Abstract
Calls for research documenting outcomes of new literacy practices in school (e.g., Moje, 2009) focus on the need for understanding adolescents’ experiences, what they learn about content, about literacy practices, and about their identities and positions in the world. This metasynthesis of findings from 27 qualitative studies of digital video (DV) composing in secondary schools involved 97 teachers and 135 students as focal participants in ethnographic, case, and grounded theory studies. The focus was on the body of research completed in a mature DV composing project based in sociocultural learning theories, including New Literacies and social semiotics. Following teachers out of professional development on using DV composing as a curricular learning tool into their classrooms and then analyzing across the studies provided trends in contexts for student learning. Following the analytic processes of extracting, categorizing, and translating outlined by Sandelowski and Barroso (2007), six themes were revealed, the components of DV composing pedagogy that led to student engagement in embodied learning: (a) Teacher change toward a New Literacies stance led to development of (b) classroom social spaces for mediating multimodal composing in which participants (c) co-constructed authentic communicative purpose for representing meaning, in part by (d) opening meaning-making to student lifeworlds and cultural resources, and (e) explicitly attending to multimodal design for representing meaning, leading to students’ (f) transmediating or translating in symbolic modes. These components working synergistically in classrooms provide an evidence base for a pedagogical framework for students’ embodied learning through multimodal composing.
Keywords
New literacies activities occur among adolescents outside of school, and many scholars have called for importing these high-status youth endeavors into schools. Yet little research has investigated the use of new literacies in classrooms as student learning tools. To better understand these influences, Moje (2009) calls for research documenting outcomes of new literacy practices in school, particularly how youth feel, if they are more engaged in classrooms, and what youth learn about content, about literacy practices, and about their identities and positions in the world.
The aim of the present study is to systematically examine findings of ethnographic case studies and grounded theory analyses of teachers and students using digital video (DV) composing in classrooms. In this article, I report on the findings of this metasynthesis to integrate findings of studies for the purpose of developing a robust pedagogical framework for evidence-based practice in teaching and learning from multimodal composing that accounts for teacher and student engagement, mediated activity, and embodied learning.
Multimodal Literacy Theory and Research
Theoretical Lenses
This study is situated in the interdisciplinary theories of New Literacies Studies (NLS; e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Gee, 2004) that integrates sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1971, 1978; also Kozulin, 1998; Wertsch, 1998), the social semiotic theory of multimodality (e.g., Kress, 2010), and ultimately explained by theories of embodied cognition (e.g., Johnson, 1987, 2007; Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Although they are separated here for analytical convenience, these theories clearly overlap and transact as explanations for multimodal composing and literacy.
Multimodal tools
In his sociocultural theory, Vygotsky (1971, 1978) argued that besides language, human cultural tools for shaping and representing cognition would include multimodal texts such as drawings, maps, and works of art. These cultural tools or mediational means are interiorized through social use in activities. The creation of social problem-solving spaces where social mediation permits problems to be solved/activities to be completed collaboratively is an essential component of sociocultural theory, providing individuals with opportunities to contribute and receive mediation from the participating group to complete the task that he or she could not complete alone. In these social spaces, mediational means (e.g., language, images, strategies, tools) are provided at the point of need, that is, at the moment needed by participants to complete the activity. Sociocultural theory posits cultural tools as mediation or support for action in the form of physical and mental tools (or signs). From this perspective, multimodal texts designed by students serve as complex tools for thinking and for representing meaning.
Social semiotics provides a clarifying theory of design of multimodal communication and representation: Kress (2010) argues against only one authoritative representation of the world in language, calling such a view “the monomodally conceived world” (p. 27). The affordances of different modes—that is, visual, audio, spatial, and gestural modes of representation most often along with writing and speaking (Kress, 2010; New London Group, 1996)—permit more tools for representing meaning. In a recent review of the “digital turn” in literacy studies, Mills (2010) concluded that theorists and researchers now acknowledge the “multimodal nature of meaning-making” (p. 251) in literacies enhanced by new technologies. These multimodal literacies entail the orchestration of multiple modes, that is, the design of meaning across modes for personal purposes (Kress, 2010; New London Group, 1996).
The recently named New Literacies Studies (NLS) integrates theory and research from sociocultural and social semiotics work, along with scholarship on language and literacy (e.g., New London Group, 1996). In brief, NLS conceives of texts, literacies, and social practices as varying across contexts—with uses of texts created by participants for multiple local purposes. This notion was taken up by Street (1995) in his account of varied international literacy practices, and by scholars who sought a way to explain the novel forms of encoding meaning generated through social practices enacted in media-cultural studies (Buckingham, 1993) and by users of the Internet (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006), video games (e.g., Gee, 2003), and social networks (e.g., Ito et al., 2009; Jenkins, 2006). The addition of digital tools—for example, in computers, cameras, software—makes representation of multiple modes more accessible for communication.
Finally, this metasynthesis is grounded in a theory of mind based in neuroscience, second-generation cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and social psychology—a paradigm called embodied cognition, “a view of cognition as embodied action” (Varela et al., 1991, p. xx). In this view, “Embodied action is the root of cognition as a whole” (Stewart et al., 2010, p. viii). In contrast to the first-generation cognitive science computational model of mind based on language only, second-generation cognitive science supports embodied cognition and construes learning as emerging from the body and mind engaged in generative activities of sensing and acting. Furthermore, integration of new cognitive frames in the mind may be guided by language, but language is not the only conceptual tool used: “People manipulate many more frames than they have words and constructions for” (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998, p. 134). As Johnson (1987, 2007) explains it, we conceptually integrate embodied experience as meaningful multimodal structures (image-schema) for organizing our experience and comprehension, which transform through patterns in new embodied experience. We incorporate knowledge into our existing conceptual frames in a process of complex cognition grounded in “bodily experience and feeling” (Johnson, 2007, p. 41). Conceptual learning, then, emerges from the body engaged in generative, mediated activity that creates neural connections in the brain (Stewart et al., 2010). In short, the human mind “emerges at the productive interface of brain, body, and social and material world” (Clark, 2011, p. 219). Learning is a biological—embodied—phenomenon.
Taken together, these theories integrate 21st-century understandings of cognition, texts, literacies, and multiple modes of representation. Multimodal text creation in diverse sociocultural contexts draws on and develops embodied experience, thus developing embodied cognition through multimodal tools. In the digital world, youth have first-hand experiences with these ways of understanding in newly available texts, literacies, and representational modes.
