Well, Dr. Alice Hays @haysalice and I Were Being Book Nerds When We Made a Wild Connection @NCTE a Few Years Ago, So This Year We Presented the Literacy of @WGIcolorguard

Yesterday, Dr. Alice Hays and I presented at "The Intersection of Literacy, Sport, Culture, and Society" during the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Anaheim, California. Our presentation, "Sport of the Arts - Towards Equity, Justice, and Literacy through Pageantry" was an opportunity to begin theorizing, academically, the out-of-school performances by many youth who participate within Winter Guard International events. As a younger brother to a sister and an uncle to a niece who marched with the North Syracuse Winterguard (Northstars) over several years, I joke that I spent many weekends in gyms and on football fields watching performances. 

Alice and I bonded over National Writing Project work and a passion for young adult literature, which led me to learn that she performed and judges for circuits, including WGI. As a person in the audience for so many years, I felt I might get an inside view into how teams are scored, which led me to interviews with her, watching shows with her, and hearing her talk through feedback she gives teams. As a result, we started thinking about the poetry of pageantry, the ways physical movement and equipment share storytelling, and the similarities of "scoring" student writing an evaluation the genre of this particular sport. There are many parallels. I felt like I was connecting with my family's history with a deeper level of what we mean by sports, arts, and performance. Alice is a phenomenal teacher.

For our analysis, we chose to discuss Sun Lake's performance of Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem (as the spoken word piece brought poetry into showmanship). It also paralleled the conference theme very well, especially in pursuit of light. 

We created a one-pager that we discussed while participants could see the team do their job on the floor and began to theorized ways that such sport is a literacy that may be used in classrooms, especially for teachers interested in the out-of-school literacies of young people (and want to find ways to use it for in-school success).

Alice is a dream-colleague and I've loved our weekly meetings as she's talked to me and helped me to think deeper about the sport that was central to my family's lives for so many year (something I've kept up with because the storytelling through movement has always interested me). 

It's one thing to watch shows as a spectator, but listening to the brilliance and insider-knowledge of Alice's expertise, made me rethink the all the ways I've viewed the competitions I've experiences - the value system of the circuit parallels the one we uphold in literacy instruction, which is intriguing. 

I can now say that all those weekends in gyms paid off in my adult career...the brother/uncle (floor uncle...I've carried a few mats over the years) paid off. I'm hoping the to of us explore this much more and find an outlet for the work.

Anyone want to hire us to write the book about this?