Fringes, the NCETA Journal, is a space for current and pre-service English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, as well as ELA teacher educators, to share ideas for teaching primary and secondary ELA. Specifically, Fringes is a peer-reviewed journal published annually and features articles that address innovative classroom practices, important and timely educational issues, pedagogical methods, classroom activities, and curricular materials. We welcome a combination of both practice-oriented and research pieces, grounded in the various interests, assets, and contexts experienced by North Carolina teachers. In particular, we want to hear about the practices and research that educators are doing that are unconventional and peripheral, what we call fringe.
Fringes Editors
Morgan V. Blanton is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Child Development, Literacy, and Special Education (CLSE) at Appalachian State University. Her current research interests include literacy (text complexity, graphic novels, instructional practices in literacy, and media literacy) as well as reflective practices as it relates to teacher self-efficacy and eCoaching. Her most recent projects include exploring text complexity in graphic novels for upper elementary and middle grades, investigating ways in which children’s literature can foster discussion of complex issues in elementary school classrooms, and examining preservice English-Language Arts teachers reflective practices.
Damiana Gibbons Pyles is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Appalachian State University. Her research interests focus on media production, identity, and media literacy practices in order to understand the intersections of the visual, the spoken, the written, and the performed in digital and print literacies. She created an analytic methodology called multimodal microanalysis to understand the media products young people create, and her past scholarship focused on how to think through an ethics of youth media production, especially in marginalized groups. She currently teaches courses for preservice and practicing teachers to learn how to integrate media and technology for teaching and learning. She also teaches Media Studies students from across campus to learn how to analyze identities across media, such as race/gender/sexualities in streaming media and comics, and how to create their own media in response through games, blogs, audio documentary, and other media. Her most recent projects include exploring literacy and science learning through YouTube and YouTube Kids and other multimodal tools in kindergarten classrooms, exploring how to teach difficult topics, such as climate change, using picturebooks, and analyzing identities in Netflix’s interface and original programming through a feminist and critical lens.