Youth Culture and New Media
New literacies activity among adolescents occurs outside of school through their participation in new media (e.g., Alvermann, 2002, 2010; Gee, 2003; Hull & Schultz, 2002; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). From “forms of audience engagement” with music, TV shows, films, books, video games, websites, and other aspects of youth culture, new social and cultural practices are emerging, inclining teens toward creating and sharing their representations and texts as part of a “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006). In a large-scale study of teens, Ito et al. (2009) used the term networked publics to emphasize media use as “the production and circulation of culture and knowledge” (Ito et al., 2009, p. xv): That is, students no longer just consume media as audience members, but participate actively to compose it, in and through social networks.
Cope and Kalantzis (2000) point to what they call “coengagement in designing” across print and nonprint modes of representation, arguing that it is more prevalent and now essential to the new economy, to students’ social and cognitive development, and to their democratic empowerment (p. 22). Adolescents’ online social practices on Web 2.0 now include DV composing (Lenhart, Madden, Smith, & Macgill, 2007; Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). Creating and sharing videos online has increased dramatically: In December 2007, a record-breaking 10 billion videos were viewed online in the United States (Lipsman, 2008). Educational forecasters refer to DV as an emerging technology that will “significantly impact the choices of learning-focused organizations” (Horizon Report, 2008, p. 3).
Research on Digital Video Composing
In secondary schools, recent research on students’ multimodal composing as a learning tool suggests positive influences on adolescent readers and writers (e.g., Bailey, 2009; Miller, 2010b; Mills, 2010; Moran, Ferdig, Pearson, Wardrop, & Blomeyer, 2008). Studies of bringing print and other textual modes together in school activities document successes when teachers work to support students and recognize their identities in these social media/literacy practices (Alvermann, 2010; Kist, 2005; Pahl & Rowsell, 2005; Snyder & Beavis, 2004). DV composing as a classroom activity is in many ways congruent with what we know about writing as a tool for learning and communicating (Beach, Campano, Edmiston, & Borgmann, 2010; Bruce, 2009)—with similarly complex processes of composing, including planning, focusing, organizing, elaborating, and revising for coherence. These findings are congruent with NLS theories—digital technologies generate new ways of encoding meaning, that is, new forms of literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006).
Research focused on teachers introducing multimodal composing as a student learning tool illustrates that teachers need first-hand experiences composing multimodally to reframe notions of literacy and knowing and develop strategies useful in the classroom for mediating students’ DV design (Blondell, 2009; Cercone, 2010; Miller, 2007, 2008; also Bailey, 2009; McVee, Bailey, & Shanahan, 2008; Shanahan, 2006). Teachers who sustained their use of DV composing as a student learning tool appeared over time to integrate it into their curriculum (Blondell, 2009; Cercone, 2010, Kim, 2011; Knips, 2009; Lauricella, 2006; Miller, Hughes, & Knips,2013), though some struggled with contextual and professional impediments (e.g., Borowicz, 2005; Costello, 2006; Knips, 2012; Miller & Borowicz, 2007).
Recent studies have focused on student learning of content concepts. Students’ accounts of their engagement in challenging DV composing assignments show, for example, that in English classrooms where teachers mediated student DV composing, students developed understandings of specific literary texts and of literary strategies as tools for reflection on meaning (e.g., Blondell, 2009; Cercone, 2010; Goss, 2012; Miller, 2010b, 2011). Specifically, DV composing on literature prompted multimodal reflection on print meaning, which generated in students a new appreciation for the rewards of sustained attention to and an active stance toward print texts.
The present study, a metasynthesis of the extant research on DV composing as a pedagogical intervention in a mature school-based project, translates the findings from studies in diverse urban and first-ring suburban schools completed over the past 7 years. One recurring theme that provoked the need for the metasynthesis is this: While some teachers reframed their practice and students’ learning, others struggled with new roles and constraining school contexts—yet even in those classes students generally engaged with effort in DV composing about the curriculum and found it meaningful. Given the low percentage nationally of graduating seniors who say what they learned in school was meaningful and/or useful in their future lives—only 28%—(Bachman, Johnston, & O’Malley, 2008), this effortful engagement warrants further inquiry.
Under-represented minority students in poor urban and working-class schools often are least likely to be engaged in traditional classrooms (Anyon, 1981; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Finn, 2009), with almost 50% dropping out nationally among students who are African American or Latino/a (Orfield, 2004). Scholars recommend that student voices on school improvement be added as a data source in research to complete the picture of lived experience in schools and, thereby, provide ideas about better opportunities for learning (Atweh, Bland, Carrington, & Cavanagh, 2008). Research on student engagement concludes that education needs “richer characterizations of how students behave, feel, and think” to assist the development of appropriate pedagogical interventions (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004), particularly “among minority children and older youth” (p. 82).
The goal of this metasynthesis is to integrate findings inclusive of the whole body of project research, including students’ lived experience in classrooms, to create an evidence-based pedagogical framework for multimodal composing as a learning tool in secondary classrooms.
Method
Metasynthesis Research Design
This article is based on a qualitative metasynthesis of findings from ethnographic case studies and grounded theory studies of teacher and student responses and change in a large DV composing project. Metasynthesis appeared as a research method in the health sciences as a means of increasing the usefulness of qualitative studies on a topic by synthesizing findings to develop a framework for evidence-based practice (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2007). Metasynthesis studies have appeared in education on the topics of co-teaching in special education (Scruggs, Mastropiere, & McDuffie, 2007), high-stakes testing influence on curriculum (Au, 2007), and information literacy among teachers (Duke & Ward, 2009). The value of metasynthesis is in providing a comparative integration of qualitative studies to develop better understanding of the topic and to enable more general statements (meta-statements) that hold across studies. The phenomenon of interest in this metasynthesis is DV composing used as a tool for student learning of content in secondary-school classrooms.
The metasynthesis was conducted to focus on what worked when teachers tried to integrate student DV composing as a way of learning curricular texts and concepts, how it worked, and why it worked. Although interest in promoting DV composing for use in schools has grown, much of the work occurs outside of schools (e.g., Goodman, 2003; Hull, 2003; Hull & Nelson, 2005; Hull & Schultz, 2002), in media production courses (e.g., Williams, 2006), or in practice-oriented advice about using new media in classrooms (e.g., Kadjer, 2010; Robbins, 2010). The focus of this metasynthesis is on the studies completed in a large DV composing project, to examine and integrate what happened in content-area classrooms when teachers who had received intensive professional development (PD) initiated student DV composing as a learning tool in urban and first-ring suburban schools.
Data Analysis
Metasynthesis requires these steps for integrating findings: selection of studies, extracting findings, and abstracting findings—each explained in the following.
