Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, PhD, is Cecil “Pete” Taylor Endowed Professor of Literacy Leadership, and Urban Education at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She is Director of the LSU Writing Project and Coordinator of the Educational Leadership PhD program in the School of Education. Sulentic Dowell’s research agenda includes three strands focused on literacy in urban settings, specifically exploring ways to provide access to literature, writing, and the arts (arts integration) in urban environs, investigating the complexities of literacy leadership, and examining service-learning as a pedagogical pathway to preparing pre-service teachers to teach literacy in urban environments. Sulentic Dowell has published widely, and her most recent book is "The Literacy Leadership Guide for Elementary Principals: Reclaiming Teacher Autonomy and Joy" (2019) by Roman & Littlefield.
“My 1st graders pantomimed today to illustrate understanding of vocabulary. Pantomime pairs well with a current science unit about animals and the structures they use to defend themselves. They loved it. I’m so thankful I took the arts […]
When I was asked to create a work of art exploring literacy, I wanted to create a dance but I had no dancers or a studio, so I chose to use my own body in the space I had, my yard. Fluent Nature is video of micro-choreography that explores what cannot be expressed with words, how nature has its own language, and how placing the human body in nature changes the story.
Title: What Is Me and What Is Not Me | Artist: Alex Chadwell | Medium: Music
My thinking on arts and literacy centers around the concept of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that organically and inevitably overlap, intersect, and reciprocate. Compositionally, What is me and what is not me is a sound collage of sorts (there is no notation for the piece, and I'd be hard pressed to recreate it accurately) that abstractly and aurally represents the relationships between literacies and artmaking.
Title: A Curious Honeybee | Artist: Gideon Young | Medium: Film
Offering welcome through traditional and digital elements of literacy, A Curious Honeybee provides an experiential learning environment by activating visual, musical, natural, and emotional literacies.
La Carpa Theatre is a project that I am currently directing in the Detroit Latinx community. The project aims to strengthen and uplift youth voices through devised theatre, in the style of the Mexican Carpas. This audio was created in the theatrical environment envisioned for our project. The ways in which literacies are re-defined are at the heart of La Carpa Theatre's mission.