"It's Complicated": Fourth-Grade Students Representing Other Peoples' Lives in a Critical Digital Literacies Project

• In Event: 33.078 - Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: 33.078-7 - Representing, Positioning, and Designing Through Digital Literacies

Abstract

In this paper we share the results of an analysis of a set of multimodal, digital videos created by fourth-grade children in a critical digital literacies project. These digital compositions, made in honor of Cesar Chavez Day, were meant to be about a day in the life of a worker and were meant to allow children to use school and home community members lives as curricular content. We focused on the ways that children represented other peoples’ work and personal lives, what they said they learned, and the affordances of the multimodal composing platform. Ultimately, we argue that such assignments foreground the school community as a source of curricular material and position children as designers of powerful texts.

Authors

• Jessica Zacher Pandya, California State University - Long Beach

• Kathleah Allene Consul Pagdilao, California State University - Long Beach