Faculty Member, Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development
Arizona State University, Mary Lou Fulton teachers College
Assistant Professor of Education; Director of Secondary English Education Teacher Preparation
Thesis Title: “The Hangout was Serious Business:” Exploring Literacies and Learning in an Online Sims Fan Fiction Community
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Josephine Peyton Marsh
James Paul Gee Elisabeth Hayes |
About
In June 2011, I joined the University of Rochester's Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development as an Assistant Professor in the Teaching & Curriculum department. I am the Director of the Secondary English Education Teacher Preparation program, supervising a combined Masters degree and teacher certification program.
My dissertation research explored the literacies and learning taking place in an online fan community of Sims fan fiction writers. I conducted a 2+ year virtual ethnography of The Sims Writers' Hangout to understand how participation in the community shaped and was shaped by members' fan fics. The project resulted in three separate analyses that explored the tensions within this "affinity space" (Gee, 2004), the nature of the literacies from a Design perspective (New London Group, 1996), and the pedagogy of the space using Bernstein's (1990; 1996; 2000; 2004) "pedagogic discourse" theory.
As I begin my career at UR, I'm continuing to analyze data from this study to make sense of how the space afforded participants varied experiences with creating and sharing digital media and gave them access to varied identities. I am also working on a piece about multimodality, with respect to collecting and analyzing multimodal digital creations.
The next study I'm designing will build off of the lessons learned in my dissertation as I conduct a formative design experiment with a local middle school teacher. Our pedagogic goal for the project will be to apply principles present in an online affinity space to the students' language arts classroom in the hope of creating an engaging and dynamic learning environment.
Photo Credit: ©2011 Laura Brophy for the University of Rochester
