Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reconstructs a joint classroom activity; a Creative Writing collaboration between my grade 9 and a grade 5 class. It examines the inherent language learning and acquisition complexities of an urban, post independent African context regarding the resultant undercurrents of language owing to the multi lingual nature of the setting. It also explores the influence of cultural dichotomies (West versus African) and establishes how the teacher of English should shape instructional methodology in dealing with such diversity. The paper was born out of an anachronistic example by a grade five, given during a group activity where she suggested that they write a story featuring a lion in the snowing streets of New York. This paper argues that the ‘snowing New York streets’ and the ‘lion’ are symbols of different exposures and that the classroom is a confluence of disparate worlds. It identifies the various metalanguages that characterize a multi lingual classroom and through explicating their interactions, it suggests considerations for effective teaching methodology and for comprehending the intricacies in such a setting. As a multi-lingual speaker and a practising professional, I hope to offer a clear understanding of the processes and cultural aspects that characterise this unique context.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Parents, educators and social commentators have repeatedly claimed that passive media consumption can harm children. Building on recent attempts to understand how children actively interpret media, we use an interpretive model of socialization to analyze fieldnote excerpts from a Taiwanese kindergarten and first grade. Contrary to popular opinion, our findings demonstrate that young children did not simply internalize and reproduce the messages received from media or adult authority figures. Instead we found that children actively incorporated popular media into their peer cultures through knowledge displays, play planning episodes, and collective play. Further, the children in this study used popular media to enact, explore and resist the Confucian values of being a good student, good family member, and good peer.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As a case study for uncovering White racist coded practices, I examine the role of White women in perpetuating the coded racialized practices of contemporary White Southern gospel communities. Writing against such religious studies scholars as R. Marie Griffith, I argue that constructions of womanhood within White Southern evangelical communities are not simply an expression of evangelical theology, but are drawn from templates of White Southern Womanhood that were formed in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jim Crow South. Because these gender constructions are based on older models, simply performing certain aspects of them references the whole.