Jennifer Stone
My work specializes in sociocultural and critical approaches to literacy studies. In my research, I focus on how individuals, families, and communities accumulate literacy resources across home, community, school, workplace, civic, and affinity-based contexts. In particular, I have examined the roles that language diversity (such as dialect, Indigenous and world languages, other forms of representation, and community networks), digital literacies (such as website use and design, computer and video game play, and instant/text messaging), and popular culture (including games, music, television, and other media) play in contemporary American culture, as well as the implications of such resources for literacy teaching and learning. My current research project is investigating the roles that language, literacy, and technology play in the lives of everyday Alaskans.
Phone: 907-786-4373
Address: ADM 101J, 3211 Providence Dr.
University of Alaska Anchorage
Anchorage, AK 99508
Phone: 907-786-4373
Address: ADM 101J, 3211 Providence Dr.
University of Alaska Anchorage
Anchorage, AK 99508
less
InterestsView All (20)
Uploads
This paper describes the WoW experience, where students in a graduate English seminar played World of Warcraft to ground their learning about digital literacies. Through the experience, students developed their own digital literacies and learned to enter academic discourse about games and digital literacies.
In the article, the instructor and eight students describe the purpose, design, and outcomes of the experience. Over the course of a month, the group coordinated logistics and roles, each person created a character, each character reached the threshold level for low-level dungeons, the whole class played several dungeons together, and the class engaged in metaconversation about the experience. The instructor reflects on the problem of practice that the WoW experience addressed and the instructional organization of the experience. The students, who came into the WoW experience with a range of prior knowledge about games and MMORPGs, reflect on what challenges they faced while learning to play and develop their own digital literacies, how they assembled resources to overcome challenges, how their views of digital literacies and games shifted from the experience, and how the experience helped them rethink teaching first-year composition. As the WoW experience illustrates, finding ways to connect games to advanced graduate courses can create fun, frustrating, and powerful learning experiences for students as they maneuver complex content.
This short piece describes two applications of games and gamification in university-level English courses.
theory of medievalism in high fantasy MMORPGs. In D. Kline (ed.) Digital gaming reimagines
the Middle Ages. New York, NY: Routledge.
This chapter investigates how high-fantasy Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) create a backdrop for players to engage in contemporary medievalist gender practices. In particular, we focus on how such games provide contexts that hail players into longstanding motifs of medievalist gender practices, such as expectations for masculinity and femininity, chivalry, courtly love, and warfare. Although these motifs have strong influences over players’ choices and actions, we also investigate moments of transgression, where medievalist historical structures of gender are exposed or questioned. They authors, who are all avid players, draw on a wide range of experiences to illustrate how such medievalist contexts shape gender practices in relation to history and identity.
Online participation is becoming a significant part of many young people’s recreational literate lives. Nonetheless, the range of online literacies available in children’s out-of-school lives is rarely addressed in school-based literacy curricula and instruction. To address this gap, this chapter develops and illustrates a critical literacy framework based on Jenkins’ (2006) concept of “convergence.” Building on Jenkins’ theory of convergence, we pull together ideas from media studies, multiliteracies, and semiotics to develop a cohesive framework for unpacking the textual practices, practices of consumption, and social networks common in new media. We then illustrate this framework through an analysis of ideologies of gender in popular websites among elementary-age children, including Barbie, American Girl, Transformers, and Hot Wheels.
Online texts rapidly are becoming central to children’s out-of-school literate lives. However, children’s engagement with such unofficial texts rarely is addressed in schools, or is addressed
in limited ways. To address this gap, we argue for conceptualizing popular media, including websites, as the new literatures of childhood, tracking how popular websites maintain many of the values of children’s literature but extend beyond the genres, purposes, and textual practices commonly discussed in children’s literature. Through analyses of cultural models of gender in four popular websites—including cultural models of ideal girls and boys, appropriate activities for each gender, and characterizations of the opposite sex—we illustrate how a literary approach to new media texts can be used to refocus literacy education.
This chapter engages in a textual analysis of eight websites that adolescents commonly use outside of school. As I illustrate, these
sites—-despite popular conceptions that they are degrading literacy—-actually engage young people in complex literacy practices that converge with many of the values of school-based literacies. However, these sites also raise several key issues that currently are not being addressed in official literacy learning contexts.
This article examines a children's book writing workshop for middle school students of color in which 12 girls participated. The curriculum was developed to create intersections between students' in- and out-of-school lives. The students' writing within the workshop is analyzed by unpacking their "recontextualizations" of settings, characters, language, and popular culture.
Describes five lessons learned from teaching and researching website design with 7th grade students.
