocabulary scope and application.

- Sarah W. Beck, Karis Jones, Scott Storm, @swbook411; @karis_m_jones; @ScottWStorm - New York University

Sarah W. Beck is a teacher educator and writing researcher based at NYU whose work with teachers and scholarship focuses on classroom writing assessment, writing instruction, and disciplinary literacy.

Karis Jones is a PhD candidate in NYU's Teaching & Learning English Education program. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines issues of power and transformation at the intersection of students' fandom and disciplinary literacies and implications for designing more equitable contexts for learning in English classrooms.

Scott Storm is a doctoral student in English Education at New York University. He has taught students English in urban public schools for over a decade; he was founding English teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School where he served as Department Chair and Professional Learning Community Organizer. Scott studies disciplinary literacies, critical literacies, and adolescents’ literary sensemaking. His work has appeared in English Journal, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacies, English Teaching Practice and Critique, and Schools: Studies in Education.

- Ted Kesler, @tedsclassroom - Queens College (CUNY)

Ted is an associate professor in the Elementary and Early Childhood Education Department. He is Chair of the NCTE Poetry and Verse Novel Notables Committee. Recently, Ted’s research has focused on weaving children’s social semiotic resources into their classroom-based work, transforming writing workshop into composing workshop.

- Sue Nichols, @suemarynichols - University of South Australia

Sue Nichols is a literacy researcher and teacher educator, holding the position of Associate Professor at UniSA, Australia. While Sue’s research has often taken her out of institutional sites to explore diverse literacy practices and identities, she is also very interested in the preparation of multiliterate educators for inclusive, diverse, connected classrooms.

- Jayne C Lammers, @JayneLammers - University of Rochester

Jayne is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and Human Development. She’s the Director of English Teacher Preparation and a founding Associate Director in the Center for Learning in the Digital Age. She recently spent 5 months in Indonesia as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar learning about the digital literacies of secondary students in Central Java.

This video was compiled by members of the W&L SIG Grad Student Board Podcast Team: April Camping, Karis Jones, Gemma Cooper-Novack, Alex Corbitt

This episode features:

- Meagan J. Meehan, @artsycr8tor - University of Buffalo (SUNY)

Meagan J. Meehan is an artist and author who holds a Bachelors in English Literature from New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), a Masters in Communication from Marist College, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Curriculum, Instruction and the Science of Learning at University at Buffalo (SUNY). Meagan’s research focuses on using Entertainment-Education to increase vocabulary scope and application.

- Sarah W. Beck, Karis Jones, Scott Storm, @swbook411; @karis_m_jones; @ScottWStorm - New York University

Sarah W. Beck is a teacher educator and writing researcher based at NYU whose work with teachers and scholarship focuses on classroom writing assessment, writing instruction, and disciplinary literacy.

Karis Jones is a PhD candidate in NYU's Teaching & Learning English Education program. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines issues of power and transformation at the intersection of students' fandom and disciplinary literacies and implications for designing more equitable contexts for learning in English classrooms.

Scott Storm is a doctoral student in English Education at New York University. He has taught students English in urban public schools for over a decade; he was founding English teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School where he served as Department Chair and Professional Learning Community Organizer. Scott studies disciplinary literacies, critical literacies, and adolescents’ literary sensemaking. His work has appeared in English Journal, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacies, English Teaching Practice and Critique, and Schools: Studies in Education.

- Ted Kesler, @tedsclassroom - Queens College (CUNY)

Ted is an associate professor in the Elementary and Early Childhood Education Department. He is Chair of the NCTE Poetry and Verse Novel Notables Committee. Recently, Ted’s research has focused on weaving children’s social semiotic resources into their classroom-based work, transforming writing workshop into composing workshop.

- Sue Nichols, @suemarynichols - University of South Australia

Sue Nichols is a literacy researcher and teacher educator, holding the position of Associate Professor at UniSA, Australia. While Sue’s research has often taken her out of institutional sites to explore diverse literacy practices and identities, she is also very interested in the preparation of multiliterate educators for inclusive, diverse, connected classrooms.

- Jayne C Lammers, @JayneLammers - University of Rochester

Jayne is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and Human Development. She’s the Director of English Teacher Preparation and a founding Associate Director in the Center for Learning in the Digital Age. She recently spent 5 months in Indonesia as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar learning about the digital literacies of secondary students in Central Java.

This video was compiled by members of the W&L SIG Grad Student Board Podcast Team: April Camping, Karis Jones, Gemma Cooper-Novack, Alex Corbitt

"Visit tinyurl.com/y4uwutxj to upload your research video!"

