Negotiating the Yardstick of Academic Legitimacy: Integrating Multimedia Literacies Into School-Based Learning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Literacy Practices and New Technologies in and out of School

Abstract

This study investigates how secondary teachers in a combined English, history, and media course adopted an innovative literacy vision that framed students as writers, readers, and communicators of multiple texts and positioned multimedia production as a means for students to deepen their understanding of literature. Findings demonstrate that despite the teachers’ beliefs, they did not explicitly discuss with students their enactment of a broadened notion of literacy or the reasons for incorporating multimedia production. This disconnect worked to promote media class as something “other,” as tangential to the “academic” English and history classes. These findings highlight the need for educators to examine and discuss with students the guiding assumptions and normative discourses of schooling and literacy.

Author

• Jessica K. Parker, Sonoma State University