“Actually, that’s not really how I imagined it”: Children’s divergent dispositions, identities, and practices in digital production

Abstract

This case study explores the range of social and digital literacy practices in which a group of 4th to 6th grade students engaged while collaboratively creating digital book trailers—one‐ to two-minute digital videos designed to entice classmates to read a particular book. The research question framing this work is how do these children’s ways of knowing and being in the world impact their multimodal production processes? Fine‐grained multimodal analysis was combined with retrospective think‐alouds and ethnographic fieldwork to uncover traces of practice that were sedimented in their digital texts. The analysis highlights the importance of developing methodological tools for studying digital composition processes, given that much of the research in this area has focused on analyzing the final products using multimodal content analysis. The findings reveal divergent practices around image selection and representation that suggest contrasting ethea of remixing culture. Implications include considering the visual arts as a potential entry point for supporting students’ critical engagement in the digital world.