This episode features:

- Abdul-Qadir Islam, @aqeyes - Teachers College, Columbia University

- Anna Smith, @anna_phd - Illinois State University

- Bethany Monea, @bethanymonea - University of Pennsylvania

- The Digital Discourse Project, @digitaldiscourseproject; @amystorn; @ElyseEA; @bethanymonea; @rabanigarg; @kagrogan15; @educatorsWAB; @ebonyteach; @maestraphilly - The National Writing Project & University of Pennsylvania

We are a team of researchers and teachers embarking on a five-year project to study how secondary ELA teachers learn to facilitate high-quality discussions of literature in online spaces.

- Alex Corbitt, @Alex_Corbitt - Boston College

This video was compiled by members of the W&L SIG Grad Student Board Podcast Team: Karis Jones (@Karis_M_Jones), Gemma Cooper-Novack (@gemmasupernova), Alex Corbitt (@Alex_Corbitt), April Camping (@AprilCamping)

"Visit tinyurl.com/y4uwutxj to upload your research video!"

This episode features:

- Abdul-Qadir Islam, @aqeyes - Teachers College, Columbia University

- Anna Smith, @anna_phd - Illinois State University

- Bethany Monea, @bethanymonea - University of Pennsylvania

- The Digital Discourse Project, @digitaldiscourseproject; @amystorn; @ElyseEA; @bethanymonea; @rabanigarg; @kagrogan15; @educatorsWAB; @ebonyteach; @maestraphilly - The National Writing Project & University of Pennsylvania

We are a team of researchers and teachers embarking on a five-year project to study how secondary ELA teachers learn to facilitate high-quality discussions of literature in online spaces.

- Alex Corbitt, @Alex_Corbitt - Boston College

This video was compiled by members of the W&L SIG Grad Student Board Podcast Team: Karis Jones (@Karis_M_Jones), Gemma Cooper-Novack (@gemmasupernova), Alex Corbitt (@Alex_Corbitt), April Camping (@AprilCamping)

Welcome to the Writing & Literacies SIG podcast series "Scholarship Spotlight"! This episode, titled “Publishing Across Modalities and Communities,” is Part 2 of our two-part interview series with Professor Tananarive Due and Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. Professor Due and Dr. Thomas discuss how they work in academic and fan communities to publish work across a variety of modalities. They conclude the interview by citing writers and scholars of color who continue to inform their thinking.

Tananarive Due is is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote "A Small Town" for Season 2 of "The Twilight Zone" on CBS All Access. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor at Penn GSE, studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. She regularly reviews children’s books featuring diverse heroes and heroines, teens and tweens caught between cultures, and kids from the margins for the Los Angeles Times. She has a particular interest in young adult fantasy literature and fan culture. A former English and language arts teacher, Thomas also explores how teachers handle traumatic historical events, such as slavery, when teaching literature.

Dr. Thomas has published her research and critical work in the Journal of Teacher Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Qualitative Inquiry, Linguistics and Education, English Journal, The ALAN Review, and Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Her work has also appeared in Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors Through Reading (ALA Editions, 2012), her co-edited volume Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012), and A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Dr. Thomas is a former NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow (2008-2010 Cohort), serves on the NCTE Standing Committee on Research (2012-2015), and was elected by her colleagues to serve on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee (2013-2017). Her early career work received the 2014 Emerging Scholar Award from AERA's Language and Social Processes Special Interest Group. In 2014, she was also selected as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.

This Scholarship Spotlight Series is brought to you by the The W&L Graduate Board Podcast Team: Karis Jones at New York University, Alex Corbitt at Boston College, Gemma Cooper-Novack at Syracuse University, Jessica Lough at West Virginia University and April Camping at Arizona State University. Special thanks to Alex Corbitt for his thought leadership and video editing work on this episode!

Welcome to the Writing & Literacies SIG podcast series "Scholarship Spotlight"! This episode, titled “Publishing Across Modalities and Communities,” is Part 2 of our two-part interview series with Professor Tananarive Due and Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. Professor Due and Dr. Thomas discuss how they work in academic and fan communities to publish work across a variety of modalities. They conclude the interview by citing writers and scholars of color who continue to inform their thinking.

