Spring Opportunities for Graduate Coursework in Qualitative Research, Theory and Literacy Practices

Hung Pham

Educators engage in comics workshop with professor Sean Connors

The Department of Curriculum and Instruction is pleased to offer three courses in Spring 2023 designed to extend and expand the literacy graduate coursework available to the U of A community. Three award-winning faculty members, professors Faythe Beauchemin, Vicki Collet and Sean Connors, are offering distinct courses designed to expand and deepen the understanding and application of literacy practice, theory and qualitative research methodology.

Begin your spring semester with a Digital Storytelling Workshop (CIED 599V) with associate professor Sean Connors, offered in the evenings of the intersession. Given the relative ease with which people can use digital technologies to compose texts that combine spoken and written language with video, audio, animations and other modalities, defining literacy narrowly as the ability to encode and decode print text is no longer sufficient. However, in school, print remains the predominant mode through which students are expected to consume and create narratives, raising the question: "As educators, how can we reimagine the writing curriculum to support students' building skills and knowledge associated with non-traditional forms of composing?" To answer that question, this workshop immerses participants in making an assortment of digital stories in the context of a supportive and collaborative professional community.

During the regular spring semester, associate professor Vicki Collet is offering CIED 6093 Vygotsky in the Classroom, which will meet Tuesdays from 5:15-8 p.m. Collet had the good fortune of studying Vygotskian theory with Vladimir Ageyev from the University of Moscow and is pleased to share that learning with graduate students. This course introduces the cultural-historical theory of L. Vygotsky and considers its complexity. The comprehensive nature of Vygotsky's heritage and the importance of the sociocultural context for understanding his work is emphasized, as well as the implications of his theories for contemporary educational settings. 

For those interested in advanced qualitative research methodology, don't miss assistant professor Beauchemin's Discourse Analysis and Education Research (CIED 694V), also in spring. This course provides an opportunity for an in-depth exploration of the use of discourse analysis in education research. Discourse analysis is a set of approaches to the study of educational events that focuses attention on people's use of language and related semiotic systems as they construct social (and educational) events, social identities, social relationships, histories, knowledge, power relations and learning. The approach taken is grounded in sociolinguistic ethnography, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis and related approaches to discourse-in-use. Although the course engages in learning about a method of discourse analysis to apply in educational research, the primary intellectual thrust of the course is theoretical and epistemological. 

Questions may be directed to each faculty member:

• Faythe Beauchemin: fpbeauch@uark.edu
• Vicki Collet: collet@uark.edu
• Sean Connors: sconnors@uark.edu