Selection of studies
In selecting studies, Sandelowski and Barroso (2007) suggest taking precautions about publication bias that can result when including only published articles that may tend toward more positive findings and consistency with present paradigms. All included DV composing studies were reviewed for quality indicators—systematic and appropriate collection and representation of data and considerations such as trustworthiness, evident in seeking disconfirming evidence, detailed descriptions, and triangulating data perspectives and/or types. All included studies had also been found to be acceptable by some type of peer review in the form of editorial boards, conference refereeing, or dissertation committees. The 27 studies in this metasynthesis consisted of ethnographies, case studies, grounded theory studies, and one cross-case synthesis analyzing research findings across early project research.
Why studies from one project?
In a metasynthesis, selection of studies to be included is the first step in the data analysis. There are several benefits to conducting this metasynthesis on studies in which all of the teachers completed the same professional development. The teachers all had experiences with composing multimodally themselves, as recommended by Lankshear and Knobel (2006) in their concept of “teachers first.” All teachers learned to make DVs in familiar media genres, such as poetry videos (akin to music videos), movie trailers, and investigative reports (E! True Hollywood), the same ones recommended for their students and tested through use by previous teachers in these schools. The institute instructors were experienced urban teachers using DV composing in their own classrooms; they supported teachers’ development and revision of assignments and evaluation rubrics to use with their students. Sessions were held as DV workshops with instructors introducing tasks, mediating small groups during composing, and screening DV products, thus serving as a model for new collaborative teacher and student roles in their Grade 6 to 12 classrooms. These instructors were, in short, providing new images of teaching for participants, an important element of teacher learning (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). Research shows that teachers without such PD opportunities have more difficulty integrating multimodal composing in their classrooms (e.g., Shanahan, 2006). Since the focus in the metasynthesis was on “what works” in classrooms to develop a practice-based pedagogical framework for multimodal composing, the documented presence in these studies of teachers’ own multimodal composing experiences added to the potential for relevant findings.
In addition, very few other systematic studies specifically focusing on DV composing as a tool for learning subject matter in schools have been conducted. Those that do exist focus more on student engagement, identity, and media learning rather than on the subject-area content-learning that is the focus of this metasynthesis. Studies conducted in the United Kingdom, for example, often are situated in required media studies classes. Teacher researchers studying their own classrooms (e.g., Robbins, 2010) focus on the practical steps for engaging students with new technology tools. In all, the concentration in this metasynthesis on 27 studies related to the same PD project provides a coherent research focus on what secondary teachers with PD experience with multimodal composing do pedagogically to adapt student DV composing for content learning in their school contexts.
Sites and participants
Participating secondary teachers had all completed the PD described previously on using DV composing as a student learning tool. They were invited to participate in the PD through the school districts’ Instructional Technology departments. Since 2001, over 250 teachers have attended the summer or Saturday sessions (28 hours total), receiving a modest stipend. The funded 1 project provided each school building with an LCD projector and each teacher with one computer and one DV camera. Evaluations of the PD institute conducted by external evaluators concluded that this was “high-quality” professional development: Surveys showed that 98% of the teachers rated it as very good or excellent (RED, 2009). Continued support for teacher participants occurred through the university team collaborators visiting teachers in classrooms during DV composing activities. In all, the project brought together struggling schools where students frequently dropped out and teachers who were willing to try the new literacies tool of DV composing to engage their students in content learning.
The studies in this metasynthesis involved as focal participants 97 teachers and 135 students. The teachers were diverse in experience (2-26 years), subject area (English, science,
Classrooms were located in two school districts in the Northeast. The large urban school system had 70 schools, with students mostly from low-income homes with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. 2 The graduation rate among all students in 2009 was 53%. Three of the teachers in these studies came from a diverse working-class school in the first-ring suburb. 3 The graduation rate among all students in 2009 was 87% (but only 65% among the “economically disadvantaged”). Varying administrative pressures to teach to the state graduation tests existed in all buildings in both districts. In addition, the urban district instituted scripted English instruction for those reading below grade level up through the 10th grade and required teachers to use “direct instruction” throughout the district.
Extracting findings
Following the metasynthesis processes outlined by Sandelowski and Barroso (2007), after selection of studies I extracted findings and created a data display to present studies. I categorized them by type (design and purpose) and participants (number and role). See Table 1 for details.
Research Examined for Metasynthesis: Study Characteristics.
Note. Obs = observation; int. = interviews; art = artifacts (e.g., lesson plans, assignment sheets, student storyboards and DVs); DV fest = DV regional festival and screening; T writing (e.g., journals, emails, academic papers)
Initial analysis showed (as described earlier) that teachers participated in the same PD and taught in the same two school districts in the region. These studies have several other components in common: (a) a sociocultural theoretical frame, including NLS, which served as a common basis for defining phenomena and interpreting findings; (b) a common interest in tracing teacher and/or student response and change as DV composing was introduced as a classroom activity; (c) all ethnographic case studies included long-term participant observation, teacher and student interviews, and collection of artifacts—analyzed through analytic induction and triangulation; and (d) all grounded theory studies were situated across project classrooms, with specific foci for examining teachers and/or students. Variations in the studies included these elements: (a) different grade levels (Grades 6-12); (b) different content areas—English, social studies, science, and ESL; (c) thereby, research questions about student learning varied somewhat; (d) different middle- and high-school buildings within the districts with variations in leadership and norms; and (e) differential levels of focus on teacher and/or students and their work and learning. These variations in conditions and groups functioned as multiple data types, perspectives, and contexts—thereby contributing to the trustworthiness of the metasynthesis study outcomes.
Abstracting findings
After identifying the studies, I followed the procedures for metasynthesis by abstracting the findings for each one by capturing the content in concise statements (see Table 2).
Findings Extracted From Articles in the Metasynthesis.
Next, I read and reread, seeking recurring themes that emerged across the studies to create a taxonomy of categories for translating the studies into each other. This became a form of triangulation, then, to increase the validity of the categories. This stage required constant comparison as I moved back and forth from the inductive categories to synthesize the findings in emerging themes. In some cases the categories changed as they were subsumed by themes. For example, interpretive assignments and teacher attention to student thinking became part of teacher mediation. In some cases during the analysis concepts imported from new literacies and multimodal literacies research and theory were appropriated as descriptive categories or adapted to explain the data. This dialectic between imported concepts, such as “affinity group” (Gee, 2004), and the findings from data in the studies created further translation and synthesis, as suggested by metasynthesis processes (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2007).
