Teresa Dobson

This study explores how Latin American literature is interpreted through grade-school educational practices in Metro Vancouver and problematizes potential mechanisms of representation that emerge from such practices through the lens of postcolonial theory. First, I describe key concepts of postcolonial theory and offer a brief overview how Latin American texts came to be included in North American school and university canons. I then consider the uptake of Latin American texts in Greater Vancouver through a review of BC curriculum, recommended text lists, and a survey of Vancouver-area teachers. I subsequently held focus-group sessions discussing Latin American texts and their use in classrooms with an established teacher inquiry group that was part of a SSHRC-funded, nation-wide project focused on teaching practices with postcolonial literature. Finally, I undertook a three-month observation of student interactions with Latin American texts in the classroom of one of the inquiry group members. I used thematic analysis to analyze all transcript data and applied postcolonial theory in my interpretations of this data. My findings show that Latin American texts infrequently appear among BC recommended text lists and in BC English language arts classrooms. Those that do appear tend to be from the genre of magic realism. The participants in the inquiry group were experienced teachers and critical readers (all were in graduate programs) with an interest in social justice issues; however, their interactions with Latin American texts were sometimes troubled. They reported little knowledge of Latin American texts and at times demonstrated reading practices marked by orientalism. Some participants seemed to view Latin America as a non-space (Augé, 1992) filled with an imaginary repertoire. Children engaging with Latin American texts in the grade-school classroom I observed also demonstrated reading practices marked by orientalism, particularly in the context of independent reading not guided by the teacher. This study reinforces the importance of guided readings mediated by theory and grounded in appropriate socio-political context. Constant reflexivity and examination of instructional strategies is also needed, so that teachers may avoid scenarios where stereotypes may be reinforced even in spite of intentions to expand and diversify the school canon.

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This study explored ways to integrate processes of reconciliation into educators’ teaching practice. The focus of this narrative inquiry was to engage educators in a series of land-based activities that prompted them to consider how the notion of “land as first teacher” (Haig-Brown & Dannenmann, 2008) might contribute to interdisciplinary approaches to land education, ecological recovery, and reconciliation in their classroom praxis. Research took place on the University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver campus, situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. The 4Rs of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility described by Kirkness and Barnhardt (1991) provided an ethical community protocol that directed the study.Over the span of four months, a participant group consisting of four graduate students, three undergraduate students, and two course instructors from the UBC Faculty of Education, engaged in a series of land-based activities on various public sites on or near the UBC campus that acknowledge and re-inscribe Indigenous presence. Following each activity, participants were asked to reflect on a series of guiding questions. Data sources included pre-study questionnaires, reflective journals, semi-structured interviews, and my own field notes and observations. Findings of the research suggested dominant discourses regarding the use of land and ethics towards the land were effectively challenged over the course of the study. Participants expressed how they might re-shape their instructional approaches to include processes of reconciliation in a multitude of ways, and expressed commitment to build their own personal and professional knowledge, and awareness of Indigenous perspectives to help further these processes. The study builds on a body of research exploring the effectiveness of decolonizing teacher education programs. It advances land education as a pedagogical model, and thus addresses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (2015b) calls to action for increased Indigenous content for learners at all levels. Further, it attends to the urgent need for reconciliation that runs deep in our country, by promoting mutually respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (TRC, 2015c).

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Environmental issues are a growing, global concern. UNESCO (1997) notes the significant role media has in appealing to audiences to act in sustainable ways. Cox (2013) specifically remarks upon the powerful role images play in how viewers can perceive the environment. As we contemplate how best to engage people in reflecting on what it means to live in a sustainable fashion, it is important that we consider the merits of particular rhetorical modes in environmental communication and how those approaches may engender concern or hopelessness, engagement or disengagement. One form of environmental communication that relies heavily on images, and that is growing in popularity, is documentary film. My study examines visual rhetorical modes in environmental documentaries and the types of impact they have on viewers. This study first identifies some dominant visual rhetorical modes through an extensive literature review and discussion of a variety of environmental documentary films. The resulting taxonomy of dominant visual rhetorical modes include: apocalyptic, jeremiad, hopeful, environmental nostalgia, sublime, and environmental melodrama. To explore how viewers react to visual rhetoric, eleven research participants were asked to view a sixty-minute compilation of video clips from various environmental documentaries that employed, to varying degrees, each of the dominant visual rhetorical modes. Using video annotation software, participants were asked to comment at points they felt to be particular striking or evocative. Follow-up interviews were conducted for clarification of participants’ annotations. The data collected and analyzed from participants’ annotations and transcribed interviews revealed that viewers were disengaged with messages of ecological doom. The most powerful rhetorical effect was observed when participants drew personal connections to content of particular video clips, which raised their awareness about certain environmental issues.

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In recent times, the declaration of the prominence of the visual over other channels of communication has been persistent across several disciplines, including film studies, design, sociology, and literacy education (e.g. Bolter, 1991; Fransecky & Debes, 1972; Kress, 2005; Sartori, 1998; Messaris, 2012). It is within this loom of visuality that the concept visual literacy has been woven together throughout the twentieth century and beyond. This dissertation explores the mobilization of this concept through the last century and addresses the implications of its interdisciplinary and polysemic nature. By tracing the evolution of this term, as well as some of its correlates in English, I map the concept of “the visual as a literacy.” In order to do this, I first completed a comprehensive search of available databases for all uses of “visual literacy” in English, in the process compiling a working bibliography of 2400 documents. Subsequently, I created a full-text database of 330 representative documents I deemed most central to the mobilization of visual literacy. I employed text visualization approaches combined with close reading to understand trends and patterns in my datasets. Beyond using available tools for text visualization, I also worked with a team to design and program a tool specifically for analysis of my full-text corpus: The Glass Cast (Peña, Juárez, Dobson, & INKE Research Group, 2016). This tool is a plug-in for the open- source reference management software Zotero. It allows researchers to visualize relationships between documents in a bibliography over time. In itself this tool is a unique contribution to scholarship and a key outcome of this study. Findings of this research included the revelation of a rich history of visual literacy dating to 1939, the identification of three virtually independent historical avenues, or waves, of mobilization of visual literacy, and the coexistence of at least two confounding understandings of the concept. Ultimately, I address these two different understandings in an attempt to inform the work of educators invested in the topic.

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This research was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of ethical issues confronting Alternative Reality Game (ARG) players who, when faced in a gameworld with actual life problems, must collectively reach solutions which are expressed through narratives and critical literacy. The aim of this research was to draw on the experience of game players engaging in the ARG, “Urgent Evoke,” in order to respond to the following research questions: 1) What kinds of moral functioning are evident in human play in immersive gameworlds; 2) How can players and educators who use these spaces grow as individuals in their ethical sensibilities?The method of analysis for this study was virtual ethnography, including pre- and postgame surveys and interviews and the analysis of artifacts created during the game. The four-component model of moral functioning (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2005) was used as a framework for analysis with the following main categories: judgment, sensitivity, motivation, and action. However, because Narvaez and Lapsley’s division in skills and sub-skills appeared too inflexible for broad understanding of the behaviours under review, additional coding was applied.Study results suggest that ARGs motivate players to contribute to the game, and that through such contribution participants may arrive at understandings that encourage them to make changes in their behaviours outside of the gameworld. In the four component areas, the ARG offered fertile space for growth and learning through discussion, negotiation, and reflection. The study suggests that ARGs can be used successfully to encourage sensitivity to questions of ethics.

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Despite current emphasis in teacher preparation programs on developing pre-service teachers’ comfort and competence with digital learning technologies (DLT), research suggests that pre-service teachers struggle to transfer innovative applications of technology into their eventual teaching practice. In particular, they resist change from traditional constructs of teaching and learning. In this dissertation, I suggest that disrupting pre-conceived notions of teaching and learning is a requisite step to facilitating change in classroom practice. Neuman (1990) observed that classroom practice is “disrupted” when digital technologies are integrated “in a way that fundamentally alters the instructional environment so that teaching and learning occur differently than before the technology was appropriated” (p. 110). This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter provides the theoretical framework that has informed the study and describes the case study methodology employed to explore the following two research questions: (a) How do pre-service teachers experience DLT in the context of a 12-month elementary teacher education program? (b) How do we disrupt pre-service teachers existing conceptions of literacy pedagogy? Chapters 2-4 are co-authored manuscript chapters. Chapter 2 examines the manner in which a community of learners working collaboratively within a wiki environment establish social hierarchies and negotiate power. Student engagement in this activity revealed much about social negotiation within such settings, and about the affordances of such software for formal education. This paper is included in its published form. Chapter 3 explores the participants’ experiences with “Slowmation” (a form of stop-motion animation). Findings reveal that reluctant uptake of slowmation on practicum by pre-service teachers appeared to be to the result of the weak support structure for the pedagogy and the lack of encouragement from some sponsor teachers. Chapter 4 explores pre-service teachers use of GarageBand™ and an electronic bulletin board in the context of a 3-month curriculum and instruction course in music education. Results reveal that the integration of digital learning technologies facilitates a reconceptualization of music education as well as a sociocultural interpretation of music literacy. In chapter 5, I draw comparisons across each of the manuscript chapters in light of current research in the field.

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Turning originality in authorship upside down, writing post-person posits a vital new role of writer-teacher-researcher in promoting sustainable relationships between people and the automated information environments they inhabit. In particular, this study proposes a remedial approach to info-waste in networked systems of literate correspondence, using poetic inquiry to examine the contemporary problem of spam (unsolicited bulk and commercial email and net abuse), and to reframe this critical juridical-technical issue from a personal and literary perspective. Seen within the Western historical context of public postal systems and the rise of mass mail, the connection between modes of impersonal address in networked media and consumerist ideologies is theorized. Focusing on the troublesome immanence of disposability, informational excess is examined as a means of social inclusion and exclusion by tracing computer network spamming from the first bulk newsgroup postings to the current era of artificially intelligent robotic networks. Situated within an educational context of teaching and writing in the twenty-first century, an age post-personal discourse, this dissertation aims to enhance the critical pedagogical work of establishing diversity as fundamental to personal and social value systems with attention to how poetics can be applied to everyday digital literacies to increase language awareness, stimulate student creativity, and at the same time serve as a barometer of prevailing climate change in cyberspace.

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