Innovation and imagination in reading and technology

Original Course Design

    • I designed the curriculum map "Sports and Popular Culture" in 2010 and ran the course in a variety of iterations over the next years, always grounding digital media literacy as the core of the instruction. Please click here to see the curriculum guide I wrote.

STATEMENT: The course evolved significantly since its inception, as I reflected on initial student reactions to topics and texts; refined the media literacy mechanisms for inquiry; and, deepened the opportunities for individualization through creating different pathways to literacy learning.

Evolution of the Course

As I taught the course, I measured student reactions, assessments, and enrollment against the original curriculum design. I reflected on what worked, what didn't work, and how I could improve the literacy learning experience for my students. Please go to the attachments at the bottom of this page to read my reflections on the evolution of the course: "Multimodal, Multigenre Literacy Learning with Sports Texts."

Curriculum

The five units of the Sports, Popular Culture, and Literature course today have commonality with the first year of the course, but there have been extensive changes to represent new media, technology, and educational innovations.

Unit One: Sports as a Reflection of Society

Unit Two: (Inter) National Sports and Identity

Unit Three: Consumer Culture and Sports

Unit Four: The Role of Race in Professional Sports

Unit Five: Sex and Gender in Sports

Curated Collections of Sports Media Texts

As I conducted research to understand the wide variety of pedagogical choices available to me as a media literacy instructor, I realized that offering students choice in each unit's final analysis and composition phase might be a significant way to motivate students to become better readers of their worlds.

Remembering Glasser's Choice Theory, which is centered around the belief that we are internally, not externally motivated, I created opportunities for students to choose their own pathways at the end of each unit. In this way, what drove student learning was a series of internally developed notions of what was most important and satisfying to them. Click here to view the five curated collections.

Post-Doctoral Research Study As I approached the 2013-2014 school year, I recognized the possibility to make a real change in the worldviews of students in this course through a media literacy intervention. With the guidance of Dr. Renee Hobbs, co-editor of the Journal of Media Literacy and founder of The Media Education Lab, I designed and conducted a research study. I will analyze the data I acquired this summer 2014.

Please click here to learn about the research study, titled, "You swing like a g-g-g-i-r-r-l-l! A media literacy intervention to analyze student attitudes around gender constructions in sport." If you are interested in my literature review, please go to the attachments section at the bottom of this page.

EVIDENCE

includes, but is not limited to: