Multimodal Interactions: Shaping the Exploration of Digital Storytelling as a Tool for Media Literacy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: Multimodal Interactions and Learner Engagement in Online Communities

Abstract

Suarez-Orozco and Qin Hillard (2006) refer globalization as the changes that occur as people, goods, or ideas from different communities connect to one another. The authors stress that due to these connections, “globalization seems deeply implicated in nearly all of the major issues of the new millennium” (p.1). These ideas of globalization are more visible and familiar from the growing affordance of technologies. As Suarez-Orozco and Qin Hillard point out, “while human lives continue to believe in local realities, these realities are increasingly being challenged and integrated into larger global networks of relationships…and it impacts us from economic realities, social progress to technological and media innovation” (2006, p. 1). And these global transformers will shape a different path in ways which youth experience and live their lives in the 21st century.
With the growing affordance of technology and different ways that youth interact with media, this paper will focus on how youth engage with one another by viewing, producing, and/or interacting with digitally mediated artifacts that focus on the social issues impacting their communities. This paper seeks a better understanding of the social, cultural, and educational context of youth who leverage digitally mediated artifacts as a way to explore, to engage, and to understand their identities, communities and the world at large (i.e., media scholarship). The questions considered in the paper are as follows: 1) What does media teach us? 2) How is media scholarship (i.e., McPherson, 2009) being practice by youth who engage with media literacy as a form of sharing, learning, and understanding? and 3) What does it mean to invite youth to cultivate a better learning and collaborative environment using media? The perspectives of this paper are rooted around the ideas of participatory culture, cosmopolitanism, and multimodality and how these frameworks play a role in engaging youth who already possess unique knowledge and experience. Hull notes that multimodality is usually perceived with the paradigm of printed text with barely a regard to multimodality within digital composition. She muses that biggest challenge of multimodality is to “locate and define the deeper aesthetic power of multimodal texts” (p.229) and how this tool can be transformed to offer better insights and communication (2005).
From the perspective of Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CGTV) (2003), educators would agree that learning is a transformative process where students need opportunities to explore topics in-depth; and that the use of multimodal tools can connect with one’s capabilities to think, to represent, and to communicate—widening the definition of what counts as valued knowledge and communication that welcomes a varied channels of expression (Hull, 2005). Through the examination of these participation and multimodal play (Vasudevan, Dejaynes and Schmier, 2010), this paper explores the engagement from discussions taken both on- and off-line during film festivals and workshops of a local media group. The paper highlights the specific need to nurture a space that invites youth to share, to listen, to read, to write, and to reflect in valuable and multiple ways.

Author

• Ahram Park, Teachers College, Columbia University