Brief Description: During the 2014-2015 school year, faculty members and doctoral students documented the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts project, Anne Frank: Bearing Witness, funded by the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence. Teachers and students in four 8th-grade classrooms (one in each of four middle schools) in Louisville participated in the project. All of the classroom teachers engaged in professional development about an approach to arts-integrated literacy instruction known as the Performance Cycle. Each teacher developed his or her own unit of study rooted in an enduring question related to the Anne Frank narrative. The results of our evaluation from Year I of the Anne Frank: Bearing Witness project indicated the importance of empathy, risk taking, and arts integration.

Reading Challenging Texts with Adolescents: Layering Literacies Through the Arts
By: James Chisholm and Kathryn F. Whitmore

(2016) Moving interpretations: Using drama-based arts strategies to deepen learning about The Diary of a Young Girl. English Journal, 105(5), 35-41.
By: James Chisholm, Kathryn F. Whitmore, Ashley Arnold, Irina McGrath

(2016) Bodies in space/bodies in motion/bodies in character: Adolescents bear witness to Anne Frank. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 17(5).
By: James Chisholm and Kathryn Whitmore

Title: Engaged, embodied, and empathetic literacies learning: Drama-infused instruction about the Anne Frank narrative. Location: 2016 Baltic Sea / 17th Nordic Literacy Conference, Turku/Åbo, Finland. Presenters: James Chisholm and Kathryn Whitmore

Title: Examining embodiment in process drama with the semiotic photo response protocol. Location: 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Urbana/Champaign, IL. Presenters: James Chisholm and Kathryn Whitmore

Title: Lines of flight in moments of embodied literacy as eighth graders study Anne Frank.
Location: 2016 American Education Research Association, Washington, DC. Presenters: James Chisholm and Kathryn Whitmore

Title: Using arts-based methods to extend verbocentric analysis: The semiotic photo response protocol.
Location: 2016 National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research, Ann Arbor, MI
Presenters: James Chisholm and Kathryn Whitmore

Title: Visual, embodied, and empathetic literacies: Research methods to understand how adolescents see, become, and feel challenging texts.
Location: 2016 Literacy Research Association Conference, Nashville, TN.
Presenters: James Chisholm, Kathryn F. Whitmore, Jonathan Baize, Ashley Arnold

Title: Research methods to understand middle grades readers’ semiotic awareness
Location: 2017 Discourse & Semiotics Workshop, University of Louisville, KY
Presenters: James Chisholm and Kathryn Whitmore

Title: Embodiment and emotion in arts-infused literacy learning: Adolescents engage with the Anne Frank narrative.
Location: 2017 12th International Conference on the Arts in Society, Paris, France.
Presenters: James Chisholm and Kathryn Whitmore

Title: Documenting, researching, and understanding arts-based inquiry with the Visual Learning Assessment.
Location: 2017 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Urbana/Champaign, IL
Presenters: James Chisholm, Kathryn Whitmore, Jonathan Baize, Aly Jacobs