“I didn’t say, ‘Macbeth,’ it was my Google Doc!”: A secondary English case study of redefining learning in the 21st Century

Abstract

The substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition (SAMR) model offers a framework by which schools and teachers can implement digital tools through curricular design that encourages participatory learning. 21st Century students should be producing content and making meaning in educational settings with high levels of engagement and by the same literacy methods they use in social contexts. This case study examines the digital pedagogy of one English teacher at a Western United States high school. Using the SAMR model as a theoretical framework, this article first reviews relevant literature on creating participatory cultures in schools with Google Docs. Then, through observations, interviews, and artifacts, the analysis attempts to pinpoint specific phases of the teacher’s instruction where the potential to enhance academic opportunities is transformed by creativity and collaboration and leads to a redefinition of the learning environment. This article considers both the teacher’s pedagogy in her Macbeth unit as well as the school’s technology procedures in measuring its progress within the SAMR model.

Capitalizing on the Craze of Fortnite: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Understanding How Gamers Construct Communities of Practice

“…Zero tolerance policies disseminated by school administration may be contributing to teachers’ inability to provide rich, authentic learning opportunities with digital platforms because classroom operations tend to lack the multimodal, interactive meaning-making adolescents perform in their daily lives. By failing to consider the co-existence of adolescent learning, media, texts, and technology, schools do a disservice to their students, whose learning experiences benefit from the integration of sociocultural contexts to enhance academic knowledge and skills (Marlatt, 2018; Baker, 2010). While video games such as Fortnite present challenges to educational environments, we also recognize that the classroom integration of gaming principles results in measurable learning and increased engagement (Gee, 2007; Howard-Jones, Jay, Mason, & Jones, 2016).…”

“Literacy to me is about power”: reading book-length fiction and non-fiction texts in a disciplinary literacy teacher education course

“…One reason for implementing a book-length text in a DL course is to consider our content areas as a form of literacy itself (Marlatt, 2019). That is to say, rather than only including texts that an educator might "use" in their science or ELA classroom, the purpose of using a book-length text is to offer another viewpoint of DL through the reading of a text.…”

“…In a previous iteration of this course, Rick assigned Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury as a way to engage disciplinary literacies through a book club (Marlatt, 2019). As he noted in an e-mail to Mary, he chose to use a novel as a way to “[ask] students to explore in literature and everything else ‘the things they do’ in their content areas” (Rick, personal correspondence).…”

Microgenetic analysis of written languaging attributes on form-focused and content-focused e-collaborative writing tasks in Google Docs

“…Thirdly, as the literature review indicated, the innovative instructional potentials of Google Docs have been widely supported by several SLA researchers (Ebadi & Rahimi, 2017 ; Falhasiri, 2021 ; Marlatt, 2019 ; Yamashita, 2021 ; Yang, 2010 ). In previous studies, however, Google Docs has functioned as a forum to facilitate the student-student and/or teacher-student interactions and to create tremendous opportunities to use the target language.…”