Call for Papers

Topic: “Transformation through Literacy”

for the 54th Annual NeMLA Convention March 23-26, 2023 in Niagara Falls, NY. 

 The deadline for abstracts is September 30, 2022. Please email to submit your abstract online here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/19780

Description of Session: Dr.Maryann P.DiEdwardo, Chair 

 "Transformation through Literacy”

This panel seeks presentations about peace studies through spatializing the study of human rights, emigration, migration, immigration, and diasporas.

Combining metacognition and hermeneutics suggests that thinking about literature through the lens of the hermeneutic arc may enlighten us to better writing. In fact, we promote the use of metacognition to begin the outlines and purpose, hermeneutics to approach the research, and finally, cultural poetics to see the literary work as a social discourse.  Evidence in favor of applying this methodology occurs in the fall of 2018, at a Southern Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference. The panel about “Agency, Activism, and Courage in the Classroom Community” by invited members of the College English Association includes a lecture by Maryann P. DiEdwardo entitled “Pedagogy and Social Justice: Reading to Transgress”.  The main themes center upon teaching civic values at Lehigh University in English Literature and Composition classes and in research writing  for graduate students from 2007 to the present. Considering the impact that researchers make on their readers, we can change the researcher with hermeneutics, metacognition, and cultural poetic approaches. Consider participants’ views and knowledge. Applying hermeneutical approaches constitutes a text, a respect for history of the author of the text and the significance of the text, and understanding approaches to writing about the text. The hermeneutic arc offers us methodology for interpretation. “Hermeneutics, in France as elsewhere abroad, is frequently associated with the work of Paul Ricoeur” (Frey, viii.). We discuss civic values through the hermeneutic arc and prepare to study through metacognitive activities.  

The most important outcomes of hermeneutics and metacognition in writing is cultural poetics which seeks to identify literary works as social discourses; we apply curriculums that engaging in reasoned conversation with others about short stories, essays and novels as well as film as visual literature. We practice marshaling and organizing evidence in support of our claims while not neglecting evidence to the contrary. We also practice critical thinking, and we use writing to improve our skills of analysis, synthesis, and interpretation. We create logical and special thinking, socialization, and conversation.  Metacognitive processes focus on learning with self discovery in hard copy journals. Writing assignments ask us to take positions on cultural issues or questions of interpretation. We combine poetic and hermeneutic models to ask how a particular effect is achieved or why an ending seems right but also what a particular line means and what a literary work tells us about the human condition. In 2017, Maryann P. DiEdwardo published her article titled “Implementing Learning Strategies Based on Metacognition” in the Journal of Modern Education Review. She presents learning strategies based on metacognition or thinking about thinking. The planning of a writing project “center upon activities that support preparation for learning to teach students to act as cognitive mappers to create new literature of the social network as new voices for a global cultural revolution” (DiEdwardo, 380).               

      Imagination, individualized by each writer, captivates us. We become agents of change if we share the new formations that research and reading offer us. We can take action and go further than our heroes and heroines. Furthermore, building bridges through civil rights awakens conscience to address concerns of poverty, racism, violence, nuclear armament, economic equality, among other pressing concerns of the 20th century and the 21st century. Our presentations share research which involves identifying key images, values, beliefs, and social structures that point toward a particular cultural movement. We explain our own transformative experiences based upon reading of the works of Global authors. We research Peace Studies through letters and archival evidence to acknowledge space as a methodology to teach human rights. In fact, the study defines the human experience.