The construction of boys as a gendered culture is not usually associated with neuroscience. Exceptions are publications and presentations by consultants on boys' education who adopt a "brain-based" perspective. From a neuroscience perspective, my analysis indicates the selective use of primary neuroscience research to construct and perpetuate…

This study applied Wiki technology and peer review to an English as a foreign language writing class. The objective was to investigate whether this system, as a collaborative platform, would improve students' writing skills. The study gauged students' perceptions about integrating a Wiki writing course and peer feedback. The participants were 32…

In this paper I explore the interconnected nature of literacy and the body, and the relation between bodies, landscapes and literacies. I draw on interview data from my doctoral study, the central problematic of which is to provide a rich account of the ways in which teachers' embodied histories, multiple identities and out-of-school lives relate…

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,…

This paper investigates the current dismissal of feeling from teaching and learning in the college composition classroom. Drawing on the teaching experiences and the concept of lore, it argues that the practices and pedagogies of composition studies continue to produce a division between reason and emotion, denying the body's epistemic potential.…

This article discusses how prolonged participation and digital composition online intersect to forge material extensions of the physical body, or limbs beyond the skin. Based on postmodern theories of technology and the body, I argue that these limbs, while less tangible, merit serious consideration given their potential to engender physical…

American consumerism has historically taught women and girls--and now men and boys--how to live in what I refer to here as bodily-not-enoughness: the idea of not being enough of something in one's body (not thin-enough, pretty-enough, feminine/masculine-enough, white-enough, middle-class-enough, straight-enough, and so on.). The bodily practices…

Examining the body as a site and product of various ongoing discursive processes can provide insight about how identity impacts students' learning and understanding of their classroom experiences. This qualitative case study investigates how two, urban, eighth-grade students responded to being identified as struggling readers, concentrating…

Literacy literate has become a contested and dynamic concept in the 21st century (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro & Cammack, 2004). Images are increasingly a primary means of communication and they have been emancipated and democratised in the post-literate age. Images are accessible, and are being endlessly reproduced and manipulated on a scale never seen…

Using a personal narrative as grounding, three theories create a base for understanding bodies as texts that are read. Ricoeur's (1971/2007) hermeneutic interpretivist theory of bodily action as text maintains that during real-time events, an observer can interpret a person's action for meaning. De Lauretis's (1984) theory of imaging contends that…

In this paper I examine the literacy work of three African American young women (through data drawn from a larger qualitative study), particularly their ways of knowing, such as double consciousness (Du Bois, 1989), and the multiple subject positions they occupy as they write themselves into a digitally created story. My analysis is guided by the…

The central focus of this research has been to document immigrant and non-immigrant students' storytelling practices and cultural knowledge and identify how these might be adapted as "cultural data sets" for academic literary study in ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, middle-grade classrooms. Such data sets, however, have limited use…

In this paper we look at what the critical tradition in education has to offer to the phenomenon of social media. Through an overview and evaluation of the approaches advocated by practitioners of critical literacy and critical media literacy, we illustrate the limitations of applying these frameworks to the fluid and densely interwoven spaces of…

This article explores what happens to interpersonal and power dynamics when tutors use closed-group Facebook pages as a social networking tool in their tutorial groups with first and second year Bachelor of Education (BEd) students at the Wits School of Education (WSoE). It argues that this literacy practice creates an alternative pedagogical…

This article discusses differences in purpose, orientation and method between what is commonly known as "visual literacy" and what is being called "critical visual literacy". It does so through a comparative critical analysis of two sets of materials produced for classroom use: those produced in 1993 under the umbrella of visual literacy and those…