Carmen Medina Research Collection

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/23019

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Now showing 1 - 13 of 13

In search of the glocal through process drama
(Peter Lang Publishers, 2007) Weltsek, G.; Medina, Carmen L.
In this chapter we present findings from a case study ing Methods course examining pre-service teachers' responses co the critical literary text The Streets Are Free (Kurusa, 1995). Drama strategies grounded in notions of process drama (O'Neill, 1995)-the creation of a make-believe world through improvised encounters-worked as the interpretative site for the pre-service teachers engagements. Through these creative experiences, dramatic interprctations of various sociopolitical issues framing the text were constructed. The researchers utilized elements of critical performative pedagogical theory (Giroux, 200]; Pineau, 2002, 2005), and critical discourse analysis (Gee, 1999), as theoretical and analytical lenses to examine the possibilities of using process drama as a space to observe how multiple ideological discourses were performed, enacted, and reflected upon when exploring a literary text. We position critical performative pedagogy as a framework for theorizing the emergence of glocal hybrid, critical discourses and identities in creative literacy experiences.
Latino Media and Critical Literacy Pedagogies: Children's Scripting of Telenovelas Discourses
(Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 2013) Medina, Carmen L.; del Rocío Costa, María
Using elements of the ethnography of globalization and teacher research, two Puerto Rican researchers and educators worked collaboratively with a teacher on a study conducted in a third grade classroom in a public school in an urban community in Puerto Rico. They conceptualized children’s curricular engagement with the Spanish television genre of telenovelas in relation to classroom critical literacy and performative inquiry where children’s histories, their lives in hyper-globalized contexts (through media, multinational commercialization, and technology), and their related discursive practices were made visible.
Los poetas
(Peter Lang Publishers, 2005) Medina, Carmen L.; Bradburry, Kelly; Pearson, Susan
Research on language and literacy development for English language learners has provided extensive data and theoretical frameworks to suggest different practices—nonprescriptive or homogenous—to effectively engage these students in success-ful literacy learning experiences. Among the most relevant to this chapter are sociocultural theories that look at the connections among language, literacy, and cul-ture (Huerta-Macías, 1998; Pérez et al., 1998; Soto, 1997; Trueba, 1990) and the critical role of honoring and welcoming the students’ home language and culture into the learning process to develop inclusive and culturally democratic biliteracy spaces (Darder, 1997). Related to this notion of home, language, and cultural democracy is also the idea that students from diverse linguistic backgrounds come to the schooling process with valuable information and experiences from their home and their communities or “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992) that should be considered in the development of a relevant cur-riculum that allows for the students’ voices and experiences to be heard and be pre-sent (Martínez-Roldán, 2003).
Drama Wor(l)ds: Explorations of Latina/o Realistic Fiction
(Language Arts, 2004-03) Medina, Carmen L.
This article looks at fifth graders’ interpretations of Friends from the other side/Amigos del tro lado by Chicana/Mexican American feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa (1993). Drama-in-Education strategies were the pedagogical tools used to facilitate the students’ engagement in dialogues that moved them from understanding aspects of the life and social reality of Mexican undocumented immigrants on the US/Mexico border to questioning issues of citizenship and justice. Three (3) overarching themes were identified that extended through the dialogues and the drama: First, Making sense of the issues, where the students began to talk and make sense of social issues presented in the text such as citizenship, representation and language. Second, Friendship and compassion. Finally, Becoming critical: Understanding the multiple perspectives involved.
Performing Identities through Drama and Teatro Practices in Multilingual Classrooms
(Language Arts, 2006-03) Medina, Carmen L.; Campano, Gerald
This article provides evidence from our work as teachers, drama facilitators and researchers that drama potentially affords a generative nexus between the students’ own identities and more expansive understandings school-based literacy practices. We examined data from two separate fifth grade classroom studies on drama and literacy to show how drama may in fact open critical spaces within which students negotiate diverse perspectives and collaboratively generate knowledge. These perspectives and knowledge can then be put in the service of their own educational and social empowerment.
Interpreting Latino/a Literature as Critical Fictions
(ALAN Review, 2006-12) Medina, Carmen L.
Reading Latino/a children’s literature has become a great passion and an important component of my work as an educator. The journey began while looking for children’s literary texts that somehow speak about aspects of my Puerto Rican/Latina identity and those communities close to mine. I was looking for personal and literary growth but also for ways in which I could share a different literary experience from the mainstream with children and teachers.
Collaborative Voices Exploring Culturally and Socially Responsive Literacies
(Language Arts, 2010-03) Medina, Carmen L.; del Rocío Costa, María
This piece shares preservice teachers and instructors reflections on their perceptions of a course on Spanish language arts methods in Puerto Rico. The course was redesigned to focus on interrelated curricular and pedagogical aspects such as literacies as situated social practice, funds of knowledge, popular culture and critical literacy. In redesigning the course the instructor and colleague/co-researcher explored perspectives related to “inquiry as stance” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) and engaged with the students on inquiry approaches and practices to examine the collective experience within the course and the polticial nature of the work we do in literacy education.
Embodiment and performance in pedagogy research: Investigating the possibility of the body in curriculum experience
(Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2011) Perry, Mia; Medina, Carmen L.
In this study, we consider experiential learning in relation to embodiment and performative practices. We address the need for a method of analysis to examine the role of the body in space, as text, and as experience. In order to develop our analysis, we define embodiment and performance as areas of thought with distinct histories and anatomies. Through an examination of theories of the body and concepts of the performative in pedagogy, we explore how bodies are constructed and understood within the "experience of learning" (Ellsworth, 2005), and situate performative pedagogy in relation to that. We draw on data from a drama education classroom, and poststructural theory, to illustrate how the body can be considered in analysis and can reveal complex and informative notions about teaching and learning, as well as bodies and performance practices in the classroom.
