Centering Youth Literacies in Public School Classrooms.

Co-Designed with Scott Storm and Odyssey Collegiate High School

Playing with Discourse.

Students investigate a fandom of their choice and write a paper exploring the context/background of their fandom and explaining their close reading and analysis of fandom text. Students present papers in cosplay (costumes) in small groups.

Constructing Metadiscourse.

Students study metadiscourse across different fandom communities (literary critics, fanfiction writers) tied to the same published text in order to write an original literary claim about a published text situated within the larger fandom discourses.

Discursive Transformation.

Students identify a fandom that has problematic elements and conduct a critical analysis in a meta-text. Students create a fandom artifact to help shift the fandom toward justice and are encouraged to share their artifacts with the fandom.

Centering Youth Literacies in Non-Profit Learning Contexts.

Co-Designed with New City Kids

Writing Workshop.

I have been developing and leading 5-6 week student-interest focused writing workshops for teens titled “Meaningful Writing Life Skills Class” in which we build a writing community to support youth with outward-facing writing prompts in genres such as fiction, poetry, fanfiction, memoir and personal essay, and social media postings. In this seminar, students were guided in analyzing fandom discourses and creating fandom artifacts that they are encouraged to publicly share or post online to contribute to larger conversations in socially transformative ways.

Reading Program.

Drawing on my social design experiment training and transliteracies analysis, I have been helping Families for Literacy (a program which serves primarily Arabic speaking youth and families) collaboratively develop a primary reading program that engages youth in culturally-relevant reading activities around a broad array of “texts” and sustains affective resonances around reading.

Unit Design & Lesson Planning.

I have been training teen interns in developing expansive definitions of literacy and supporting them in running bi-weekly media & fandom-themed literacy groups for ENL children through their virtual after-school reading program.

Centering Youth Literacies in Teacher Education Spaces.

Co-Generative Research with NYU English Education emerging educators

Centering Linguistic Justice.

I study ways to collaboratively center informal discourses for learning—such as social media-based hashtagging practices—in teacher education classrooms through informal participatory digital spaces, working at the classroom level to shift leading discourses toward justice.

Roleplaying & “Pre-storying”.

I design storying activities using table-top roleplaying mechanics to allow players to experience “texts” in new ways, creating productive juxtapositions between the original texts and their collective “unstorying.” I explore how sound functions as an actor in these activites (Woods & Jones, 2020) as well as what emerging teachers learn from these activities (Jones, Storm, Castillo & Karbachinsky, 2021; Jones, Karbachinsky & Castillo, in preparation).

Entering Fandom Discourses.

I support emerging teachers in creating creative digital responses drawing on fandom literacies that are posted in public digital spaces such as Reddit, YouTube or Twitter. Educators reflect on discourses and disciplinary implications of their work.