In this article we merge de Certeau's theory of strategies and tactics with more recent work on socially situated identities to investigate how youth in one eighth-grade reading class withstood and resisted identities of "being remedial." On the basis of observational and interview data collected during a year-long ethnographic study, we illustrate how students used various texts to participate in official school practices while subverting those practices.
The relationship between talk and learning has been well documented in preservice and inservice teachers' and administrators' education. These studies demonstrate that talk is a central part of teacher learning and change, that particular forms of talk are more or less effective for such change to take place, and that talk must be conducted over long periods of time in a supportive community for it to initiate teacher change. However, little is known about how sustained, critical conversations in teachers' lives shape and reshape their understandings and practices. In this paper, the authors extend the work on teacher talk and learning by drawing on Bakhtin's notion of "excess of sight." They explore how such critical conversations enable teachers to see themselves and their teaching in fresh light. In January 1997, a group of ten teachers from one urban elementary school and two university researchers began to meet for conversations about their literacy teaching and its effects on children's learning. This paper explores how two of these teachers--first grade classroom teacher Susan Jones and Title I reading specialist Aby Smith--used dialogue to rethink their literacy practice and ultimately to teach Benjy Valdez how to read.
Through a detailed case study of one preservice teacher's development, the author examines the tension between basic skills and whole language discourses in literacy education. The author frames "the basic skills/whole language binary" as a "social imaginary,"--"an image that exists within the popular imagination or unconscious" and a force that frames one's societal understanding of literacy education. The author demonstrates how prospective teachers recruit their own experiences to position themselves within this binary and suggests important ways in which university coursework and practicum placements can provide a context in which preservice teachers might make sense of the "social imaginary" of literacy education.
This session shared an achievements-based mini-game from my online ENGL A111 (first-year composition) courses. The game consists of 9 possible achievements, which support the “habits of mind” of successful online students (exploring content, engaging in community, inquisitiveness, paying attention to criteria, etc.). Participants left the session with a model of how achievements can be used in an online class, an analysis of the pros and cons of using achievements, and concrete ideas for applying achievements in their own teaching.
Based on a series of life history interviews about language, literacy, and technology in Alaskan lives, this analysis focuses on participants’ experiences of historically grounded language ideologies. In particular, this analysis looks at the tension between sponsors of English and stewards of Alaska Native languages and thought-worlds.
Jennifer Stone’s presentation discusses how her experiences
teaching and researching in Alaska have challenged official
narratives of the history of English, such as those promoted
by common textbooks. Drawing on data from a study of
language, literacy, and technology in Alaskan lives, Stone
constructs a counternarrative of the history of English in
Alaska that highlights the ideological struggle between
English and heritage languages in the state (including
Alaska Native languages and various world languages
brought to Alaska by immigrants and refugees). She raises
ethical questions for those engaged in English studies and
English education in the state.
This paper describes the WoW experience, where students in a graduate English seminar played World of Warcraft to ground their learning about digital literacies. Through the experience, students developed their own digital literacies and learned to enter academic discourse about games and digital literacies.
In the article, the instructor and eight students describe the purpose, design, and outcomes of the experience. Over the course of a month, the group coordinated logistics and roles, each person created a character, each character reached the threshold level for low-level dungeons, the whole class played several dungeons together, and the class engaged in metaconversation about the experience. The instructor reflects on the problem of practice that the WoW experience addressed and the instructional organization of the experience. The students, who came into the WoW experience with a range of prior knowledge about games and MMORPGs, reflect on what challenges they faced while learning to play and develop their own digital literacies, how they assembled resources to overcome challenges, how their views of digital literacies and games shifted from the experience, and how the experience helped them rethink teaching first-year composition. As the WoW experience illustrates, finding ways to connect games to advanced graduate courses can create fun, frustrating, and powerful learning experiences for students as they maneuver complex content.
This short piece describes two applications of games and gamification in university-level English courses.
theory of medievalism in high fantasy MMORPGs. In D. Kline (ed.) Digital gaming reimagines
the Middle Ages. New York, NY: Routledge.
This chapter investigates how high-fantasy Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) create a backdrop for players to engage in contemporary medievalist gender practices. In particular, we focus on how such games provide contexts that hail players into longstanding motifs of medievalist gender practices, such as expectations for masculinity and femininity, chivalry, courtly love, and warfare. Although these motifs have strong influences over players’ choices and actions, we also investigate moments of transgression, where medievalist historical structures of gender are exposed or questioned. They authors, who are all avid players, draw on a wide range of experiences to illustrate how such medievalist contexts shape gender practices in relation to history and identity.
