Books by Elisabeth Johnson
by Christian Ehret, Christine Mallozzi, Hilary E . Hughes, Kerryn Dixon, Jaye Johnson Thiel, Anne Crampton, Mia Perry, Amanda Claudia Wager, Jacqui Dornbrack, Elisabeth Johnson, Rachel Oppenheim, Karen Wohlwend, Stephanie Jones, Marjorie Siegel, Stavroula Kontovourki, and Grace Enriquez The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the emb... more The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings. The contributors investigate and reflect on the complexities of embodied literacies, honoring literacy learners and teachers as they holistically engage with texts in complex sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Considering these issues within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, the book offers a fresh lens and rhetoric with which to address literacy education policies, giving readers a discursive repertoire necessary to develop and defend responsive curricula within an increasingly high-stakes, standardized schooling climate.
articles by Elisabeth Johnson
New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2011
College coursework and job-related tasks make similar demands on students and workers. Typically,... more College coursework and job-related tasks make similar demands on students and workers. Typically, as students advance through the grades, they are expected to become increasingly competent and less dependent on detailed guidance from instructors. That is, these students are expected to acquire the academic skills, thinking, reasoning, and teamwork skills necessary for productive work in the twenty-fi rst century (21st Century Workforce Commission, 2000). Focusing on the transition from school to work, the 21st Century Workforce Commission has recommended closer linkages between secondary schools and colleges and between colleges and the workplace as a means of motivating students toward higher personal goals linked to the world of work. In negotiating the increasingly complex demands of college classrooms and the workplace, students and workers can benefi t from equipping themselves with a repertoire of strategies, such as mobilizing internal and external resources, self-monitoring, and evaluating information. These are volitional strategies of self-regulation. In self-regulating, individuals draw on a variety of volitional strategies to accomplish their goals. Distinguishing motivation (setting goals) from volition (protecting goals), Corno and Kanfer (1993) described three categories of covert or internal volitional control strategies individuals use to protect their goals: 89 This chapter explores how preservice teachers prepare for the transition from college classroom to career through assignments and features of the learning environment designed to approximate the demands of work settings and job-related tasks.
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2012
IFTEEN MINUTES INTO THE PERIOD a young man I will call Santo was embroiled in his poster project,... more IFTEEN MINUTES INTO THE PERIOD a young man I will call Santo was embroiled in his poster project, working on the assignment for the day -to reflect on his essay writing process. Lucretia (a pseudonym for his classmate), who self identified as Black, female, and selfconfident, walked into the room, leaned over to sign the late book next to the front door, and moved across the room to take a seat at our table -back row, middle aisle, alongside Santo, and back to reveal two quarter-sized guitar earrings. She was wearing them with a lime green pearl necklace atop a brighter lime shirt under a turquoise hooded sweatshirt and corduroy cream tailored suit coat. Santo, also fifteen, and half-Dominican half-Ecuadorian wore a large, white IZOD polo shirt over baggy, faded blue jeans. His dark wavy hair was gelled back, revealing his before him. Santo cheerily greeted Lucretia as she approached.
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2014
English Teaching Practice and Critique, 2011
Drawing on multimodal, post-structural, and critical theory, the author examines a high-school En... more Drawing on multimodal, post-structural, and critical theory, the author examines a high-school English classroom exchange about editing a student publication. Analysing a young woman's embodied identity performances, the author illustrates how Simone, a tenth-grader, employed, adjusted, and coupled modes of communication like speech, laughter, gesture, and silence to perform critical literacy amidst discursive subjectivities the local media and school officials were busy producing for young writers. She argues that Simone's decisions to try on a variety of genres of communication, to shift from speech modes to embodied gestural modes, and to address particular audiences at particular junctures, evidence her identity as a critically literate person in school. Moreover, shifts in genre, mode and audience afforded Simone opportunities to maintain multiple identities in the classroom, at times obfuscating her "critical" identity to maintain her status as an "obedient" student while simultaneously critical vis-à-vis other audiences. Teachers interested in critical pedagogy and ways to read participation might consider how gestures, body movement and shifts in volume are participatory, communicative acts that might provoke questions about authority and limits to classroom knowledge. Teachers can engage such questions to rethink curricula, rules, what they're willing to know about student identities in school.
Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2018
This article presents a case drawn from a yearlong ethnographic inquiry with secondary school you... more This article presents a case drawn from a yearlong ethnographic inquiry with secondary school youth who engaged in publishing student interest-driven writing for audiences beyond the classroom. Informed by connected learning researchers' illustrations of the potential impact of connecting student self-interest with publishing in the academic sphere (Ito et al., 2013), we look deeply at the work of youth and teachers as they negotiated institutional spaces in a connected learning classroom. Specifically we share a case study of a student who went public with a text critical of her school's approach to Physical Education classes and advocating for change, highlighting the tensions that arose as her text circulated among audiences beyond the classroom. In doing so, we discover instructional implications and possibilities that can help teachers anticipate and create moments of learning that occur when texts are published for audiences beyond the classroom.
English Education, 2013
Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic disco... more Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient, resistant, naive, and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher's racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English classroom. Drawing on post-structural performance theories of identity and subjectivity, I pinpoint the material and sociopolitical forces that constrain the white teaching body and reorient attention to the power of people in daily motion: subverting, making themselves known in multiple ways, always and already becoming. This performative perspective may provide productive lenses for white teachers in antiracist higher education who support teachers living and working in white skin.