The result of the analysis is an integrated framework for teacher pedagogy and adolescent engagement in multimodal composing for learning across the curriculum. In the following sections, I present each of the six themes that emerged from this metasynthesis. Following Sandelowski and Barroso (2007), I present descriptions of the data presented in the studies to elaborate this model of pedagogy and learning in some detail. Finally, I make the argument that student DV composing, when integrated into learning-centered classroom contexts, can provide a means of engaging students in making sense of curriculum with effortful attention. The over-arching focus for this pedagogical framework is teaching multimodal composing in ways that led to student understanding and embodied learning.
A Pedagogical Framework for Multimodal Composing in School
The process of metasynthesis revealed six interdependent themes, which frame the components of a multimodal composing pedagogy that led to embodied student learning: (a) teacher change toward a New Literacies stance through experience with and reflection on multimodal learning. This change led teachers to develop (b) classroom social spaces for mediating multimodal composing. In those spaces teachers and students (c) co-constructed authentic communicative purpose for representing meaning, in part by (d) opening meaning-making to student lifeworlds and cultural resources. In classes which also focused (e) explicit attention to multimodal design decisions for representing meaning, students engaged in (f) active transmediating in embodied symbolic modes. These components worked synergistically in classrooms to provide an evidence-based grounding for a pedagogical framework for multimodal practice that led to students’ embodied learning. (Relationships among the themes are taken up in the Discussion section.) In what follows, I present each theme in turn and provide representative data from the studies to support each one, providing incidents and events from specific teachers’ classrooms to represent the theme in a contextualized manner. The first component—teachers moving to a New Literacies stance—emerged as essential for the other five components to be effectively initiated, so I present a detailed account of evidence for this stance developing (or not).
From Teachers’ Changing Attitudes a New Literacies Stance Emerged
In one third of the studies, the complex dynamics in place in the schools worked against teachers using DV composing as a learning tool in the school contexts with required direct instruction pedagogies, felt time constraints, state testing preparation, and traditional beliefs about what counted as literacy—all served as impediments to integrating DV composing. In all contexts it was teachers’ changing attitudes toward literacy and learning that led change.
Teachers learned to view DV composing as literacy and learning
Teachers from the DV composing PD who successfully changed the goals and activities of their classrooms appeared over time to move toward a “New Literacies stance” (Goss, 2008; term coined by Bailey, 2006), that is, toward new attitudes about multimodal texts and students’ collaborative composing of their content understanding. In this cross-case analysis of 10 science, English, and social studies secondary teachers, Goss examined teacher change in the classroom after PD and categorized it: One teacher maintained a traditional stance, 4 were in transition, and 5 developed a “New Literacies stance” toward texts and knowing.
This stance accommodated print literacy beliefs and values, while viewing literacy as dynamic and able to change with new social realities, such as the “digital turn” in literacies (Mills, 2010). This change of conventional attitudes toward and beliefs about multimodal literacies, student social learning, and what counts as knowing content led to teacher success in DV composing in classrooms, as evident in positive and negative cases in the research. In these studies teachers’ paths of change from belief in a single mode—traditional print-only literacy—to a New Literacies stance carried with it a growing respect for student knowledge and multimodal ways of knowing and representing learning in school.
The trajectory for teacher reframing of practice toward a New Literacies stance in eight of the studies grew from collaborations for joint planning and inquiry in teachers’ classrooms, in teacher work groups, in teaching/learning at the university, and in regular reunions and professional presentations of project teachers. In one case, a student with advanced multimodal composing skills collaborated with the teacher to help him succeed in the DV composing project so the class could continue making videos.
Such social support helped teachers move toward using multimodal literacies with their students and developing new beliefs about multimodal composing as appropriate in school. In her grounded theory on teacher attitudes, Blondell (2007) found that teachers felt new identities as innovators when their students engaged in DV composing, even as some still wondered about student composing as a literacy and learning tool. This finding was taken back to project PD and subsequent reunions and roundtables: In discussions after that teachers were prompted for accounts of students’ content learning (not just their engagement).
In a multiyear ethnography, Blondell (2009) traced the development of a new stance in Ms. Gorsky as she worked with her 11th-grade English class. Her case stands as an exemplar of other teachers in the studies who made similar journeys. Diane Gorsky struggled at first with how to fit multimodal composing into her test-prep lessons. Her willingness to reconsider her classroom practice to “reach” her disengaged students sustained her change. She was dissatisfied with how literature had been reduced to test-prep material, but was heartened by her students’ engagement with DV composing. She persisted, conversing with other teachers who were doing DV composing with students in their classrooms and presenting her own work with students in project teacher gatherings and the project conference. When her initial DV project on the state exam essay rubric did not go as well as planned, she learned from watching her students composing and asking how they felt. In response, she created a new project: Her DV found poem assignment on a novel prompted students’ intense engagement and learning. Her resolve came from her attitude toward her students as able learners who needed support to compose with DV and to return to the literary text. As students engaged in composing with effort, their learning energized her change toward acceptance of their multimodal texts as evidence of their learning. Although Blondell (2009) does not use this term, it is clear in her descriptive data that Ms. Gorski developed a New Literacies stance. She specifically attributed her ability to make classroom changes to the discussions she participated in during PD and to presentations by specific teachers who had inspired her. Blondell summarizes: “She was beginning to see herself as part of a collective group of teachers, rather than just a solitary teacher struggling to negotiate the mandates of [administrators].”
Teachers struggled with DV composing as literacy
When teachers did not participate in meetings of project teacher groups, often only superficial change occurred. For example, a representative negative case occurred in the classroom of Ms. Peters (Knips, 2008b), who taught in the same building, grade level, and subject (English) as Mrs. Gorski, but she adapted DV composing in a very different way. In her poetry video project, she took control over interpretations by writing a list of prescriptive themes for videos on the chalkboard. She objected when students drew on popular media connections in their DVs, because she felt they were not staying with “the content.” She refused to allow her student Jose to use video he had shot at home on his cell phone, because he did not do it during class.
Students felt her stance as being unsupportive when she lost their video footage several times. Her student Jose, who refused to participate after his cell phone footage was disqualified, concluded, “She doesn’t want us to make a sweet video.” 4 Ms. Peters’ solution to making DV composing go more smoothly—offer fewer “choices” and “more structure” for her students who “did not do well” in school—seemed to come from her own privileging of print, deficit views of students, and departmental pressures to do test preparation. When Ms. Peters stopped giving time for the project in class, her students (all but the group with cell phone footage) showed persistence in completing their videos on their own time in the library. Her student Omar gave his oral interpretation of “Aftermath” by Wordsworth in an interview, narrating his connecting it to 9/11 and his understanding of extended poetic metaphor, but Ms. Peters was not pleased with the process. Although she initiated the DV composing poetry project, her stance toward texts, students, and what counts as knowing—along with the school testing pressure—seemed to undermine her potential to reframe her teaching with a New Literacies stance.
