Articles by Alex Corbitt
Linguistics and Education, 2024
Role-playing games (RPGs) are interactionally complex activities in which participants use talk t... more Role-playing games (RPGs) are interactionally complex activities in which participants use talk to coauthor narratives across player and character identities. Taking an interest in how talk and interaction mediate collaborative text production, I drew upon concepts and methods of conversation analysis (CA) to examine RPG play. Despite a breadth of CA scholarship that examines storytelling and gameplay, there is scant CA research that examines role-playing games. Contributing to the burgeoning program of education research on RPG literacies, I used CA to study how six adolescent boys negotiated game-based storytelling across their character and player identities. Findings illustrated how participants' metagame talk worked to negotiate knowledge, fairness, relationships, and pacing during RPG play. Implications of this work call for youth and educators to develop a reflexive awareness of metagame talk to better negotiate storytelling and power relationships during game-based coauthorship.
Journal of Literacy Research, 2023
This case study examined how a 14-year-old youth and eighth-grade student named Kendra (pseudonym... more This case study examined how a 14-year-old youth and eighth-grade student named Kendra (pseudonym) mobilized restorying to (re)center her experiences in horror fiction. I asked how she conceptualized horror and monstrosity in a 6-week English language arts unit, and how she (re)centered her life experiences within horror fiction through restorying "The Price" by Neil Gaiman. Focusing on two forms of her restorying practices-counter-storytelling and transmedia storytelling-I analyzed how she composed an original, personalized horror story. The findings illustrated how the composition reflected her conceptualizations of monstrosity and subverted problematic horror tropes. I also discussed how her horror story functioned as sociopolitical critique, a (re)interpretation of source material, and a method of composing for audiences.
English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2023
Purpose-This study aims to explore the implications of a recent case in spring 2022 where the nov... more Purpose-This study aims to explore the implications of a recent case in spring 2022 where the novel Dracula went "viral" as tens of thousands of Tumblr users participated in a serialized re-reading and discussion of the text through the hashtags #dracula and #dracula daily. Design/methodology/approach-The authors use a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design approach (quant: topic modeling; qual: multimodal content analysis) to examine how users describe their own practices as well as top posts (more than 25,000 likes, comments and reblogs) in the first month of the collective reading of the novel. Findings-The authors found that the serialization of Dracula made space for "wandering reading practices" (Chavez, 2010) relevant to this interpretive community on Tumblr. The quantitative methods determined specific affective, intertextual and serialized aspects of textual play that were salient to readers. In top posts themselves, the authors saw readers creating metaleptic content imagining characters like the protagonist Jonathan in other novels or contexts, as well as processing and playing with their collective emotional responses toward characters. Additionally, readers used irony or satire through multimodal compositions to create literary arguments. Originality/value-Playfully analyzing literature together through intertextual connections and multimodal memes has the potential to be both emotionally resonant, culturally relevant and supportive of literary interpretive practices. Based on these findings, the authors provide suggestions for teachers working to embrace interpretive play in formal learning spaces.
Curriculum Inquiry, 2022
Building on sociocultural theories of literacy learning, in this article, we think at the interse... more Building on sociocultural theories of literacy learning, in this article, we think at the intersection of reader response theory and multimodal literacies to examine how 13 preservice teachers in the course Teaching Social Sciences Through the Arts remediated responses to Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit: Stories From the Life of a Migrant Child through additive manufacturing (i.e. 3D printing) and arts-integrated making. Through qualitative analyses of par- ticipants’ in situ processes and product(s), we identified a range of ideological and material supports and constraints during the digital fabrication process. Reading and responding to text—as mediated actions and events—became iterative spaces wherein individual understandings of text transformed into encounters of difference. Suggesting that participants’ artifactual responses at times operated as critical literacy texts, our analyses of 3D fabrication and remediated responses led us to consider how modalities of composition yielded unique affordances and constraints to the ways readers encountered texts and expressed and responded to controversial social issues.
Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2022
This article draws on video data from a larger empirical project tracing how five adults learned ... more This article draws on video data from a larger empirical project tracing how five adults learned to escape a series of complex multi-linear escape rooms. Zeroing in one room, The Author's Enigma, it interrogates sound as a design feature and more-than-representational resource that co-produced play. Refracted through more conceptual and methodological conversations concerning the sonic, analyses highlight how sound mediated participant interaction and shaped the encounter of escape through affective sonic encounters. As this article suggests, sound was both a mediating resource and an atmosphere. Using transcription as theory, authors demonstrate how sound-as an atmosphere and vibrational force-forwarded activity and produced moments of affective resonance.
English Journal, 2022
The authors present a framework to guide youths’ analysis of literary monsters and foster the acc... more The authors present a framework to guide youths’ analysis of literary monsters and foster the acceptance of others—in and beyond our classrooms.
English in Education, 2021
The emergence of e-literature – texts created on and for digital devices – has coincided with inn... more The emergence of e-literature – texts created on and for digital devices – has coincided with innovative, transgressive methods of storytelling. Pry, an iOS-based text, exemplifies e-literature’s potential to rethink traditional narrative conventions. Rather than depict the real-world as we experience it (i.e. mimesis), Pry features metaleptic elements (i.e. jarring transgressions across narrative levels) and unnatural temporality (i.e. nonlinear, contradictory jumps across time). This article traces how a graduate class of librarians and preservice teachers responded to Pry’s unnatural narratology through multimodal composition and annotation. Findings suggest that e-literature may demand more expansive repertoires of text interpretation and relationality.
Voices from the Middle, Dec 2019
Book Chapters by Alex Corbitt
More Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Doors: A Period of Growth in African American Young Adult Literature (2001 to 2021), 2022
Already Readers and Writers: Honoring Students' Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom, 2020
Like many progressive schools, Alex Corbitt's school in the Bronx tries to carefully balance the ... more Like many progressive schools, Alex Corbitt's school in the Bronx tries to carefully balance the federal accountability mandates of standardized test scores with authentic teaching and learning. Within the confines of state mandates, Alex's school has encouraged him to create a Teen Activism course. In this class, the kids decided that they wanted to write, produce, and distribute an anonymous zine that discussed issues of tolerance and inclusion throughout their school community. The argument writing that was the basis of the zine was natural and rigorous as these middle schoolers wrote pieces to encourage their fellow students to help them create a school environment where everyone counted. Alex believes that good literacy teaching can be a means to important activism.
Unsettling Education: Searching for Ethical Footing in a Time of Reform, 2019
School systems in the U.S., particularly in urban contexts, often mirror, reinforce, and maintain... more School systems in the U.S., particularly in urban contexts, often mirror, reinforce, and maintain the systemic oppression that exists outside classroom walls. As teachers committed to justice and equity, the authors attempted to resist the historically oppressive institution of schooling and imagine new possibilities for learning. The authors found strength and direction by collaborating with each other, listening to their school communities, and reflecting on the work of esteemed educators, particularly educators of color. In this chapter, the authors share their struggles, successes, and new understandings to contribute to ongoing conversations about education justice.
The Ethics of Digital Literacy, 2019
Students can develop rhetorical techniques that promote productive online discourse. In this chap... more Students can develop rhetorical techniques that promote productive online discourse. In this chapter, two teachers reflect on a series of digital argument activities as they worked together to refine their understandings of ethical digital rhetoric.
Book Reviews by Alex Corbitt
English Journal, May 2017
Helping Children Succeed marks the continuation of Paul Tough’s quest to bridge the achievement g... more Helping Children Succeed marks the continuation of Paul Tough’s quest to bridge the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. This issue is particularly relevant in light of the 2013 federal data reporting that over half of our nation’s public school students are now classified as “low income.” The title of Tough’s book is a tall order, and in many ways he delivers; but as Tough’s vision of a reformed education system becomes exceedingly clear, so do its limitations.
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Articles by Alex Corbitt
Book Chapters by Alex Corbitt
Book Reviews by Alex Corbitt