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1985 19952015

2005

Joel Mario ThomasMuseum of Multimodal History

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Joel M Thomas is the current executive director and founder of IE21CL, the Institute for the Emergence of 21st Century Literacies and a graduate student in the CCNY M.A. in Language and Literacy Program.

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1995

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This is where the story starts to get interesting. After having moved and established a new life with my parents in New York City, I found myself, as a black island boy, lost in white America and confused about how to negotiate between worlds as a 1.5 immigrant. In an attempt to cope with this new reality, I turned to the arts: music, creative writing, and theatre. Then, following a chance opportunity given to me by an English teacher during my sophomore year in high school, I became a founding member of the formerly, New York University, but currently CUNY, Creative Arts Team's Youth Theatre. This organization centers its work on one core mission: to give “young people the opportunity to make new meanings from the material of their lives.” In this community, I first learned how to produce cultural products using available resources and the technique of improvisation—a skill that would eventually become a key invention process for me in writing. Through this process, I began crafting poetry and recognized my ability to channel the feelings and experiences of others into words—this marked the beginning of my rhetorical life as I learned to use pathos effectively; but as I was challenged to turn the written word into performance art, I also became aware of the delivery system in composition that John Timbur and James E. Porter discuss. At the same time, Microsoft launched Windows 95 and I was also beginning to learn to type and use word processing software in my business education classes. I had no way of knowing at the time that over the next 18 years the world around me would be transformed from a print to digital culture. On that journey, I learned how to write in ways that made my words and meaning easier to deliver in multiple modes of communication.

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