I Am/You See: Traversing Literacies from Page to Screen to Body

Julie: I entered Smith High School on a surprisingly warm November afternoon. The lockers dotting the long, sterile hallways were in need of a good paint job, not to mention the ancient-looking water fountains, many of which had tape around them indicating they were broken. As I rounded the corner to Sarah's classroom, I breathed an audible sigh of relief. The entire feel of the school changed the moment I neared her classroom; the hallway outside was colored with annotated poetry, posters illustrating literary techniques, and even student-articulated future college goals. Once inside her room, I felt back at home. A neat schedule of the week was on the board, featuring all the typical English-class- trappings of journaling, reading assignments, essay revisions, vocabulary enrichments. The seniors in her class were noisily forming an imperfect circle out of desks for the day's Socratic seminar, armed with novels, notebooks, and pencils. Would Sarah and her students be up for joining our project? After all, it looked like they already had plenty of good things to keep them busy . . .Sarah: "Yes" is my go-to response for everything relating to teaching my AP students at Smith High School. "Can you prepare them for high-stakes testing?" "Yes." "Will you have them report to the library to take a survey on the school's atmosphere?" "Yes." "Will you have them complete a really simplistic question for the district to prove they read the three summer reading books." (sigh) "Yes." "Are you interested in a new partnership with Millsaps College that introduces your students to new media learning?" "YES!!!"The problem with my go-to answer is that often I am unsure how to handle what I agreed to do. So, yes, of course I want to involve my students in a partnership with local schools and a local college, but what the heck did I get us into? I already have a jam-packed AP syllabus. And if I am being honest, I am the worst with technology, especially in my school where half the websites are blocked and it takes months to get a response to a computer-related problem.This article shares our journey together across different literacy practices and platforms over the course of a semester, when Sarah asked her high school senior English students to write a traditional personal narrative (art on the page), then translate the narrative to a digital story (art on the screen), and finally embody major themes in a story with their bodies at a culminating Image Theater event (art on the body). Our partnership was serendipitous. Julie was a newly appointed literacy education professor in a metropolitan center in the Deep South who sought to partner with an English teacher in a neighboring urban public high school to work with a representative population in the community: 98 percent African American and 75 percent free or reduced-price lunch. Sarah was recommended by colleagues as an inspiring, experienced professional at Smith High School and, when approached, expressed interest in pushing both herself and her AP seniors to explore digital storytelling and theater techniques. Together, we expanded a traditional personal narrative writing assignment so that students might creatively leverage the digital and the physical to present narratives and counternarratives about the self to imagined audiences.We believe that imagination and the arts traverse different spaces, times, and literacy practices. We locate them in students' writing with pen on the page, in the sophisticated multimodal compositions that they make with iMovie on their phones, and in collaborative theater techniques that ask them to depict a snapshot in time with their bodies. These assumptions are key in transliteracies theory (Thomas et al.), which insists that meaning-making consistently flows from one vehicle to another (e.g., writing, multimodal composition, performance) without prioritizing one medium over another. We believe that our work together proves that the aesthetic imagination has a central role in English class despite, and because of, today's education climate of testing and standardization. …