Abrir la puerta: La escritura a través de un lente diferente
(Cuaderno de Investigación en la Educación, 2011-12) del Rocío Costa, María; Medina, Carmen L.; Soto, Nayda
This article present research findings focusing on the teaching of literacy from a socio-cultural and critical perspectives in an elementary level classroom of a public school in Puerto Rico. The project delved into how to teach writing through the inclusion of popular culture and students’ everyday literacies. As a model for the development of writing, curricular invitations were integrated to the process after the writing workshop had begun. The article discusses how integrating popular culture and students’ everyday literacies contributed to the inclusion of all the students’ voices and their active participation in the writing process. Curricular invitations as a writing strategy were especially important to include students who resisted writing and helped them perceive themselves as writers.
Playful Literacies and Practices of Making in Children’s Imaginaries
(Routledge, 2017-08) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Buchholz, Beth A.; Medina, Carmen Liliana
In this chapter, we examine literacy research that looks beyond print to recognize the action texts in young children’s media production and to better understand the mutually constitutive relationships among play and making in contemporary childhoods. How do these areas merge in children’s classroom productions in digital puppetry, toymaking, drama, animation, ﬁlmmaking, and crafting of artifacts? Our focus is on shared imaginative production in classroom cultures to understand play and making as powerful literacies with value in their own right, producing unapologetically printless texts assembled with physical actions and materials that move and recruit across digital networks. We draw upon contemporary research on imagination and literacies as social action, looking at the nexus of play and making as a site of collective meaning-making and cultural production, that both contests and reinscribes boundaries in digital cultures, resonates and ruptures dominant discourses, and mobilizes youth and materials. Play and making are literacies that run on peer culture passions, often centered on electronic games and digital play with popular media. But it is also important to note that it is not necessary for children to be online or to be using new technologies to be deeply entangled in imaginative labor as young participants in global ﬂows and digital cultures. In the following sections, we survey emerging theories and research that show the impact on children’s learning and participation in classrooms of playful literacies and practices of making within the collective imaginaries that circulate in and through childhoods.
Monster High: Converging Imaginaries of Girlhood in Tweens’ Digital Doll Play
(Routledge, 2017-07) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Medina, Carmen L.
This chapter examines the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media and shows that players also make use of the complexity that these entanglements produce to remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture normative media expectations. It analyzes the Monster High (MH) website, tracking its connected play spaces for repetitions and ruptures in both the content of the website and content of fan-produced media such as blog posts and videos. MH fanvid makeup tutorials converge fashionista and high school imaginaries with tweens' visions of their future adolescent selves. A corollary of the hypersexualization of the MH characters is the anticipation of imperfection as girls fail to achieve the deathly thin body shape of the MH dolls. Convergences among cultural imaginaries produce resonances when their associated identity texts repeat across imaginaries, amplifying a coherent message.
Producing Cultural Imaginaries in the Playshop
(Routledge, 2013-10) Wohlwend, Karen E.; Medina, Carmen Liliana
In this chapter, we consider play and drama as more than pleasurable pastimes or enrichment activities but as core literacies for critical cultural production that enable children to explore who they are expected to be in a global world. Using this lens, we examine how play enables children to engage in cultural imaginaries in the multiple spaces they encounter at home, at school, on television, in the mall, on the Internet, on the phone, or across international communities. We use the term cultural imaginaries (Medina & Wohlwend, 2014) to describe collective visions of idealized communities, constructed through shared imagination rather than located in a speciﬁ c physical geographical location (Anderson, 1991 ; Appardurai, 1996 ). Within these imaginaries, we write and play ways of being through the stories we tell, the ﬁ lms we watch, and the books we read, but also, through the media we play and the products we use. For example, media imaginaries circulate scripts for fantasy worlds in animated ﬁ lms or for melodramas in television programs that are distributed globally and replayed locally among children who enact and embody those worlds. But cultural imaginaries are not limited to media portrayals of ﬁ ctional scripts; they include our idealized models of real places, whether schools, neighborhoods, communities, or countries. In our literacy research in early childhood and elementary classrooms, we found children playing in transnational imaginaries, trying out cultural repertoires handed down across generations and continents as they pretended to be in distant places where children had never lived but that they knew through family stories, picture books, photo albums and television texts.
Media as nexus of practice: remaking identities in What Not to Wear
(Taylor and Francis, 2012-06-15) Medina, Carmen L.; Wohlwend, Karen E.
In this conceptual piece, we examine media as a nexus of a traditional schooling pedagogy and performance pedagogy to make visible how their overlapping elements produce media's pervasive educative force but also to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of using media in educational contexts. Nexus analysis examines a fashion makeover television program – What Not to Wear (WNTW) – as an embodied lesson that produces identity revision but also disjunctures and slippages that enable critical responses and productive remakings. WNTW is a dramatization of remediation of one woman's (portrayed) lived practices and clothing choices which are read on her body as personal expression of fashion trends. These globalized lessons with body texts require new ways of reading and responding that allow learners/viewers to see the power relations that construct particular identity performances as errors and cultural practices and ethnicities as unacceptable.

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