The studies also showed differences in teachers’ abilities to sustain their innovations with DV composing in their school contexts. One of the most promising eighth-grade teachers was assigned the following year to all scripted English classes, which permitted no deviation from the printed teacher script. In her 1st year after the professional development, Mary Winsome (Knips, 2012) provided DV composing experiences for her 11th-grade English students, but technology difficulties the district would not solve, the struggling students forced into her “Advanced Placement” class by the district, and pressure from administrators to teach to the state graduation test led her to discontinue the activity in the year of the study.
In contrast, long-term ethnographic studies showed that about 25% of the teachers maintained their changed stance toward multimodal composing (other shorter-term studies did not examine this issue). The classroom work of Ms. Kwon documented by Kim (2011) serves as an exemplar of persistence of the New Literacies stance as demonstrated by the “transformative new teaching” in her ESL class that included DV composing. Ms. Kwon—who over 6 years participated in several opportunities for presenting to teachers, including the regional DV conference—used DV to engage students in effortful attention to their language learning and reading their immigrant situation. She personally invited parents to the regional DV festival so they could “see” on the big movie-house screen what their children were doing in school, even if they did not speak English. Her persistence 5 in using DV composing as a multimodal literacy in her “large closet”–sized classroom with one computer and one DV camera appeared to be sustained by strong belief in DV composing as a literacy learning tool, developed over time through reflection on her students’ learning—what she called “a beautiful thing.”
In all, teacher reflection on student learning, particularly in solidarity and dialogue with other teachers, with students, and sometimes with collaborative dialogue with the research team, developed their New Literacies stance and created resilience in teachers as they solved problems and refined their approaches to sustain their innovation in schools—where not everyone was supportive of their work. Those teachers who learned in reflective conversation with others began to see such social mediation as important for introducing DV composing into their classrooms; they worked to create a social space for mediation of student learning.
Teachers Created Classroom Social Spaces for Mediating Multimodal Composing
As teachers tried to take on a New Literacies stance, they initiated a social learning space for DV composing. After an initial collaborative movie-making experience with the whole class (as suggested in the professional development), the typical organization of DV workshops was in production teams, which enabled students to act with others “in such a way that their partial knowledge and skills become part of a bigger and smarter network of people, information, and mediating devices” (Gee, 2004, p. 86)—what Gee calls an affinity space that binds people and resources together for a shared endeavor. Students interacted with the teacher and each other around the content: They turned to and taught each other, drawing on knowledge distributed among the team and from outside sources on the Internet. The new ways teachers organized these classrooms to set tasks and support joint endeavors invited students to talk for new purposes and to use what they knew to create understanding.
This distributed social support for a “shared endeavor” is the face of learning in these classrooms that helps explain students’ effortful engagement in DV composing. As compared with the affinity spaces operating spontaneously outside of school, the classroom affinity spaces described in the studies included teacher support and curricular concepts and/or texts. Successful teachers designed the context for DV production by shifting traditional teacher and student positions to create a shared social space in the classroom. In this shared workspace, the teacher shifted to the position of adult co-creator with the students. The teacher literally relocated from the desk or podium at the front of the room, moving from student group to group.
In Ms. Gorski’s presentation at the regional conference (Blondell, 2009), she explained to other teachers how her position in the classroom changed in DV composing. She referred to the documentary about the DV project screened in the plenary session, directing attention to one “image”: “ Keith [Hughes] is kind of bent down and he’s not this person that is standing there in front of you, he is bent down with the student, is kind of coaching him through it really—‘What do you see? Where do you want to take this?’ And that’s really what kind of actually happens.”
Her reference here speaks to the influence of this new image of teaching/learning for her, a portrait of “coaching” students’ meaning-making as possible and productive in his and her classrooms. Other teachers in these workshop classrooms described themselves as “facilitators” or “a third arm” in their students’ learning events.
The amount of support teachers provided depended on class needs. In an ESL class where immigrant students were learning English, Kim (2011) described what she called their “‘we’ space” with 12 desks in a semi-circle as the teacher Ms. Kwon prompted students for ideas for their class DV. She wrote ideas on the board during brainstorming, followed by collaborative storyboarding, deciding roles, and listing needed props. Only then were they ready: “The whole class, now standing, moves the desk chairs to make space for filming. Everyone has a role to participate; the teacher is the director with the cue sign . . . They move in the classroom. The learning noise with excited laughter is heard.” Ms. Kwon’s active mediation enabled participation in DV composing in English by students in the country for less than a year.
Most teachers mediated student learning by providing strategies at the point when students needed them to help clarify and refine their thinking and their group composing processes. One senior in Cercone’s (2007) case study described how his teacher mediated student collaboration from conflict: “[He] came as a referee and just stood there and helped us and I learned how to make one out of two from him because he always say, “Okay, how can we make this work together?” At different parts of the composing process students needed many kinds of teacher support, whether it was for brainstorming ideas, playing an adult role in the video, giving feedback on a draft DV, or suggesting an editing fix. In another study, what Cercone (2010) called Mr. Garvey’s “daily rounds” allowed him to address whatever students needed at the time. Mr. Garvey used his struggling student’s video to help mediate her writing, as he explained, She had a hard time articulating what she wanted to say. So we had to sit down after the fact, after she got all her video, and we spent a lot of time talking about how she could use titles, all the strength in her message, how she could more accurately say what she was trying to say.
This mediation at the point of Mercy’s need was the kind of support with mixing print and other modes that many of the studies documented, but in this case Mercy’s visual strengths led her to her voice-over written one. Calling on the similarities and integrations with written composing, Cercone named this social space a “Digital Video Workshop.”
The social context of the class and the mediational work of the teacher facilitated student-to-student mediation that studies showed occurred throughout the composing process in every class. Even when students did individual poetry videos (Blondell, 2009), an 11th grader said her classmates “helped me with my ideas and how to get [the poem] together.” This classroom affinity space formed during their joint projects and carried over (as it does out of school) as a social space binding them together by shared endeavor and resources. As students wrote their poems, collected their footage, and edited their films, they turned to others and others’ work to look for alternatives and solutions—as part of the give and take in active collaborative workspaces.
