(re)voicing teaching and learning in Paseo Boricua

What does it mean to take a "narrative approach" to exploring school, community, and literacy? When Alexandra Cavallaro and I were in a graduate seminar on inquiry-based learning, we thought about this question a great deal as we heard stories about the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School (PACHS) in the Paseo Boricua neighborhood of Chicago and the efforts that were being made there to extend learning beyond the space of school. (re)voicing teaching and learning in Paseo Boricua is a short film that we created with teachers, administrators, and students. One teacher, Elaine Vazquez, joined us as coauthor on this video, which was presented at the fifth annual Community as Intellectual Space symposium in June of 2009.

multimodality in 60 seconds

In the summer of 2007, while attending Ohio State University's Digital Media and Composition Institute, I was asked to use video to consider multimodality—in 60 seconds! Working with footage of my daughter learning to write Chinese characters, I began to think about how easy it has become to erase the traces of our labor.