Information, Identity, and Ideology

This article examines the role of critical reading in a racial literacy-focused composition curriculum. The author draws on student-produced data to demonstrate how the racial literacy curriculum prepares students to explore the situatedness of language, how individual positionalities influence the construction and interpretation of text, and how sociocultural ideologies are represented and disseminated through seemingly innocuous or objective reporting. Broadly, this article offers strategies for teaching critical reading to help teachers of writing improve students’ rhetorical awareness and engage them more fully as participants in a textually mediated society.

iAssess

For many music teachers, assessment of student work holds several challenges: How to employ a concrete grading system for an inherently subjective, artistic experience; how to organize and present content for PK-5 grade levels so that learning is both meaningful and assessable; and how to design a music curriculum that ultimately encourages a powerful connection to music long after students have left the classroom. To help teachers face these challenges, the chapter demonstrates a music composition–based curriculum in which students use an iPad and other technologies to assess themselves and demonstrate their musical thinking, their progress, and development of compositional skills through self-reflective discussions of their work. Four sections describe iAssessment: (1) the background, context, and description of the music composition curriculum; (2) the techniques used to combine technology with composition effectively; (3) a description and analysis of student work that demonstrates the development of their musical thinking; and (4) thoughts and conclusions.

Dance Education and Technology: Working at the Intersection of Conflicting Paradigms

This paper explores the unique terrain that unfolded when a sophisticated, high-tech system called SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Laboratory) was placed in an urban, inner-city elementary school to facilitate the instruction of a dance composition curriculum. Additionally, this paper seeks to understand what it means to work at an intersection of male and female paradigms and how, from this perspective, to think about the bridge between technology and humanity. The project explored the system's efficacy and potential for educational and creative enhancement. SMALLab is a fifteen-square-foot interactive space that allows students to generate changes in sonic and visual media through gesture and full-body movement.