In this article, the author is concerned with the ways conceptions of adolescence and sexuality t... more In this article, the author is concerned with the ways conceptions of adolescence and sexuality take hold in and beyond the English curriculum. Through a classroom vignette, she considers some of the ways teachers might make more of moments when sex comes up and when planning interactions about sex with youth.
Through a student/teacher classroom conflict, the author explores ways adults produce student wri... more Through a student/teacher classroom conflict, the author explores ways adults produce student writers as vulnerable. Drawing on post-structural concepts of adolescence, identity production, interrogation, and vulnerability, the author details how an English teacher invited students to perform vulnerability in personal narratives about issues like pregnancy, drug use, or domestic violence. As the context for the writing project shifted in the media and the local school community, so did ways their teacher produced students' personal narratives asking writers to re-edit personal narratives to protect themselves from adult scrutiny. However, students interrogated this vulnerable identity, prompting their teacher to rethink her conception of vulnerability. The article closes with Judith Butler's reconceptualization of vulnerability as an active performance through which adults might turn fearful responses to students' personal disclosures into opportunities to engage more deeply with students, their families, and their own personal histories with norms for personal disclosure.
Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic disco... more Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient, resistant, naive, and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher’s racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English classroom. Drawing on post-structural performance theories of identity and subjectivity, I pinpoint the material and sociopolitical forces that constrainthe white teaching body and reorient attention to the power of people in daily motion: subverting, making themselves known in multiple ways, always and already becoming. This performative perspective may provide productive lenses for white teachers in antiracist higher education who support teachers living and working in white skin.
Theory Into Practice, 2012
In this article, the authors argue that teachers and researchers must expand current verbo- and l... more In this article, the authors argue that teachers and researchers must expand current verbo- and logo-centric definitions of critical literacy to recognize how texts and responses are embodied. Ethnographic data illustrate the ways that youth perform critical literacy in ways that educators might not always be prepared to see, hear, or acknowledge.
ABSTRACT: Drawing on multimodal, post-structural, and critical theory, the author examines a high... more ABSTRACT: Drawing on multimodal, post-structural, and critical theory, the author examines a high school English classroom exchange about editing a student publication. Analyzing a young woman’s embodied identity performances, the author illustrates how Simone, a tenth grader, employed, adjusted, and coupled modes of communication like speech, laughter, gesture, and silence to perform critical literacy amidst discursive subjectivities the local media and school officials were busy producing for young writers. She argues that Simone’s decisions to try on a variety of genres of communication, to shift from speech modes to embodied gestural modes, and to address particular audiences at particular junctures, evidence her identity as a critically literate person in school. Moreover, shifts in genre, mode, and audience afforded Simone opportunities to maintain multiple identities in the classroom, at times obfuscating her “critical” identity to maintain her status as an “obedient” student while simultaneously critical vis-à-vis other audiences. Teachers interested in critical pedagogy and ways to read participation might consider how gestures, body movement, and shifts in volume are participatory, communicative acts that might provoke questions about authority and limits to classroom knowledge. Teachers can engage such questions to re-think curricula, rules, what they’re willing to know about student identities in school.
The New Educator, 2009
For new educators, the obstacles of high-stakes testing, curricular mandates, and their own inexp... more For new educators, the obstacles of high-stakes testing, curricular mandates, and their own inexperience and self-doubt can render teaching for justice and equity overwhelming, seemingly impossible ideals. However, as students are increasingly tied to prescriptive curricula and academic performance standards, the goals of social justice and democracy are all the more necessary. Through interviews and observations with new educators, the authors argue that, despite difficult, often restrictive teaching environments, these educators are indeed engaged in teaching socially just curricula in a variety of innovative ways. Beginning teachers' stories and their inspiring curricular enactments are at the heart of this article.
Television, film, music, and Internet texts figure prominently in literature about pop culture an... more Television, film, music, and Internet texts figure prominently in literature about pop culture and literacy in school, but there are few examples of the role embodied pop culture texts, (i.e., words, gestures, and dress), play. Fiske's conceptualization of pop "culture" as struggle and Moje's thoughts on literacy as claims for power and space inform this study. The author illustrates ways students and their teacher used clothing, conversation, and movement to negotiate textual meanings and identities in English class and offers strategies for unpacking similar events. We live in and move through a society saturated with popular media texts, references, and artifacts . While pop culture texts or icons attempt to represent us through images, stories, gestures, and metaphors, they also make up symbolic material we manipulate and employ to represent our selves, communicate our beliefs, and make sense of life experiences (Duff,
Papers by Elisabeth Johnson
Routledge eBooks, Jun 7, 2023
The Handbook of Critical Literacies, 2021
During English class on January 18, 2007, Santo and his tenthgrade classmates were invited to eva... more During English class on January 18, 2007, Santo and his tenthgrade classmates were invited to evaluate a set of published, youth-authored texts. Inside one of these texts was a sex advice column ("Sex 4.1.1"). After five minutes with the column, Santo spontaneously read aloud: "I'm a boy. It's my first time. Will I come too fast?" I wasn't the teacher in charge, but what should or could a teacher do? Like many teachers, I let the comment roll and played along, but what are some of the ways teachers can respond when sex comes up in everyday classroom conversations? In this article, I assume sex is an inevitable part of the English classroom curriculum. Teachers engage sexual content with local texts like this teen sex advice column, canonical favorites such as Catcher in the Rye or anything by Shakespeare, and less intentionally, when reading, writing, or talking about anything else (T. Johnson).Sex is a central dimension of the human experience surrou...
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Books by Elisabeth Johnson
articles by Elisabeth Johnson
Papers by Elisabeth Johnson