Examination of Undergraduate Oral and Written Production at the Intersection of the Online and In-Person

• In Event: Complicating Accounts of Oral and Written Discourses in the Teaching and Learning of Multilingual Youth

Abstract

This paper examines the oral, written, and multimodal composition practices of a group of undergraduates, diverse in ethnicity, immigration status, languages, and majors, who participated in a hybrid (online/in-person) education course geared toward engaged scholarship (Calleson, Jordan, & Seifer, 2005). Framed as social design-based research (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), this course interleaved digital tools, multimodality, translingualism, and other embodied practices (Nordquist, 2017) to position students to engage in collaborative inquiry, which in turn informed their individual and collective compositions for this course. AERA has asked researchers to convey their scholarship via multimodal narratives; the undergraduate students in our study were asked to do more—to routinely take up multiple digital tools and to use varied forms of representation, as well as oral and written language. If old dichotomies such as orality and literacy no longer hold sway, how do we describe the mixture of modes, media, and technologies that constitute literate practice of the everyday? In high stakes, textually conservative environments like a university, what tensions underwrite such practices, and how can learning be organized to exploit them in order to foster expansive (Engeström, 2014) learning opportunities?

This work builds on recent scholarship that reframes what constitutes composition in today’s digitized, remix world, whereby undergraduate text production is characterized by perpetual collaboration (Author, in press) and “rigorous playfulness” (DiZio, 2017, p. 91). Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 2001) helped us uncover both the tensions that attend introducing practices originating in popular culture into the university, as well as how a course can be designed to foster playful, inventive multimodal language use that serves an academic goal.The study draws from 60 hours of classroom video data, 15 hours of interviews, and 400 digital artifacts produced by 15 students. Video and audio were logged on a variety of metadata, interviews transcribed, and digital artifacts analyzed using multimodal analysis (Author, 2005). Codes were developed inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

Our findings show how technologies, media, and modalities were spread across assignments, texts, activities, and online and in-person contexts. In such tool-dense spaces, where learning was saturated with a variety of semiotic systems, archival processes by means of which students curated their own and their classmates’ language, images, responses, likes, and pins (cf. DeKoskink, 2016; Gutiérrez, 2008) became salient compositional resources. These multimodal, translingual, and “transmodal” (Author, 2015) archives then informed the writing of formal academic texts as well as experiences in which undergraduates engaged in pedagogical (embodied) practices with youth at their practicum sites. Rather than distinctions between oral and written language, or between image and alphabetic text, our findings suggest that a textual economy developed whereby the value of a text or modality fluctuated depending on its influence and currency within the course, an individual’s educational history, and the expectations of the institution. This study has implications for how digital multimodal composition can be integrated into classrooms in ways that expand modalities of language use and that facilitate students’ traversal of multiple sites of inquiry and knowledge production (cf. Cole, 1996).

Author

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder