Redesigning English Education through Youth Practices with Media Fandoms

There is a pressing need to reimagine English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms to address pervasive issues of culturally destructive instruction and youth disengagement. Jones proposes a path forward: designing classrooms that center the passionate fan literacies of youth.

This talk shares findings from yearlong participatory design research in a diverse public high school ELA classroom inclusive of students with disabilities. Building from sociocultural and critical frameworks, Jones and teacher collaborators worked alongside diverse youth to build an instructional space that centered youth’s media fandom literacies. This presentation will report how youth engaged social justice issues in both literary and youth-centric digital communities. Jones traced youth literacy and media fandom practices across a semester of in-class writing conferences and provides an analysis of ways that Latinx focal students navigated claim-making across communities. She shares steps for ELA practitioners to design their own youth-centric classrooms as well as a preview of upcoming research-practice partnerships furthering this work.

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Karis Jones (Ph.D.) is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts for the School for Graduate Studies at Empire State University – SUNY. As a literacy scholar, learning scientist, teacher educator, and community organizer, she studies issues of equity in literacies learning and writing across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces.

She is PI/Co-PI on research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Sociological Institute Foundation, the International Literacy Association (ILA), and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). She has received funding for community partnerships through Humanities New York, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the Wycoff Family Foundation. She was a 2020-21 Public Humanities Fellow.

Her research is published in journals such as the Journal of Literacy Research, Equity & Excellence in Education; Teaching and Teacher Education; Journal of Language & Literacy Education, Linguistics and Education, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education -- English Education, and English Journal. Her book “Fandoms in the Classroom: A Social Justice Approach to Transforming Literacy Learning” written with a colleague releases this winter. She received the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Literature SIG’s 2022 Shelby Wolf Award for Outstanding Dissertation.

As a community organizer with Jersey City Together, she supports public education and advocacy around district budgets and water remediation as well as listening campaigns for Spanish and Arabic-speaking parents – these community efforts have contributed to a $53 million local funding increase in Jersey City as well as safe drinking water for 23,000 students across 32 public schools in the district.

She currently serves on the Executive Board of AERA’s Writing & Literacies SIG and the Research Committee for the Literacy Research Association.