Books by Amélie Lemieux
Art as an Agent for Social Change, 2021
In this chapter we invite reader reflections on walking as a private, yet relational artful pract... more In this chapter we invite reader reflections on walking as a private, yet relational artful practice that may foster public educational change and growth. Although we teach and practice our walking routines in different cities (Amélie Lemieux in Halifax and Boyd White in Montreal) we take mutual inspiration from land artist Richard Long. Long’s artistic practice since the 1960s has involved mostly solitary walks, recorded photographically, across isolated territories. He regards these walks, which have inspired his reflections on place, space, and time and human↔nature intra-actions, as sculptures, although the works consist of “minimally invasive marks on the landscape” (The Art Story: Modern Art Insight. n.p.). Unlike Long, we do not deliberately alter our landscapes, even minimally, with the exception of leaving our footprints and our breath-induced carbon imprint. Instead, through the lens of post-intentional phenomenological hermeneutics (Van Manen, 2014; White & Lemieux, 2017), we interrogate our intra-actions with time and place to engage in conversations, first with ourselves in internal dialogue and interrogation, then with each other, and ultimately, we hope, with the wider academic community.
Literacy, 2020
This article addresses key components of posthumanism and maker literacies by reporting on empiri... more This article addresses key components of posthumanism and maker literacies by reporting on empirical data from two makerspace research sites. Using posthuman methodologies, we suggest practical considerations of the relational autonomy of materials through entanglements between humans, non‐humans and more‐than‐humans in makerspace classroom settings. We propose answers to the following research questions: How do materials manifest their relational autonomy in makerspaces? How could the relational autonomy of materials impact maker literacies pedagogy? With this article, our contribution warrants researchers to think about the unpredictability of maker work through posthuman methodologies and how maker projects can help speak against the failing student rhetoric in literacy education.
Peter Lang New York, 2020
De/constructing Literacies: Considerations for Engagement reviews and defines the concept of enga... more De/constructing Literacies: Considerations for Engagement reviews and defines the concept of engagement in literacy studies from different epistemologies. Well-suited for literacy researchers and graduate students, it considers the foundations of arts-based research, cognitive psychology, ethnography, phenomenology, posthuman theories, with a final chapter on walking methodologies, to better understand how engagement can be framed and looked at in literacy studies.
Mapping Holistic Learning: An Introductory Guide to Aesthetigrams introduces the concept of aesth... more Mapping Holistic Learning: An Introductory Guide to Aesthetigrams introduces the concept of aesthetigrams. These are participant-produced visual maps of aesthetic engagement. The map-making strategy was originally developed by one of the authors, Boyd White, to assist him in understanding what his university-level students were experiencing as they interacted with artworks. Such interactions are, after all, private, individualistic, and fleeting. How can a teacher foster student/teacher dialogue that might lead to enhanced engagement, much less do research, without a concrete record of such engagement? Aesthetigrams provide that record.
Recently, the strategy has been adapted to other fields of study—the teaching of literature, and philosophy for children, as well as the writing of poetry. Boyd White and Amélie Lemieux are persuaded that the strategy could be expanded into other disciplines. For example, might it not be useful for a teacher to know what a student is feeling and thinking as she struggles with a mathematical concept?
Mapping Holistic Learning is divided into three sections. Chapter 1 addresses the theoretical framework that underpins the authors’ research. The second section, Chapters 2 to 5, provides examples of aesthetigram usage within the formal education environment, in art and literature classrooms. The third section, Chapters 6 and 7, introduces two recent experiments in informal settings—one in an adult poetry workshop, the other in a philosophy-for-children workshop. It is not necessary to follow the book in chronological order. Readers are invited to attend to the chapters that most closely address their individual interests.
Articles by Amélie Lemieux
Professional Development in Education, 2021
This article contributes methodological insights into the role of posthumanism in documenting pro... more This article contributes methodological insights into the role of posthumanism in documenting process in maker education for teachers. This research draws on two case studies of women teachers from Nigeria and Jamaica who engaged in makerspace activities in a graduate university course on maker literacies. The study upholds the necessity to consider relationality with nonhumans as integral to maker entanglements in the classroom. From different backgrounds, the two teachers share how materials impacted them through their inter- and intra-actions with materials, positioning them as part of entanglements that can enact change in their community and beyond. The significance of this research speaks to the necessity to focus on maker processes rather than maker outcomes in teacher professional development, emphasizing how posthumanism allows for an acknowledgement of relationality between humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans.