Much of the collaborative talk in the studies occurred as students planned, made decisions, and solved problems during DV composing. One 10th-grade group (Miller, Cercone, Goss, & Blondell, 2013) negotiated their political advertisement video for emperor, based on characters in Julius Caesar: We decided on a person that we thought would be a good leader for Rome base[d] on what he could do, like physical[ly]. Was he strong? Was he intelligent? And then once we figured that out, we had to write a script on what we were gonna’ say about him, why should people vote for him.
This question-posing about characters is what good readers do as they engage with text in a reflexive way. Prompted by the engaging task, they collaborated to generate different perspectives that spurred their analytic process: “We kinda’ compared everybody, their strengths, their weaknesses, and from that, we concluded that the best thing we would want in a leader is honesty and intelligence.” This joint endeavor allowed them to reach a better understanding of the text characters and to conclude that they would back Brutus in their video. Analyzing topics and solving problems posed of the text are clear examples of collaborative inquiry for DV composing that also mediated their reflexive reading and interpreting of print. Collaborative written composing was also promoted in DV composing in almost every study. For example, as compared with individual writing, socially mediated writing of the voice-over script was favored by a student who explained, “It’s way better because everybody has something to put into it” (Cercone, 2007).
Filming and editing were opportunities for joint reflection in groups, as well. Nevin (Cercone, 2009), for instance, described his team’s filming process: “We basically just worked together, like before we did the scenes, like we thought about it, thought about exactly what we were gonna’ do.” In this example their thinking required attention to multimodal communication with acting, movement, gesture, and camera position under consideration to represent meaning.
The import of the social effort involved was salient in many students’ accounts in the studies. The stimulation and pleasure of working together prompted effortful attention. A common scene of diverse students, heads together, intently focused around a camera play-back or computer editing screen, showed the attraction for students (Miller & Borowicz, 2005). One student helped almost every group in his class with solving editing problems, and felt that more engaged collaboration occurred with DV composing: “When they’re actually into it, then it’s like, can I help you with this? Can you help me? . . . You want to be into it and with these video projects they’ve actually brought our whole classroom together a little better.” Another student, Charles (Knips, 2009), drew on his online social support by seeking help from his fan fiction “friends in Germany and China” to do an anime video about the French Revolution. This sense of abilities spread across students presents a clear example of distributed intelligence, which drives participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), and was a major component of these classroom spaces. Another component prompting social engagement and student thinking was the sense of felt purpose for the DV composing endeavor, initiated and mediated by the teacher, but ultimately co-constructed by students through their composing activities.
Students and Teachers Co-Constructed Authentic Purpose for Composing
Successful teachers in the studies worked with students to co-construct an explicit sense of purpose for multimodal composing. In these classrooms teachers acted “as designers of learning processes and environments” (New London Group, 1996, p. 73), who initiated a felt need for multimodal composing. When teachers introduced a strong sense of communicative and expressive purpose, students became engaged in DV composing processes for designing and producing their videos. Often, the purpose was initiated through the interpretive assignment and in students’ sense of an inquiry, a puzzle to solve, or a story to tell.
Focal and case study students in this research had a strong sense of which DV projects felt purposeful. They felt an active purpose in creating a video on their found poems from a novel and their music videos on a song important to them. When social studies teacher Molly engaged her seventh-grade English Language Learners in making a DV about their stories of immigrating to the United States, she learned the sense of purpose they felt and learned it was the best way to introduce the unit on immigration (Miller, 2010a). Students positioned in schools as nonresponsive and/or troublemaker often found purpose in creating DVs. For instance, Darrius (Borowicz, 2005) created a DV story in response to a novel. He chose to depict his vision of the importance of loyalty among friends based on his experience. In an impressive change, he came to class early and often stayed late, sometimes giving up his lunch period to work on his movie. He orchestrated a tragic scene, demonstrating to the actor her language and movements before filming, then edited the footage using quick cuts and dramatic music to amplify the shock. He watched his movie over and over, sometimes talking to himself, sometimes singing along with the music he had imported, sometimes turning to a fellow student for assistance. On one occasion, he announced aloud to no one in particular, “Man, I love this. I could stay here and work on this all day.”
Successful teachers sometimes struggled with the transition to new purposes with active roles for students. In Moira Green’s class (Goss, 2009) the first video assignment was a constrained task called “The Story of Our Town”: The assignment sheet had a list of “must” do scenes that sent students to the internet for still images. Students did not engage as she had hoped. A quarter of the class never finished the video. For those who did, in the screening it became obvious that each was very similar to the others—with a still image on weather, sports, politics, and so on, following the listed requirements exactly. The assignment was constructed not as purposeful interpretation, but just as a display of known information. Students complied with rules rather than designed meaning purposefully. Ms. Green recognized the problem and in the next video asked students to write a personal narrative, poem, song, or essay focusing on an important aspect of the student’s life. Students explored their own lives, with the purpose of representing self and communicating to others, first in print, then designed as a DV. Goss (2009) described the excitement: “During the writing process students were focused and engaged, and often would read their narratives out loud to neighboring students, testing to see how they might sound as a voice-over in the video.” The project results were varied and reflected the diverse student voices and backgrounds in the class. To tell their digital stories of their love of running or their father’s recovering from drug addiction, students used a variety of literary techniques such as flashback, conflict, and multiple points of view.
The felt purpose for the assignment was always important to students, but that did not mean the topic had to be specifically about personal narrative or students’ worlds. A case in point was the political campaign for Brutus in Mr. Zane’s class (Milleret al.,2013) students thought, “We had a real topic that we could play out.” The use of “we” and “play out” suggest the sense of agency and control of the video campaign, making it a “real topic”—even though it was a fictional campaign from a fictionalized drama it posed a problem to pursue and interpret.
This need for interpretation appeared in a social studies class where the history teacher treated history as an ongoing story that had to be reinterpreted and open to new evidence (Lauricella, 2006). This consistent attitude toward historical knowledge as not fixed, but evolving, created a felt need for inquiry among his students. Instead of following a linear chronology, he posed big questions and themes to get at underlying conceptual issues and conflicts. The interpretive purpose for students to engage in DV composing, then, was to make sense of their inquiries into multimodal historical texts and to represent their historical analyses. Students took up that purpose as their own to compose DVs on their historicized perspectives on events (e.g., on the Constitutional Convention, the decision to bomb Japan, or Jim Crow Laws).
