Join us for the CESTA Tuesday lunch seminar on October 29th, from 12:00 to 1:15 pm, featuring Sarah Levine, Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education, and Nichole Nomura, Lecturer in the English Department and Associate Director of the Literary Lab. Their talk, titled "Connecting English Language Arts (ELA) Canons and Curricula," will explore how modern computational methods can help analyze shifts in secondary and post-secondary English Language Arts (ELA) education. Using advanced language models and network analyses, Levine and Nomura will discuss their findings from the Course Description Archive for Research (CDAR), a tool designed to capture and visualize the relationships between curricula, texts, and authors across different regions and institutions. The presentation will offer a deeper understanding of the evolving landscape of English education in the U.S.

The event will take place in person at Wallenberg Hall, Room 433A, with lunch provided for in-person attendees, and will also be available virtually. Please RSVP here to join either in-person or online!

Talk Abstract

For more than a hundred years, content analyses of U.S. high school and college English curricula (e.g., Barbour, 1898; Stotsky, 2010) have reflected educators’ conceptualizations of English Language Arts as a White, Western discipline. However, in the past decade, our political, cultural, and curricular landscape has changed. Schools are still grappling with Common Core standards and exams, the effects of a pandemic, anti-racist education movements, conservative backlash to those movements, and ChatGPT. How do all these developments affect what students read and why they read it? What do secondary and post-secondary English Language Arts (ELA) look like today? Teachers, researchers, administrators, and the general public need a map of the current ELA terrain to better understand the roles that race, class, political movements, and technology play in our students’ literacy lives, and to chart a course for the future of English education.We turn to computational methods that allow us to find, preserve, and analyze course descriptions at larger scales and generate quantitative and visual representations of relationships between curricula in different regions or at different types of institutions. We will present the Course Description Archive for Research (CDAR), which we’ve designed to support this work, along with preliminary network analyses that synthesize our manual qualitative coding with natural language processing to visualize relationships between high schools, colleges, texts, and authors.

About the Speakers

Sarah Levine is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the teaching and learning of literary interpretation and writing in under-resourced urban high schools, with an emphasis on the links between in- and out-of-school interpretive practices. She is also interested in ways that AI and digital media (for example, natural language processing models like ChatGPT; visual representations of text like word clouds; and radio production) can be used as frameworks for teaching reading and writing to middle and high school students. Before pursuing an academic career, she taught secondary English at a Chicago public school for ten years. While there, she founded and ran a youth radio program that used digital audio production as a tool to help make writing and analysis relevant and real-world for students, and to build bridges between in- and out-of-school worlds.

Nichole Nomura is currently an Associate Director of the Stanford Literary Lab and a lecturer in the Department of English at Stanford. She is also the Director of Digital Humanities Research Scholars Residency at CESTA. Before this, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) as a part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “The Data that Divides Us.” She has a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University with a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities and is a graduate of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education (M.A.).Nichole studies how literature teaches and is taught, English pedagogy, and Young Adult Literature, using methods from the digital humanities, literary criticism, and education. Her current book project book project, Curricular Reading, argues for the affordances of reading literature like we do curricula. She’s also working on research collaborations to co-design digital humanities curriculum for middle school and to map the disciplinary landscape of ELA in secondary and post-secondary curricula.