Bridging intersecting literacy practices in a 6th grade iPad classroom

Elin Strømman

doi:10.23865/njlr.v6.2037

Abstract

This article discusses youth’s new literacy practices emerging from their out-of-school experiences (e.g. gaming, blogging, and producing music- and game walkthrough videos), and shows examples of how these practices permeate the classroom walls. Social semiotic multimodal analyses of four students’ planet books and their talks around these will be used to exemplify what happens semiotically in the translation of meanings and designs across modes and across sites. The analyses resulted in the following findings: The students’ knowledge production in school incorporates interest-driven literacy practices. Their use of avatars, emojis and expressive fonts, typically stemming from various affinity spaces (Gee, 2005), serves as resources with which to visually mark their writer-identities, and opens dialogical spaces. The sixth-graders re-create and re-combine multimodal representations mediated by overlapping in- and out-of-school contexts. As such, the students’ texts challenge textbook conventions and the semiotic registers in science. The students also demonstrate digital literacy practices that are embedded across home and school domains. Writing with iPads eases the cross of multimodal representations and digital proficiencies and enables children to bridge intersecting literacy practices.

Highlights

Writing in digital environments intensifies the inclusion of multimodal representations, many of which are drawn from the youth’s spare-time activities
Nina wrote for the school blog, Daniela produced music videos, Jon and Martin identified themselves as gamers, and all took part in various affinity groups related to these activities
Various aspects are foregrounded, and the analysis has shown examples of multimodal representations influenced by the crossing of boundaries.Through interpretation and transfer of content into other contexts and formats, the students can make use of different semiotic resources as ‘tools for thinking’ and learn to be critical of different forms of representation (Jewitt, 2008)

Summary

Introduction

Writing in digital environments intensifies the inclusion of multimodal representations, many of which are drawn from the youth’s spare-time activities. Focusing on multimodal composition with iPads in a Norwegian school, this article seeks to elicit information about students’ multimodal design choices in text composition and queries the relations between in-school and out-of-school designs. The research questions are directed toward the characteristics of the multimodal representations in four students’ planet books and towards the students’ talks around their texts in order to find out how their participations in various learning sites influence their. Kress’ (2010) concept of the motivated sign is relevant. This concept places agency on the sign maker and draws attention to the interests and intentions that motivate the students’ choices of semiotic resources

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion