Bringing the Bard to Life Through Digital Media

• In Event: Digital Media and Discourses of Power in Adolescent Literacy Instruction: From Resistance to Readiness

Abstract

If our aim in Initial Teacher Education is to prepare teacher candidates to teach in a digital age, they must become familiar with the out-of-school literacy practices of their students and consider how they might use digital media for educational purposes in their own classrooms. The Teaching Secondary English course begins with a focus on multiliteracies and then weaves an explicit focus on digital media throughout the course. I hope to encourage beginning teachers to be not only users of technology, but more importantly, questioners and producers of technology (Selber, 2004).
I scaffold the development of new literacies skills by exploring Shakespeare through a multiliteracies lens. I examine what happens when teacher candidates engage with Shakespeare through digital media. They critically examine existing resources then select a play and create digital resources for their students that reflect a multiliteracies perspective. For the purposes of this research I am interested in teacher candidates’ shifting views of multiliteracies and its place in the English classroom as well as how the creation of digital media to teach Shakespeare might encourage them to engage with the Bard in a more active and contemporary way.
Within the multiliteracies framework outlined by the New London Group (1996), which contemplates the future of literacy teaching and the role of schools in the context of a rapidly changing world, are four underlying pedagogical components: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice. I use these pedagogical components as I focus my attention on four beginning teachers and their use of digital media (particularly the creation of a digital Shakespeare resource). I explore both their shifting perceptions of multiple literacies and how these shifts in thinking help shape or transform their ideas about teaching and learning Shakespeare.
Many existing digital resources for teaching Shakespeare simply replicate the traditional transmission model used in the English classroom for decades. With a few notable exceptions, the existing resources are not “mindtools” (Jonassen, 2000) that support, guide, and extend the thinking processes of the students, nor do they make effective use of Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis, to facilitate knowledge construction and reflection. In order to address this imbalance, I ask my students to design and create their own Digital Shakespeare resources, keeping in mind the pedagogical potential of the digital tools at their disposal. In my presentation, I will focus on case studies (Stake, 2000) of digital Shakespeare texts created by four small groups of teacher candidates and explore the various ways that they have used digital tools to teach Shakespeare in new and technologically sophisticated ways. The case study data consists of (a) initial surveys about teacher candidates’ experiences exploring Shakespeare in their own schooling; (b) the digital Shakespeare texts created by teacher candidates; (c) their written reflections; and (d) open-ended interviews with each teacher candidate after they had used the digital Shakespeare resource with their students on field placement.

Author

• Janette Michelle Hughes, University of Ontario Institute of Technology