In Mr. Orsen’s class (Goss, 2012) students recalled an assignment with an explicit focus on purpose related to the school context of Speak: “Make a video that means something.” This focus on students’ meaning-making signaled an attitude toward literature and thinking that was an organizing principle in the class, providing the occasion for students’ effortful attention. The video was a social inquiry into their school that included interviews of other students, teachers, and community members. Sam explained students’ surprise at this unexpectedly complex assignment: You could make your own quote, you could make your own question to ask and you physically had to take a video camera and interview people and you could ask them any question you want and you could take the video and twist it around any way you wanted it because all he said was, “Make a video.”
The surprise seems to appear from the unexpected agency involved—all the decisions, actions, processes, and the guiding purpose of meaningfulness to students. This changed the attitude toward literature in school away from decontextualized facts on quizzes. It invited students to recontextualize the novel into an inquiry of their own high school. This mediation of thoughtful purposes for literacy practices through tasks, tools, and talk, created a critical purpose for students’ DV composing and shaped literature learning in the class.
In that class and others students developed a sense of purpose for composing and new sense of self. For a group struggling academically (Arora, 2009), the DV composing process revealed their sense of purpose for representing meaning that evolved from strengths they did not know they had: “Ami the actress [who the teacher had called ‘introverted’] became more confident in displaying her abilities. Diane, the director, took the leadership responsibilities . . . and Andy, the editor, became an actual technical expert.” When the class saw the group’s “superior project”—best in class according to the teacher—peers sought after their advice. Their purposeful composing was closely connected to identity-making, a notion that echoes throughout the new literacies scholarship (e.g., Buckingham, 2008; Gee, 2003). Identity is involved in DV design because “the outcome of Designing is new meaning, something through which meaning makers remake themselves” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 23). This inclusion of identity in purposeful multimodal composing opened the classroom to student lifeworlds.
DV Composing Opened Meaning-Making to Student Lifeworlds/Identities
Students consciously drew on available cultural resources as strategies or remixes for their work in ways that changed their sense of interpretive competence. Recruiting the designs and cultural resources familiar to adolescents for representation provided opportunities for them to use their extensive media and other experiences as part of school learning. In the ad genre, seventh-graders enacted a short drama about buying groceries for various religious holidays that ended with the tagline, “The First Amendment: Priceless” (Miller, 2010b). The 9th- and 10th-grade students created movie trailers to capture the essential conflicts and characters “coming soon” from the short story “Monkey’s Paw” and The French Revolution. Students developed a new DV genre, the confessional, based on Reality TV shows, where one of the participants enters a private place to share real thoughts and feelings about situations, relationships, and events. In Shakespearean plays, it would be called a soliloquy, but the “confessional” was a much more familiar form for the 11th graders who used it as a resource to make sense of the play Macbeth (Miller, 2010a). Students took on the roles of characters in a confessional to discuss their real feelings about who was to blame for what happened in the play. The three witches, played by young African American women, took up a pose (e.g., one leaning her elbow on another’s shoulder) to show their connection and blamed Lady Macbeth in their home vernacular (“She be blamin’ us, but she the one!”), who blamed Macbeth (“What’s up with him?”), who blamed the witches and his wife (“I’m innocent—pretty much!). This video provoked discussion in the class about who really was responsible. Embodying these central conflicts through character performance provided an updated connection of the literature to students’ lives, but the DV added the well-known media genre, linking the classic literary text to the familiar reality show confessionals with their complaining, blaming, and self-delusion.
DV composing also recruited students’ deep interests in music and spoken-word/rap poetry, thus further building on familiar youth culture. Hip hop was often used by students as sound tracks for their movies. In some cases, students rewrote the words. Every time the teacher mentioned genetics in one science class, students who had made a music video about genetics started singing their lyrics on genetics to the rhythm of a popular song (Miller et al., 2013). At other times, students wrote their own words in a hip-hop style about a brother’s death (Borowicz, 2005) or about dealing with daily stresses (Miller, 2010b). Tenth-grade students (Goss, 2012) each wrote part of a rap for different sections of the Odyssey, videoed the performances, and edited the scenes into a movie. Miles was last to rap and he worked with the teacher after school to write a choral rap for the whole class, which they filmed to sum up the Odyssey in the spirit of a Greek chorus in gospel mode. In Mr. Bradley’s class (Costello, 2006) there was a moment when he wanted students to write out their reality-show confessionals in “standard English,” but asked them to perform for the camera, not read. Students were confused—why write it down and not read it? Only Curtis (the teacher’s “problem student”) understood and offered this translation to the class: “It’s like you freestylin’.” The class then got it, too: “Yeah! Freestylin’! Yeah, it’s like a rap.” Costello concluded, “Drawing on their implicit media and performance knowledge seemed to energize the activity for students like Curtis.”
Inviting youth culture and student lifeworlds into the classroom functioned to open up the available resources for composing and learning (New London Group, 1996). Eleventh-grader Zack (Knips, 2008b) created a video based on the poem “The Road Not Taken,” which he described as being “about making choices. And we chose to make a—to have a student make a choice whether to stay at school or to drop out.” This text-to-life connection clarified the poem through DV composing: “I learned more about the poem . . . It showed, it revealed stuff that you can’t just see by reading it. But you can show it.” In a school district where only 53% of students graduated, he did “show” a strong message that drew on the shared lifeworlds of Zack and his audience.
A student who considered himself a poor English student (Cercone, 2007) edited a scene for his group’s mystery genre movie trailer, remixing a familiar TV media strategy: “In the beginning of Law & Order they have pictures of the victims and they’re like at angles, and they take pictures all in black and white, and I was always in love with it.” The aesthetics of being “in love” with a scene suggests the media awareness this student brought to school and used to represent the mystery in his DV. Another student envisioned a fantasy sequence that drew on the comic book image structure for the battle of good and evil that he knew “from every comic book I’ve ever read.” In his social studies video on the Korean War, Charles (Knips, 2009) appropriated Korean language symbols from a DVD of his favorite singer. This borrowing and remixing of cultural resources brought students’ lifeworlds to the classroom as tools for connecting, representing, and learning.
Connecting what seemed impersonal and distant to the personal and materially present was part of the affordance of DV composing. Subject matter such as the Jim Crow Laws became personal (Lauricella, 2006) when the two girls who made a DV included images of lynching from the National Archives and put up a “Whites Only” sign at the water fountain outside the classroom door to enact scenes of discrimination. For the soundtrack, they used a haunting antiracist song suggested by one of their mothers. The class was stunned by the video. These girls were friends—one African American and one White—and were changed by their DV that historicized race in America: They broke up a fight in the cafeteria a week later saying, “You can’t fight over stepping on sneakers—Do you know what we’ve gone through to be here?”
