"I Guess It Helped": The Complexities of Writing for Digital Video Composition

• In Event: How Writing Works: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Processes of Composition

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of this paper is to examine children’s complex conceptions of the role of writing in and for digital video composing.

Theoretical framework
Writing is viewed here as a communicative practice (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Hymes, 1984), a set of tools that children use to convey their ideas to others (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Vygotsky, 1986). Writing itself may be multimodal, as it “draws on visual and actional modes, in particular resources of spatiality and directionality” (Jewitt & Kress, 2003, p. 2). While children may recognise—or at least enact—the inherently multimodal quality of written text (cf. Dyson, 2008), “writing” often becomes something that one must do first in order to get to the more engaging technology of the tablet or other digital tool (see also Rowsell & Decoste, 2012). One of the goals of the paper is to make a contribution to our understanding of how children theorize writing in the context of digital video production.

Methods and Data Sources
In the larger 4-year study from which these data are drawn, children ages 8-10 created 2-3 videos per year on a variety of topics as part of their regular language arts and social studies curricula. Classroom teachers typically required children to first draft written scripts for their videos, then find or create still and moving images with which to compose their videos. Over the course of the project, the research team conducted over 90 in-depth, semi-structured (Weiss, 1994) interviews with children after they had completed each video. This paper presents an inductive, thematic analysis of those interviews (Corbin & Strauss, 1998), focusing first on the relationship of writing—as a paper-and-pencil activity in almost all cases—to multimodal composing processes.

Results
Findings suggest that children had complex understandings of the relationships between written scripts and their multimodal, digital video texts. Writing was seen as a different practice to composing a video text; it came first (not surprising, given that they were often made to write first), and children often differentiated between “writing” on paper and “composing” or “making” on the iPad. In addition, while children sometimes grudgingly admitted its uses—“I guess it helped,” as one child said”—they usually separated it from the “fun” activities of composing on the iPad. They associated it more with traditional school work, while composing on the iPad was seen as its opposite (especially since composing any kind of artefact or text on the iPad in school was much more rare). Writing was particularly useful or salient in two cases: for organizing thoughts and storylines, and for acting as an aid to recording voiceovers, which children sometimes found a daunting task.

Significance
Findings offer insight into the ways children conceive of writing vis-à-vis digital composing practices, and the differences and similarities they see between writing and digital composing. They suggest we as researchers and teachers must think carefully about how we position and assign specific composing tasks in the classroom.

Author

• Jessica Zacher Pandya, California State University - Long Beach