Literacies, Learning, and the Body: Putting Theory and Research into Pedagogical Practice (Expanding Literacies in Education)

The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings. The contributors investigate and reflect on the complexities of embodied literacies, honoring literacy learners and teachers as they holistically engage with texts in complex sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Considering these issues within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, the book offers a fresh lens and rhetoric with which to address literacy education policies, giving readers a discursive repertoire necessary to develop and defend responsive curricula within an increasingly high-stakes, standardized schooling climate. Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Preface 10 Acknowledgments 16 PART I Why Bodies Matter in Literacy Research 18 1 Introduction: Assembling Research on Literacies and the Body 20 2 Inscription, Erasure, Embodiment: Literacy Research and Bodies of Knowledge 37 PART II Disciplined Literacies, Disciplined Bodies 56 3 Reader Response and Embodied Performance: Body-Poems as Performative Response and Performativity 58 4 Disciplined within a Discipline: English Teachers Are Bound to Be Human Bodies 74 PART III Living Literacies, Feeling Bodies 90 5 When the Body Acquires Pedagogy and It Hurts: Discursive Practices and Material Affects of Round Robin Reading 92 6 Shrinking In, Spilling Out, and Living Through: Affective Energy as Multimodal Literacies 107 7 Literacy, Emotion, and the Teaching/Learning Body 122 8 Racialized Bodies as Lived Experiences: How Phenomenology Might Offer Literacy Studies Another Perspective on the Body 139 9 Moving Off-Screen: Pathways for Understanding an Adolescent’s Embodied Experience of New Media Making 153 PART IV Bodies as Social Texts 170 10 Race and Rag Dolls: Critically Engaging the Embodiment of Diversity in Lalaloopsy Transmedia 172 11 Traditionally Marginalized Bodies Making Space: Through Embodied Literacy Performances 187 12 Drawing Teachers in a Language Arts Methods Course: Images of Teachers, Literacy, and Pedagogy 199 13 “What Kind of Woman Are You?”: Performing Decency and Motherhood Behind Bars 222 PART V Pervasive Bodies, Indeterminate Literacies 236 14 Bodies With and Without Organs: Literacies of a True Crime Sex and Violence Drama 238 15 Dead-Lines: Teachers’ Bureaucratic Habitus and Disciplinary Writing in Three South African Schools 253 16 Resisting the Script: Assuming Embodiment in Literacy Education 269 PART VI Conclusion 286 17 On Literacies, Learning, and Bodies: Theorizing, Researching, and Imagining Pedagogies 288 List of Contributors 295 Index 300 Putting Theory and Research into Pedagogical Practice The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings.