A Renaissance of Text: Adolescent Digital Authoring in the Classroom Virtual Space

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

Abstract

Educators in middle school systems are well aware that their students spend enormous amounts of time interacting with computers and the Internet. However, how these interactions are affecting their in-school literacy practices is only beginning to be explored (Burke, 2009;Hull & Shultz, 2001; Hagood, 2009) More important, this body of research shows how children’s’ reading and writing is being profoundly changed by these on-line interactions, and that we need more research to address the ways adolescents use and conceive language to inform curricula and classroom practice.
This paper looks at a one-year qualitative case study (Stake, 1995) in a middle grade classroom. The case study purpose was to chronicle a teacher’s digital practices to gain more insight into the literate practices of her students through their reading and writing on the computer screen, and to conceptualize what this means for classroom practice and curricula? The research looked specifically at the types of writing engagements students took up in out of school practices and what digital resources the classroom teacher could use to engage the design of language the students tacitly used.
Multimodal analysis of her students’ on-line engagements in her language arts classroom using a Ning showed how they engage different design modes as a way to emphasize the social aspect of their communication practices as active designers of meaning (Halliday, 1978, Jewitt, 2008,Jewitt & Kress, 2003). This type of analysis is important when looking at students’ on-line engagements because it sees adolescents as active meaning makers who recontextualize texts using various semiotic processes such as image, gaze, movement and sound. Key research has shown that as students participate in multimodal ways of communication, new possibilities and constraints for representation are explored. (Kendrick & Jones, 2008; Kress, 1997; McTavish, 2009; Stein, 2008). Further to this, a multimodal analysis shows how hybridity and intertextuality is enacted through created identities, which are embodied in a larger discourse.

In this presentation a number of data sources will be shared. Data sources from this middle grade case study consisted of a literacy log outlining the students’ out of school literacy practices, classroom observations of students’ engagement on the Ning, student and teacher interviews, focus group discussions, and an artifact collection of the students’ postings on the classroom Ning site.
Using Digital practices such as the Ning in the teacher’s classroom was representative of an expanding definition of school literacy, which sought to empower students’ literacy potential. Using a fine grained account of the students’ multimodal practices and teacher’s critical reflection, this study’s findings show that digital authoring on the screen is dependent not only on teacher’s expansive views of authoring and language in classroom pedagogy, but also an understanding that created identities in digital resources such as the Ning are fluid and performance based and are tied to larger discourses of power.

Author

• Anne Michelle Burke, Memorial University