Tananarive Due is is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote "A Small Town" for Season 2 of "The Twilight Zone" on CBS All Access. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor at Penn GSE, studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. She regularly reviews children’s books featuring diverse heroes and heroines, teens and tweens caught between cultures, and kids from the margins for the Los Angeles Times. She has a particular interest in young adult fantasy literature and fan culture. A former English and language arts teacher, Thomas also explores how teachers handle traumatic historical events, such as slavery, when teaching literature.

Dr. Thomas has published her research and critical work in the Journal of Teacher Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Qualitative Inquiry, Linguistics and Education, English Journal, The ALAN Review, and Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Her work has also appeared in Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors Through Reading (ALA Editions, 2012), her co-edited volume Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012), and A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Dr. Thomas is a former NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow (2008-2010 Cohort), serves on the NCTE Standing Committee on Research (2012-2015), and was elected by her colleagues to serve on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee (2013-2017). Her early career work received the 2014 Emerging Scholar Award from AERA's Language and Social Processes Special Interest Group. In 2014, she was also selected as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.

This Scholarship Spotlight Series is brought to you by the The W&L Graduate Board Podcast Team: Karis Jones at New York University, Alex Corbitt at Boston College, Gemma Cooper-Novack at Syracuse University, Jessica Lough at West Virginia University and April Camping at Arizona State University. Special thanks to Alex Corbitt for his thought leadership and video editing work on this episode!

Welcome to the Writing & Literacies SIG new podcast series "Scholarship Spotlight"! This episode, titled “Representation and (Re)Writing Speculative Fiction,” is an interview with Professor Tananarive Due and Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas about their histories and critical involvement with(re)writing the genre of speculative fiction. In Part I of this two part series, they answer the questions: How does your work rethink or resist the conventions of speculative fiction? What conventions of speculative fiction need to be reworked, and how are you as scholars challenging these conventions in similar (or different) ways?

Tananarive Due is is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote "A Small Town" for Season 2 of "The Twilight Zone" on CBS All Access. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor at Penn GSE, studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. She regularly reviews children’s books featuring diverse heroes and heroines, teens and tweens caught between cultures, and kids from the margins for the Los Angeles Times. She has a particular interest in young adult fantasy literature and fan culture. A former English and language arts teacher, Thomas also explores how teachers handle traumatic historical events, such as slavery, when teaching literature.

Dr. Thomas has published her research and critical work in the Journal of Teacher Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Qualitative Inquiry, Linguistics and Education, English Journal, The ALAN Review, and Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Her work has also appeared in Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors Through Reading (ALA Editions, 2012), her co-edited volume Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012), and A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Dr. Thomas is a former NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow (2008-2010 Cohort), serves on the NCTE Standing Committee on Research (2012-2015), and was elected by her colleagues to serve on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee (2013-2017). Her early career work received the 2014 Emerging Scholar Award from AERA's Language and Social Processes Special Interest Group. In 2014, she was also selected as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.

This Scholarship Spotlight Series is brought to you by the The W&L Graduate Board Podcast Team: Karis Jones at New York University, Alex Corbitt at Boston College, Gemma Cooper-Novack at Syracuse University, Jessica Lough at West Virginia University and April Camping at Arizona State University. Special thanks to Alex Corbitt for his thought leadership and video editing work on this episode!

Welcome to the Writing & Literacies SIG new podcast series "Scholarship Spotlight"! This episode, titled “Representation and (Re)Writing Speculative Fiction,” is an interview with Professor Tananarive Due and Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas about their histories and critical involvement with(re)writing the genre of speculative fiction. In Part I of this two part series, they answer the questions: How does your work rethink or resist the conventions of speculative fiction? What conventions of speculative fiction need to be reworked, and how are you as scholars challenging these conventions in similar (or different) ways?

Tananarive Due is is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote "A Small Town" for Season 2 of "The Twilight Zone" on CBS All Access. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor at Penn GSE, studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. She regularly reviews children’s books featuring diverse heroes and heroines, teens and tweens caught between cultures, and kids from the margins for the Los Angeles Times. She has a particular interest in young adult fantasy literature and fan culture. A former English and language arts teacher, Thomas also explores how teachers handle traumatic historical events, such as slavery, when teaching literature.

Dr. Thomas has published her research and critical work in the Journal of Teacher Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Qualitative Inquiry, Linguistics and Education, English Journal, The ALAN Review, and Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Her work has also appeared in Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors Through Reading (ALA Editions, 2012), her co-edited volume Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012), and A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Dr. Thomas is a former NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow (2008-2010 Cohort), serves on the NCTE Standing Committee on Research (2012-2015), and was elected by her colleagues to serve on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee (2013-2017). Her early career work received the 2014 Emerging Scholar Award from AERA's Language and Social Processes Special Interest Group. In 2014, she was also selected as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.