Online participation is becoming a significant part of many young people’s recreational literate lives. Nonetheless, the range of online literacies available in children’s out-of-school lives is rarely addressed in school-based literacy curricula and instruction. To address this gap, this chapter develops and illustrates a critical literacy framework based on Jenkins’ (2006) concept of “convergence.” Building on Jenkins’ theory of convergence, we pull together ideas from media studies, multiliteracies, and semiotics to develop a cohesive framework for unpacking the textual practices, practices of consumption, and social networks common in new media. We then illustrate this framework through an analysis of ideologies of gender in popular websites among elementary-age children, including Barbie, American Girl, Transformers, and Hot Wheels.
Online texts rapidly are becoming central to children’s out-of-school literate lives. However, children’s engagement with such unofficial texts rarely is addressed in schools, or is addressed
in limited ways. To address this gap, we argue for conceptualizing popular media, including websites, as the new literatures of childhood, tracking how popular websites maintain many of the values of children’s literature but extend beyond the genres, purposes, and textual practices commonly discussed in children’s literature. Through analyses of cultural models of gender in four popular websites—including cultural models of ideal girls and boys, appropriate activities for each gender, and characterizations of the opposite sex—we illustrate how a literary approach to new media texts can be used to refocus literacy education.
This chapter engages in a textual analysis of eight websites that adolescents commonly use outside of school. As I illustrate, these
sites—-despite popular conceptions that they are degrading literacy—-actually engage young people in complex literacy practices that converge with many of the values of school-based literacies. However, these sites also raise several key issues that currently are not being addressed in official literacy learning contexts.
This article examines a children's book writing workshop for middle school students of color in which 12 girls participated. The curriculum was developed to create intersections between students' in- and out-of-school lives. The students' writing within the workshop is analyzed by unpacking their "recontextualizations" of settings, characters, language, and popular culture.
Describes five lessons learned from teaching and researching website design with 7th grade students.
In this article we merge de Certeau's theory of strategies and tactics with more recent work on socially situated identities to investigate how youth in one eighth-grade reading class withstood and resisted identities of "being remedial." On the basis of observational and interview data collected during a year-long ethnographic study, we illustrate how students used various texts to participate in official school practices while subverting those practices.
The relationship between talk and learning has been well documented in preservice and inservice teachers' and administrators' education. These studies demonstrate that talk is a central part of teacher learning and change, that particular forms of talk are more or less effective for such change to take place, and that talk must be conducted over long periods of time in a supportive community for it to initiate teacher change. However, little is known about how sustained, critical conversations in teachers' lives shape and reshape their understandings and practices. In this paper, the authors extend the work on teacher talk and learning by drawing on Bakhtin's notion of "excess of sight." They explore how such critical conversations enable teachers to see themselves and their teaching in fresh light. In January 1997, a group of ten teachers from one urban elementary school and two university researchers began to meet for conversations about their literacy teaching and its effects on children's learning. This paper explores how two of these teachers--first grade classroom teacher Susan Jones and Title I reading specialist Aby Smith--used dialogue to rethink their literacy practice and ultimately to teach Benjy Valdez how to read.
Through a detailed case study of one preservice teacher's development, the author examines the tension between basic skills and whole language discourses in literacy education. The author frames "the basic skills/whole language binary" as a "social imaginary,"--"an image that exists within the popular imagination or unconscious" and a force that frames one's societal understanding of literacy education. The author demonstrates how prospective teachers recruit their own experiences to position themselves within this binary and suggests important ways in which university coursework and practicum placements can provide a context in which preservice teachers might make sense of the "social imaginary" of literacy education.
This session shared an achievements-based mini-game from my online ENGL A111 (first-year composition) courses. The game consists of 9 possible achievements, which support the “habits of mind” of successful online students (exploring content, engaging in community, inquisitiveness, paying attention to criteria, etc.). Participants left the session with a model of how achievements can be used in an online class, an analysis of the pros and cons of using achievements, and concrete ideas for applying achievements in their own teaching.
Based on a series of life history interviews about language, literacy, and technology in Alaskan lives, this analysis focuses on participants’ experiences of historically grounded language ideologies. In particular, this analysis looks at the tension between sponsors of English and stewards of Alaska Native languages and thought-worlds.
Jennifer Stone’s presentation discusses how her experiences
teaching and researching in Alaska have challenged official
narratives of the history of English, such as those promoted
by common textbooks. Drawing on data from a study of
language, literacy, and technology in Alaskan lives, Stone
constructs a counternarrative of the history of English in
Alaska that highlights the ideological struggle between
English and heritage languages in the state (including
Alaska Native languages and various world languages
brought to Alaska by immigrants and refugees). She raises
ethical questions for those engaged in English studies and
English education in the state.
As part of a larger study of language, literacy, and technology in Alaskan lives, this analysis looks closely at the tensions between young people’s in- and out-of-school writing lives. It also examines what kinds of writing practices are being “sponsored” in various contexts (Brandt, 2001).