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Banned: Three Poems by Melissa Fite Johnson

Melissa Fite Johnson
Bishop Seabury Academy
Lawrence, Kansas, USA
melissafitejohnson@gmail.com

Author Bio

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS, where she co-hosts the Volta reading series at the Replay Lounge.

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[banned]

Kevin Rabas
Emporia State University
Emporia, Kansas, USA
krabas@emporia.edu

Author Bio

Past Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019) Kevin Rabas teaches at Emporia State University. He is a seventh generation Kansan. His several books include Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner. He is the recipient of the Emporia State President’s and Liberal Arts & Sciences Awards for Research and Creativity, and he is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry. His plays and films have shown across the Midwest and on both coasts.

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Books for Grieving

Janan Chan
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
janan.chan@mail.mcgill.ca

Author Bio

Janan Chan is a PhD student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University, Montréal, Canada. His research project engages multilingual language learners in writing translingual poetry for aesthetic and expressive purposes. Completing his MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University, he moved to Shanghai, China, where he taught EFL from 2021 to 2024. His poems, appearing in Warm Milk, The Mitre, Fauxmoir and Soliloquies Anthology, explore themes such as identity, belonging and nostalgia. Through his regular blog posts for BILD (Belonging, Identity, Language, Diversity), a blog and journal based out of McGill university, he has reflected upon and documented his teaching practices, the subversive uses of internet culture in China and neighbourly trust during China’s pandemic lockdown. He was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Toronto, Ontario and a small town in Québec. He now lives in Montréal.

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MAKING HOLES

Tyler Robert Sheldon
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
tyrsheldon@gmail.com

Author Bio

Tyler Robert Sheldon has seven poetry collections including Everything is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist. He is Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review and Poetry Co-Editor of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Pop Culture and Pedagogy, and his work can be found in Dialogue, The Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. He earned his PhD at LSU and his MFA at McNeese State University, and he lives in Baton Rouge.

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Three Characters and Me(me): Positioning Popular Culture to Unpack Emerging Teacher Identity

Gillian E. Mertens
SUNY Cortland
Cortland, NY, USA
gillian.mertens@cortland.edu

Henry “Cody” Miller
SUNY Brockport
Brockport, NY, USA
hmiller@brockport.edu 

Abstract

In this article we narrate an instructional practice we implemented in two different teacher education courses that facilitated conversations about teacher identity through the use of fictional characters who were educators. This practice served two purposes in our course work: firstly, this activity presents students with an opportunity to demonstrate their media interests and career goals; secondly, this activity provides a quick, baseline assessment of how aspiring teachers view their profession and future practice. We detail student responses to this activity and consider how their choices of fictional educators fit into broader patterns we see in popular culture, specifically depictions of teachers within film and television. While our paper specifically centers teachers, there is significant possibility for this activity to be used in any professional-identity training program (e.g., nursing and medicine, social work and counseling, and law). We close the paper with additional questions for future lines of scholarly inquiry into teacher identity and media representation. 

Keywords: teacher identity, memes, television shows, practice-based identity, identity models 

Author Bios

Gillian Mertens is an assistant professor of literacy education at SUNY Cortland. Her research interests include digital and information literacies, teacher preparation, and the interplay between technology and identity. Gillian previously worked as a middle school English teacher in Florida. 

Henry “Cody” Miller is an associate professor of English education at SUNY Brockport. His research interests include young adult literature, graphic novels, LGBTQ education, and educational politics. Cody previously worked as a high school English teacher in Florida. 

Suggested Reference Citation

APA

Mertens, G., & Miller, H. (2024). Three characters and me(me): Positioning popular culture to unpack emerging teacher identity. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, volume11(2). http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v11-issue-2/three-characters-and-meme/

MLA

Mertens, Gillian, and Henry “Cody” Miller. “Three Characters and Me(me): Positioning Popular Culture to Unpack Emerging Teacher Identity.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 2024, vol 11, no. 2 http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v11-issue-2/three-characters-and-meme/

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Ways of Decoloniality by The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Katara Demonstrates How to Revive a Community in Ecological distress Brought by the Colonial Expansion of the Fire Nation 

Jose Santos P. Ardivilla
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, Texas, USA
jose.ardivilla@ttu.edu

Abstract

In the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Book 3: The Book Of Fire, The “Gaang” consisting of Avatar Aang, Toph, Sokka, and Katara chanced upon a fishing village on stilts,ravaged by the pollution of its waterways. The pollution comes from the industrial activity of the Colonial Masters’ Fire Nation which greatly affected the village. This animation is from Nickelodeon, a channel geared for children’s entertainment, thus implicates humorous asides in what purports to be a serious epicurean reclaiming of a lost balance through indigenous visual culture, solidarity, media studies, and ecocriticism. Katara disguises herself as “the Painted Lady,” a folkloric figure of the village to help in healing the sick and providing food, which proved not to be as effective until a direct confrontation with the polluters had taken place. Katara dons the appearance of the Painted Lady as a benevolent force (to rival the Fire Nation’s industrial foment) and eventually worked with the villagers to seize their village’s wellbeing by the ousting of the Fire nation. This paper explores connective nodes relating this episode with other local environmental concerns that are at the forefront of increased geopolitical tensions in the region.

Keywords Avatar: The Last Airbender, Katara, waterbending, Fire Nation, coloniality, decoloniality, animation studies, ecocriticism, popular culture, praxis

Author Bio

Jose Santos P. Ardivilla is a political cartoonist, printmaker, and writer from the Philippines. He is pursuing a PhD in Fine Arts at Texas Tech as a Fulbright-Philippine Commission on Higher Education scholar. You may reach him at ardivilla.com

Suggested Reference Citation

APA

Ardivilla, J. S. P. (2024) “Ways of decoloniality by The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Katara demonstrates how to revive a community in ecological distress brought by the colonial expansion of the Fire Nation.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 11(2) http://journaldialogue.org/v11-issue-2/ways-of-decoloniality-by-the-painted-lady/

MLA

Ardivilla, Jose Santos P. “Ways of Decoloniality by the Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Katara Demonstrates How to Revive a Community in Ecological Distress Brought by the Colonial Expansion of the Fire Nation.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 2024, vol. 11, no. 2. http://journaldialogue.org/v11-issue-2/ways-of-decoloniality-by-the-painted-lady/

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