Whether teaching English to high school students or presenting in my dissertation defense, I have been fascinated by the interplay of old literacy and new literacies.  I think a challenge for teachers is to blur the line between the old and the new.  The challenge for academics is to find ways to represent their ideas via new texts.  Below are some examples of my work.

A Dissertation Movie Trailer and Sequel

The theory I build in my dissertation centers around a political cartoon from New York City in 1871.  It depicts corrupt politician Boss Tweed throwing one set of textbooks out of a classroom window and supplanting them with his own.  This cartoon still strikes me.  I created a brief trailer to walk others through the implications of this cartoon on education in America–and New York–today.

The first trailer was made as much for me to understand the crux of my research study as for catching the attention of friends and colleagues.  The second video, seen below, was  made less as a teaser and more as an attempt to make a quick and compelling point based on work I had done with Critical Discourse Analysis and policy documents surrounding online learning.  See it here:

Reading Chaucer, Composing Critical Rap Songs

As a high school English teacher, I worked with students to blur the line between old and new kinds of texts.  In one project, we read Canterbury Tales, wrote “traditional” literary essays about the poem’s portrayal of social issues, and then transposed those essays into academic raps.  For a song from the album, download it here.  Here is a glimpse into what the classroom looked like during recording:

Mobile Phones to Teach Writing 

While consulting with a school as part of the Innovation Zone work, I worked with a Spanish teacher and her team to design a project in which students used mobile phones to archive and write about meaningful artifacts from their lives, which they then curated in an online museum exhibit.