Expanding the Geography of Learning: How Students Represent and Read Their School-Worlds in Digital Spaces

• In Event: 46.082 - Teacher Research: Transformative Classroom Practices

Abstract

This study is intended as a first step toward understanding how students use visual digital technology and shared online spaces to read their school-worlds. Using iPads, students, explored the complexity of multimodal texts they designed (photographs of school spaces). In addition to exploring how students create, analyze, and make meaning of their own lives at school, this study aimed to understand the ways in which the students play with and perform in multimodal texts. I found that as the students shared their representations and analyses of school spaces, the geography of learning was expanded so that the curriculum of the school building was recognized, and the students began to reorient themselves towards it in meaningful ways.

Author

• Deirdre Faughey, Teachers College, Columbia University