Literacies in the Making: Exploring elementary students’ digital-physical meaning-making practices while crafting musical instruments from recycled materials

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study describes the literacies practices of three bi/multilingual fifth-grade students attending a French-language school in an urban community in Canada during a digital-physical Maker activity that included three phases: Plan Making, Instrument Making and Multimodal Making. Framed by theories of new literacies and embodied/sensory literacies, the authors captured students’ first-person gaze with video spy glasses to inform understandings of their meaning-making practices in activity. Evidence suggests that students’ Making was shaped by the ways that they understood themselves in relation to others, to materials, and to the expectations of schooling. Given the embodied meanings situated in the musical instruments that students made and the diverse, dynamic, discursive nature of students’ literacies practices while Making at every phase, teachers are encouraged to adopt non-linear conceptualisations of Maker projects, and pedagogies that are active, responsive, and place value on the embodied meaning-making processes that bi/multilingual youth can use.