Visualizing mapping as pedagogy for literacy futures, 2020
In this article, the authors explore mapping as a pedagogical approach. Drawn from two literacy c... more In this article, the authors explore mapping as a pedagogical approach. Drawn from two literacy classrooms, the authors report on five empirical examples of mapping, elucidating the ways in which mapping activities were sites of dynamic meaning-making through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In both cases of mapping pedagogy, participants used mapping to interrogate texts, reflect on experiences, express identity, and locate emotions as language learners and readers. Employing visual analysis to ‘think with theory,’ the authors provide a coordinate plane to map the pedagogical dimensions of mapping across the five empirical examples. The authors illustrate the ways students gravitated across a continuum of literal to metaphorical visual depictions of their learning and life experiences. This inquiry offers new ways of theorizing thematic mapping of learning and experience for classroom practice.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2020
This article explores how principles of multimodality can be effectively incorporated into game d... more This article explores how principles of multimodality can be effectively incorporated into game design and analysis in the context of social justice. The authors use a multimodal framework to assist developers, researchers, and educators in better understanding representations of class, race, and gender in videogames. Videogames are multimodal in nature: not only do they "remediate" and adopt the representational practices of other media, but also employ algorithmic, procedural, haptic, and interactive forms of expression. Videogames are uniquely situated to represent systemic oppression and privilege through what Ian Bogost (2007) calls "procedural rhetoric," i.e. the representation of social systems through computational systems. Procedural rhetoric allows players to experience and interact with systems of oppression and privilege in ways that other media cannot. To define these concepts, the paper will include examples from several videogames deal with issues of representation either implicitly or explicitly, including Overwatch (2016), a competitive First-Person Shooter; CartLife, and Apex: Legends, a survivalist First-Person Shooter.
British Journal of Educational Technology, 2020
This paper examines what new materialist and posthumanist frameworks can offer learning science r... more This paper examines what new materialist and posthumanist frameworks can offer learning science research in diverse maker learning environments. We explore what is gained by grappling with the entanglements between humans, non-humans and
more-than-humans. To do this, we draw on Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning ethico-onto-epistemology and agential realism where she redefines connections to the shared world by attuning to the entangled matter that is created within intra-actions. We use this framework across four international cases: digital media camps, a university-level classroom-based makerspace, a Saturday outdoor makerspace workshop and a classroom-based museum makerspace. Each case study attends to how intra-actions enact agential forces in maker education research—forces that posthuman and new materialist frameworks help us see. In so doing, these case studies challenge many of the assumptions prevalent in the learning sciences about mattering and its implications in research sites.
Compassion and Empathy in Educational Contexts, G. Barton and S. Garvis (Eds), 2019
This chapter reveals in-depth, autoethnographic perspectives of three international scholars from... more This chapter reveals in-depth, autoethnographic perspectives of three international scholars from Canada and the Azores who worked with film to teach such core values as empathy and compassion in higher education. While teacher-trainer courses may focus on specific pedagogical techniques like remediation, scaffolding implementation, and differentiation, the teaching profession is in crucial need of conversations that deconstruct moral values and empathy (White & Frois, 2014). To address compassion and empathy in education, they key topics of this book, we suggest pedagogical pathways that build on our collective experiences as teacher-trainers and researchers working with film in higher education. We thus present findings from three film narratives (Mr. Lazhar. Stories we Tell, Freedom Writers) that have the potential to bolster discussions on moral values like empathy and compassion.
Digital Technologies and Online Learning in Secondary Education (Canada); Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies (Bloomsbury, UK), 2019
In this article published by Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies, Lemieux and Rowsell surv... more In this article published by Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies, Lemieux and Rowsell survey the landscape of digital literacy education in Canadian secondary schools.
Transmédialité, Bande Dessinée et Adaptation, 2019
Le film X-Men : Apocalypse de Bryan Singer a vu le jour au sein d'une franchise en pleine expansi... more Le film X-Men : Apocalypse de Bryan Singer a vu le jour au sein d'une franchise en pleine expansion et a mis en vedette plusieurs personnages notoires de la série X-Men, dont Mystique et Wolverine. Dans cet article, nous proposons une lecture du film axée sur les notions de « narration transmédia » de Jenkins et de « personnage transmédia » de Bertetti. L'objectif est d'examiner les liens entre ces deux notions et d'offrir des pistes de recherche futures dans le domaine de la transmédialité en ce qui a trait aux adaptations cinématographiques de bandes dessinées américaines de type « comics ». Abstract: Bryan Singer's X-Men : Apocalypse was produced in a growing franchise and stars numerous renowned characters from the X-Men series, including Mystique and Wolverine. In this article, I adopt a lens that investigates the movie through Jenkins' notion of "digital storytelling" as well as Bertetti's concept of "transmedia character". The goal is to examine the relationships between these two notions, and offer research avenues in transmedia studies as it relates to film adaptations of American comics.
