This article addresses reflections of one University instructor’s teaching and her pre-teacher education students’ innovative digital learning practices during the Covid-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. The question of How has one instructor embedded digital practices in her virtual teaching to engage and purposefully introduce and connect pre-teacher education students with diverse technologies and multimodalities of learning during a mandatory virtual instruction time? will be addressed and discussed. Student-centered practices such as group work, pair work, the use of Zoom breakout rooms, and multimodal literary responses through technology applications such as Flipgrid and Google Docs will be described and reflected upon. The instructor’s own teaching practices that have included weekly mentoring meetings with her education students and continuing individual coffee meetings in diverse settings will be highlighted as ways of demonstrating care and encouragement toward face-to-face students who have been transitioned as online students. The reflections outlined in this abstract draw upon the notion of technologies as providers of active interactions and will include snapshots of an instructors’ students’ digital artifacts such as Flipgrid, video-recorded monologues, and Google Doc news stories with students reflecting on the uses of multimodal technologies in their own future teaching practices. This manuscript will also include student reflections and a sidebar of suggestions for using Zoom with virtual teaching.
Purpose This study centers on high school pre-teacher education students’ reviews of their peers’ digital stories. The purpose of this study is twofold: to bring digital storytelling to the forefront as a literacy practice within classrooms that seeks to privilege students’ voices and experiences and also to encapsulate the authors’ different experiences and perspectives as teachers. The authors sought to understand how pre-teacher education candidates analyzed, understood and made meaning from their classmates’ digital stories using the seven elements of digital storytelling (Dreon et al., 2011). Design/methodology/approach Using grounded theory (Charmaz, 2008) as a framework, the question of how do high school pre-teacher education program candidates reflectively peer review their classmates’ digital stories is addressed and discussed through university and high school instructors’ narrative reflections. Through peer reviews of their fellow classmates’ digital stories, students were able to use the digital storytelling guide that included the seven elements of digital storytelling planning to critique and offer suggestions. The authors used the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 cohorts’ digital stories, digital storytelling guides and peer reviews to discover emerging categories and themes and then made sense of these through narrative analysis. This study looks at students’ narratives through the contexts of peer reviews. Findings The seven elements of digital storytelling, as noted by Dreon et al. (2011, p. 5), which are point of view, dramatic question, emotional content, the gift of your voice, the power of the soundtrack, economy and pacing, were used as starting points for coding students’ responses in their evaluations of their peers’ digital stories. Situated on the premise of 21st century technologies as important promoters of differentiated ways of teaching and learning that are highly interactive (Greenhow et al., 2009), digital stories and students’ reflective practices of peer reviewing were the foundational aspects of this paper. Research limitations/implications The research the authors have done has been in regards to reviewing and analyzing students’ peer reviews of their classmates’ digital stories, so the authors did not conduct a research study empirical in nature. What the authors have done is to use students’ artifacts (digital story, digital storytelling guides and reflections/peer reviews) to allow students’ authentic voices and perspectives to emerge without their own perspectives marring these. The authors, as teachers, are simply the tools of analysis. Practical implications In reading this paper, teachers of different grade levels will be able to obtain ideas on using digital storytelling in their classrooms first. Second, teachers will be able to obtain hands-on tools for implementing digital storytelling. For example, the digital storytelling guide to which the authors refer (Figure 1) can be used in different subject areas to help students plan their stories. Teachers will also be able to glean knowledge on using students’ peer reviews as a kind of authentic assessment. Social implications The authors hope in writing and presenting this paper is that teachers and instructors at different levels, K-12 through higher education, will consider digital storytelling as a pedagogical and learning practice to spark deeper conversations within the classroom that flow beyond margins and borders of instructional settings out into the community and beyond. The authors hope that others will use opportunities for storytelling, digital, verbal, traditional writing and other ways to spark conversations and privilege students’ voices and lives. Originality/value As the authors speak of the original notion of using students’ crucial events as story starters, this is different than prior research for digital storytelling that has focused on lesson units or subject area content. Also, because the authors have used crucial events, this is an entry point to students’ lives and the creation of rapport within the classroom.
This article discusses findings from a qualitative research study which focused on how women from diverse backgrounds used storying as a space to make sense of life experiences that had highly impacted their lives. This article explores how women’s stories mediate their experiences of being temporarily silenced, how they resisted others’ silencing over their own viewpoints, and how their storying mediates different ways of “talking back” through story-writing in letters and journals and story-living through an intentional practice of wearing an artifact of trauma. Multiple interviews were used as the primary data sources, and through these the participants’ stories emerged. Intersections of gender, race, religion, and socioeconomic status in the participants’ stories were analyzed, and the categories of silencing, resistance/talking back, and resilience developed. Findings included the participants’ abilities to navigate issues related to others’ forced perspectives on their bodies as a social and political space (Pitts, 2003; Woods, 2012).
In the latter half of the 20th century, scholars began to contest traditional conceptions of literacy. According to these challenges, meaning is an interactive process achieved by a reader who applies their own knowledge and background experiences. Over the same period, new media technologies have emerged, leading scholars to expand their conceptions of literacy to consider how citizens make meaning in these new contexts. Literacy practices—reading, writing, and creating—are now understood as multiple and diverse practices that individuals enact beyond educational settings into other spaces of home and community. Literacy is sociocultural and diverse, involving individuals’ use of values, relationships, and things from their lives, discourses, or culturally imbedded practices. Literacy also involves multiliteracies or the use of different kinds of literacies for different purposes in various life circumstances. Literacy then is not isolated to a mere skill but involves a dynamic process that moves across various communities, discourses, and cultures, and it includes more than just language. Three genres of literacy included in this article are Media Literacy, narrative literacy, and Gaming Literacy. Media literacy is the ability to access, interpret, and produce public communication in various forms. Media literacy can be broadly understood as an approach to education that teaches students to analyze, evaluate, and create media messages using a variety of media platforms and tools. A direct offshoot of media literacy is Critical Media Literacy. Critical media literacy looks more closely at the power dimensions behind media messages and tends to emphasize structural features of media, such as considering the corporate interests supporting news organizations that construct most political news, advertising, and other forms of entertainment. Next is narrative literacy, which involves the storying of experiences, through different modes of expression or literacy practices. Narrative literacies as diverse behaviors and practices involve individuals understanding, speaking, and/or writing their world. In storying lives, sometimes individuals’ bodies (embodiment) are used in different ways to narrate. Embodiment can involve using tattoos or remembered bodily practices. Artifactual Literacies, also as practices that involve individuals’ narration of their lives, involve the use of artifacts or objects to mediate experiences. Last, gaming literacy involves the use of gamification and game-based learning as a new form of literacy and is situated in the context of game design. Game-based learning, including video games, uses games to meet learning outcomes and provides opportunities for self-directed learning where emotion and imagination situate literacy within a multimodal context. In this article, we consider how individuals make meaning through their interactions with media, gaming, and artifacts. As genres, each of the literacies we present contain particular descriptions and characteristics and are utilized by individuals for different purposes and practices.
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