Preservice Teachers' Digital Literacy Autobiographies: What Can We Learn From Their Composition?

• In Event: 29.090 - Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: 29.090-4 - Navigating Spatial and Symbolic Borderlands: Mobilization of Language Resources and New Literacies

Abstract

This paper examines two pre-service teachers’ digital literacy autobiographies to understand the ways in which these autobiographies served to organize, reflect, and impact their understandings of literacy in the 21st Century. Findings revealed the pre-service teachers used a range of compositional tools to produce synergetic digital multimedia texts, and the sharing of their digital texts with others was transformational to their understanding literacy as a complex, multimodal communicative practice. The findings have implications for supporting teachers’ and students’ understanding of and composing for multimedia, multimodal texts and in shifting thinking from narrow, reductive literacy beliefs to those more congruent with 21st Century literacy demands.

Authors

• Margot Jessica Filipenko, The University of British Columbia

• Marianne McTavish, The University of British Columbia