This Scholarship Spotlight Series is brought to you by the The W&L Graduate Board Podcast Team: Karis Jones at New York University, Alex Corbitt at Boston College, Gemma Cooper-Novack at Syracuse University, Jessica Lough at West Virginia University and April Camping at Arizona State University. Special thanks to Alex Corbitt for his thought leadership and video editing work on this episode!

Titled “Common Strands: Multimodality, Literacy, and International Perspectives,” this podcast surveys Dr. Jennifer Rowsell’s engagement with New Literacy Studies as a graduate student, the rise of multimodality in the field of literacy studies, and the current landscape of UK and Canadian literacy research. Dr. Rowsell is professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies at Brock University in St. Catherine’s Ontario.

Dr. Rowsell is the 2016 recipient of the Writing & Literacies SIG’s Steve Witte Award for Lifetime Achievement. Named for Stephen P. Witte, leading scholar of writing theory and research and a founding editor of the journal Written Communication, the Steve Witte Award is presented to a senior scholar who has made significant contributions to research in the area of writing and literacies through a particular academic work or body of work that has contributed significantly to scholarship in the area of writing and literacies.

Dr. Rowsell scholarship examining contemporary literacies across media, modes, and genres has contributed to expanding visions of what literacy education and pedagogy can be. Her work international contributions are many. Dr. Rowsell has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 18 books on an array of topics from new ways of framing literacy studies such asArtifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells A Story with Kate Pahl and Working with Multimodality: Literacy in Digital Age. She has pushed the field forward in volumes that address methodology in literacy research such as Resourcing Early Learners: New Networks, New Actors with Sue Nichols, Helen Nixon, and Sophia Rainbird and Learning and Literacy over Time: Longitudinal Perspectives with Julian Sefton-Green. She has also co-edited The Handbook of Literacy Studies with Kate Pahl which provides a renewed sense of the field of literacy studies and future directions in literacy research and theory.

This Oral Histories Series is brought to you by the SIG Historian, Dr. Robert LeBlanc, Assistant Professor at Cal Poly Pomona, and the AERA Writing and Literacies SIG Communication Team, led by Dr. Anna Smith, Assistant Professor at Illinois State University. Theme music in this episode composed and performed by SIG member Dr. Vaughn Watson, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, Michigan State University.

More of this Dr. Watson’s music is available at: @heteroglossic

Titled “Common Strands: Multimodality, Literacy, and International Perspectives,” this podcast surveys Dr. Jennifer Rowsell’s engagement with New Literacy Studies as a graduate student, the rise of multimodality in the field of literacy studies, and the current landscape of UK and Canadian literacy research. Dr. Rowsell is professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies at Brock University in St. Catherine’s Ontario.

Dr. Rowsell is the 2016 recipient of the Writing & Literacies SIG’s Steve Witte Award for Lifetime Achievement. Named for Stephen P. Witte, leading scholar of writing theory and research and a founding editor of the journal Written Communication, the Steve Witte Award is presented to a senior scholar who has made significant contributions to research in the area of writing and literacies through a particular academic work or body of work that has contributed significantly to scholarship in the area of writing and literacies.

Dr. Rowsell scholarship examining contemporary literacies across media, modes, and genres has contributed to expanding visions of what literacy education and pedagogy can be. Her work international contributions are many. Dr. Rowsell has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 18 books on an array of topics from new ways of framing literacy studies such asArtifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells A Story with Kate Pahl and Working with Multimodality: Literacy in Digital Age. She has pushed the field forward in volumes that address methodology in literacy research such as Resourcing Early Learners: New Networks, New Actors with Sue Nichols, Helen Nixon, and Sophia Rainbird and Learning and Literacy over Time: Longitudinal Perspectives with Julian Sefton-Green. She has also co-edited The Handbook of Literacy Studies with Kate Pahl which provides a renewed sense of the field of literacy studies and future directions in literacy research and theory.

This Oral Histories Series is brought to you by the SIG Historian, Dr. Robert LeBlanc, Assistant Professor at Cal Poly Pomona, and the AERA Writing and Literacies SIG Communication Team, led by Dr. Anna Smith, Assistant Professor at Illinois State University. Theme music in this episode composed and performed by SIG member Dr. Vaughn Watson, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, Michigan State University.

More of this Dr. Watson’s music is available at: @heteroglossic