Rowsell, J., Lemieux, A., Swartz, L., Burkitt, J., & Turcotte, M. (2018). The stuff that heroes are made of: Elastic, sticky, messy literacies in children's transmedial cultures. Language Arts, 96(1), 7-20. Language Arts, 2018
In this article, we feature the Speech Bubbles, Graphic Stories, Flip Books, Storyboards research... more In this article, we feature the Speech Bubbles, Graphic Stories, Flip Books, Storyboards research study that we completed in the autumn of 2017 as a part of a federally-funded project entitled Maker Literacies. In the article we present a six-week research study in a combined 3/4 classroom in Canada. Moving from story narratives to graphic texts to animated texts, children steadily worked from one text genre to the next transforming media and similar storylines into multiple modes and media and getting inside of the logic and sensibilities of modes. Applying newer frameworks within Literacy Studies such as the notions of elastic literacies (Wargo, 2017) and ‘sticky and messy practices’ (Garcia, 2017b), children worked determinedly on their graphic texts with the support and guidance of a graphic writer and animator along with their teacher and researchers.
Australian Art Education, 2018
This paper is a cross-cultural comparative study of how the arts and literacy are represented wit... more This paper is a cross-cultural comparative study of how the arts and literacy are represented within school curricula in Australia, Canada and France. The relationship between the arts and literacy within these contexts is widely considered to be tenuous, a situation which will be explored by first investigating how literacy has impacted on the arts, and second, establishing a case for arts literacies to be considered unique. A content analysis of the arts and literacy in each of the national curricula and current educational policies is then conducted. Implications of these findings for classroom practice are then shared.
I present the perspectives emerging from a university teaching experience of "teaching through fi... more I present the perspectives emerging from a university teaching experience of "teaching through film" with undergraduate students enrolled in the latter course. In-class discussions gravitated towards values and morals—notably empathy and caring— in relation to the significance of embodying " good teacher " morals, following the viewing of Monsieur Lazhar (2011). Drawing on William Ayers' philosophy of good teaching, among others, I present the implications of these discussions for teacher education and their significance for teacher education programs.
A strand of research on literature pedagogy still refers to traditional, text-oriented methods in... more A strand of research on literature pedagogy still refers to traditional, text-oriented methods in practice (Peirce, 1977; Todorov, 1982), with some studies addressing students' subjectivity through reader-response exercises involving reading logs, surveys, or journals. When looking at subjectivities in individual and collective classroom contexts, numerous studies have directed attention towards the interpretive strategies students mobilize when reading. Drawing on Sauvaire's (2013) typology of interpretive dimensions in reading, this qualitative case study investigates patterns emerging from students' written and verbalized expressions of their subjectivities in a 9 th-grade literature classroom. The data point to conclusive results explaining pathways for interpretive strategies, which vary in group and individual settings.
In this article, we explore the matters that relate to three approaches in theories of reading: 1... more In this article, we explore the matters that relate to three approaches in theories of reading: 1) the transactional approach, 2) the subjective approach, and 3) the phenomenological approach. We first review more than 20 years of research on reading subjectivity to better seize its importance today. Our goal is to use a conceptual framework rooted in research on reception theory, transaction theory, and phenomenological theory of reading to shed light on subjective reactions in reading. Through examples from recent studies on reading with secondary 3 students, we explain how these complementary approaches inform one another to promote understanding of subjective reactions.
French Quebec literature has always served as a cultural reference for the Quebec
curriculum, and... more French Quebec literature has always served as a cultural reference for the Quebec
curriculum, and is still the means through which French language skills are most often taught
in secondary 5 (grade 11) Quebec classrooms. In this paper, I suggest an interactive
teaching of the Quebec play Incendies in three secondary 5 classrooms. Students' meaning
making responses, as elicited by qualitative data, provide an understanding of directions a
teacher might take to increase interest in reading.
This article describes a research project that investigated the development of pre-service teache... more This article describes a research project that investigated the development of pre-service teacher identity, with an emphasis on meaning-making and articulation of personal values. The methodology is primarily arts-based. Data for the research consisted of:
(1) participant-created three-dimensional constructions that symbolized their emerging values and identities; (2) accompanying written reflections that provided the context of the constructions and elaborated on the personal symbolization of the material culture involved. With this article, we hope to initiate further conversations around teacher education, professional development, and arts-based learning, with particular attention to dialogue about the teaching self.
La fiction historique se situe à la croisée de deux formes d’écriture : l’une provenant de l’inve... more La fiction historique se situe à la croisée de deux formes d’écriture : l’une provenant de l’invention de l’auteur, l’autre découlant d’archives et de documents historiques. Le lecteur, quant à lui, « vient au devant du texte historique [...] avec des attentes [...] qu’on ne lui “raconte pas des histoires” ». À la différence du texte historique, la fiction historique interpelle le lecteur en lui apprenant des faits réels dans un contexte fictif. Prenant en compte cette définition, nous nous penchons sur l’analyse de deux fictions historiques pour la jeunesse qui retracent un des tournants de l’histoire du Québec, les rébellions de 1837-1838.
