Welcome: This website is dedicated to understanding multi-modal literacies, a concept and practice of determining how to derive textual meaning and purpose. The site also serves as a space for my pedagogical reformation, an ongoing theoretical claim that practice must change with the times to adjust to student needs. If your interested in my pedagogical theories, you can see my full Teaching Statement page or check out my syllabi to understand more about what I value. I’m always open for questions, so feel free to email littlefieldj10@gmail.com for more insight.
Who Am I: I’m a graduate of East Carolina University English Masters Program on a mission of discovering my academic identity. My background is in children’s literature and film studies, but my advocacy is towards the interactive medium. Students have misconceptions of what a text is, much less acknowledgement of what a text is. Literature tends to lump texts into categories, things that are literature (i.e. novels, historic documents, and poetry), and things that are not literature. These lines are concerning as we are entering a new age of media literacy where stories are being told across mediums other than print. As I open my students up to what is a text, hopefully they will realize that the subject matter they value, and the medium it is conveyed through, is an area worth talking about, writing about, and thinking about.
Research: My interest are in the interactive medium (video games), film, and children’s literature. These topics run the gambit of fields of study. They each share the theme of being modes that can often be misconstrued as being deprived of analytical meaning or depth. All three of these fields are growing and becoming defined by the innovators who lead the charge for them. Personally, I explore these genres in search of identity, and often the former two can fit the latter. I’ve long been interested in the adolescent coming of age story and all of these modes attempt to convey these stories. What do each of them do differently when exploring the concept of identity. I’m often intrigued by male homosexual representations in the media, and I want to be clear that I’m less concerned with LGBTQ themes, and more concerned with the way male homosexual’s are portrayed. Masculine studies can often be overlooked in lieu of feminism when it comes to gender studies. I by no means value one over the other, I merely want to reproach the way masculine texts are perceived, and in my context this identity falls upon male characters in LGBTQ literature.