Uploads
Books by Amélie Lemieux
Recently, the strategy has been adapted to other fields of study—the teaching of literature, and philosophy for children, as well as the writing of poetry. Boyd White and Amélie Lemieux are persuaded that the strategy could be expanded into other disciplines. For example, might it not be useful for a teacher to know what a student is feeling and thinking as she struggles with a mathematical concept?
Mapping Holistic Learning is divided into three sections. Chapter 1 addresses the theoretical framework that underpins the authors’ research. The second section, Chapters 2 to 5, provides examples of aesthetigram usage within the formal education environment, in art and literature classrooms. The third section, Chapters 6 and 7, introduces two recent experiments in informal settings—one in an adult poetry workshop, the other in a philosophy-for-children workshop. It is not necessary to follow the book in chronological order. Readers are invited to attend to the chapters that most closely address their individual interests.
Articles by Amélie Lemieux
more-than-humans. To do this, we draw on Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning ethico-onto-epistemology and agential realism where she redefines connections to the shared world by attuning to the entangled matter that is created within intra-actions. We use this framework across four international cases: digital media camps, a university-level classroom-based makerspace, a Saturday outdoor makerspace workshop and a classroom-based museum makerspace. Each case study attends to how intra-actions enact agential forces in maker education research—forces that posthuman and new materialist frameworks help us see. In so doing, these case studies challenge many of the assumptions prevalent in the learning sciences about mattering and its implications in research sites.
curriculum, and is still the means through which French language skills are most often taught
in secondary 5 (grade 11) Quebec classrooms. In this paper, I suggest an interactive
teaching of the Quebec play Incendies in three secondary 5 classrooms. Students' meaning
making responses, as elicited by qualitative data, provide an understanding of directions a
teacher might take to increase interest in reading.
(1) participant-created three-dimensional constructions that symbolized their emerging values and identities; (2) accompanying written reflections that provided the context of the constructions and elaborated on the personal symbolization of the material culture involved. With this article, we hope to initiate further conversations around teacher education, professional development, and arts-based learning, with particular attention to dialogue about the teaching self.
Recently, the strategy has been adapted to other fields of study—the teaching of literature, and philosophy for children, as well as the writing of poetry. Boyd White and Amélie Lemieux are persuaded that the strategy could be expanded into other disciplines. For example, might it not be useful for a teacher to know what a student is feeling and thinking as she struggles with a mathematical concept?
Mapping Holistic Learning is divided into three sections. Chapter 1 addresses the theoretical framework that underpins the authors’ research. The second section, Chapters 2 to 5, provides examples of aesthetigram usage within the formal education environment, in art and literature classrooms. The third section, Chapters 6 and 7, introduces two recent experiments in informal settings—one in an adult poetry workshop, the other in a philosophy-for-children workshop. It is not necessary to follow the book in chronological order. Readers are invited to attend to the chapters that most closely address their individual interests.
more-than-humans. To do this, we draw on Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning ethico-onto-epistemology and agential realism where she redefines connections to the shared world by attuning to the entangled matter that is created within intra-actions. We use this framework across four international cases: digital media camps, a university-level classroom-based makerspace, a Saturday outdoor makerspace workshop and a classroom-based museum makerspace. Each case study attends to how intra-actions enact agential forces in maker education research—forces that posthuman and new materialist frameworks help us see. In so doing, these case studies challenge many of the assumptions prevalent in the learning sciences about mattering and its implications in research sites.
curriculum, and is still the means through which French language skills are most often taught
in secondary 5 (grade 11) Quebec classrooms. In this paper, I suggest an interactive
teaching of the Quebec play Incendies in three secondary 5 classrooms. Students' meaning
making responses, as elicited by qualitative data, provide an understanding of directions a
teacher might take to increase interest in reading.
(1) participant-created three-dimensional constructions that symbolized their emerging values and identities; (2) accompanying written reflections that provided the context of the constructions and elaborated on the personal symbolization of the material culture involved. With this article, we hope to initiate further conversations around teacher education, professional development, and arts-based learning, with particular attention to dialogue about the teaching self.
During the School Bus Symposium, in situ poetry writing and reading, song and storytelling occurred in response to open ended prompts and facilitation of creative activities. After the symposium, a call was issued to invite participants to submit any poetry or stories produced during, or inspired by the session. Consisting of 18 submissions including poetry, story, photography and creative essays, infused by curriculum theory and poetic inquiry, this collection offers an inclusive, reflective, reflexive, participatory, and experiential rendering where participants are living and journeying poetically. Emphasizing creative engagement with personal memories and the surrounding environment from the moving school bus, the authors collectively aimed to promote art education through imaginative approaches to curriculum studies, poetic inquiry and academic conferences.