Materializing curricular concepts and texts by interanimating them with known cultural texts and everyday experience allowed students in many studies to reframe the curriculum as part of their lives, making the curricular concepts accessible and developing in students a deep sense of curricular understanding. To support students’ composing, teachers mediated their conscious understanding of the representational possibilities of different modes—of showing with images and naming with print, for example. Frequently, this involved helping to make students’ implicit knowledge about the meaning-making potentials (affordances) of modes more explicit.
Teachers Attended Explicitly to Multimodal Design
Successful teachers saw multimodality as another means of making content accessible by engaging students in thinking about and learning the significance of concepts in the discipline through visual, aural, spatial, gestural, and other kinesthetic modes. With their extensive media experience students had tacit understanding of multimodal design. Nevin, for example, found technical aspects of editing challenging, but contributed to his group: “I mean, I know how it should look” (Cercone, 2009). Luke said students knew when they had to do more editing: “It just don’t seem right to you.” Al (Cercone, 2007) noted, “When you know what looks good, you know what looks good . . . It’s like you just know when it’s the right thing.” This tacit knowledge from media experiences became more explicit in classes where the teacher directed students’ attention to design of video, that is, to orchestrating multiple modes to represent and communicate meaning (Kress, 2010; New London Group, 1996).
In classrooms where teachers successfully integrated DV composing as a student learning tool, teachers focused students’ attention to multimodal design to help them become aware of the affordances or meaning potentials of modes. Mr. Hughes (Knips, 2008a) showed sample videos, professional and student-made, and analyzed them with students to introduce a movie trailer assignment. His heuristic focused attention, as he explained: “‘Why is the music the way it is? How’s he speaking—what’s the tone of saying the words?’ They count the clips, notice the shots are short, swift, framed.” With the camera hooked up to the TV, he showed two shots in the class and asked which looked better, thus initiating a conversation on visual representation. He directed attention to the importance of close-up image, music to match meaning, narrative delivery, and kinesthetic modes of enaction during his introduction to DV, in screening samples of the genre and throughout his visits to DV workgroups as they planned/videoed/edited. His questions nudged students: “How can you make that look better?” “What kind of music would fit with that?” “What’s your tag-line for that ad?” Throughout the process he directed student attention to using modes to represent and design meaning.
The digital affordances of DV composing provided students with editing design tools of visual pacing, special effects, multiple sound tracks. When students in the Goss (2009) study felt the purposeful narrative video on their lives, they took up their teacher’s explicit attention to design in their products: Their video designs appeared polished, as in the high-angle close-up of a little sister looking out of the window at her dad leaving in his truck, designed to show her sense of loss. Students learned to use editing to layer meanings in the visual mode. Sally’s group (Author et al., in review) wanted to communicate to students not to be afraid of the English language arts (ELA) exam by exaggerating their fear through design: “We want the eyes to be scary,” so they layered “a fire thing” to show a fiery-eyed test monitor in the form of their classmate. In that same video on the ELA exam, one group used comical music in the opening and then switched to horror movie music to exaggerate students’ fear so as to diffuse it through laughter. Like some students, Sasha concluded, “Music is a feeling. When you listen to music, you can say, ‘This is a happy feeling. This is a bad feeling.’ It’s all about the music.” Cercone (2010) traced a student’s design of his video called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” which used bits and pieces of professionally recorded music in a mashup 6 for his sound track, while the visuals flashed “the road sign and a fork in the road he filmed on location.” Designed through this orchestration of modes, his video told a narrated, figurative story about the meaning of choices and his written text and oral presentation demonstrate his conscious design to communicate the pain of wondering whether to leave loved ones to join the military.
In their workgroups students spent time pondering issues of digital rhetoric, imagining audience and calculating how to design videos to grab attention and represent meaning multimodally. They played both parts in this imaginative dialogue—the composer and the viewing audience. Dax (Cercone, 2007) talked about designing the drama of good and evil: “It doesn’t always have to be words . . . when you can see somebody’s looking into the other guy’s eyes and you can tell there’s hatred between the two.” He focuses here on the embodied process of visually and kinesthetically using extreme closeups to portray this tension as a key element of fantasy genres: “That’s what I was trying to get across.” Al (Cercone, 2007) recounted his imagined dialogue during editing his designed shot of a character with his back to the bad guys getting away: “You want the audience to be captured by the picture. You want them to feel like they’re there and like they have an opinion, like they can say, ‘Oh my God, he went that way. Why you guys running the other way?’” Even small details emerged as designed. Ms. Gorsky (Blondell, 2009) explained in a presentation to teachers how one student’s end credits were backed with cued music: “She wanted that first line ‘you say that you want me, you say that you need me’ because her poem dealt with love, so that was really cool that she actually thought to take it that far.”
To focus attention on the affordances (resources for making-meaning) and uses of the visual and kinesthetic modes, Joe Garvey (Cercone, 2010) sometimes screened his students’ draft and finished videos a second time without sound. A part of the conversation generated by one of these replays demonstrates the process this teacher used to make students’ implicit knowledge of modes more explicit. In one such screening, students called out design elements they thought were interesting: “slow motion” “—makes it seem eerie,” “closeup,” and “Bunch of girls’ feet–and then just his feet . . .” These observations were followed by students’ connecting design to interpreted meaning: “He’s in his own little zone . . . ” Finally, a usually disengaged student, Ted, “jumps in, ‘The room is a metaphor . . . they are spaces apart.’” Focusing on design in such an exercise helped students learn to read a multimodal text with more explicit awareness and, thereby, take up the affordances of modal meaning in their composing.
As students grew more attentive to design in classes (Miller et al., 2013), their design choices became more sophisticated. In one group’s Public Service Announcement, student choices to design meaning were especially evident. Their dramatic opening represents love through a close-up of a handsome dark-haired young man bestowing a rose (it seems) to the viewer. The scene is in black and white, backed with romantic Italian opera music and as he winks (slow motion) a magical “bling” sound is layered from special effects. The next shot is a closeup of his hands delivering the rose into the hands of a young woman, followed by an extreme closeup on his face as he leans into her (and into the camera) and whispers “I love you” in her ear. These selections of angles, sounds, camera distance, music, gesture, movement—all show an advanced control of design and use of cultural and literary symbols to establish meaning. Their larger intention becomes clear in a sudden extreme closeup on the youth’s suddenly angry face, then to the heart she is drawing in her notebook, his raised hand, the heart, a slap in the girl’s face, the drawn heart with an arrow through it, finally the young woman staggering backwards from a push, falling into the wall and crumpling to the floor (shot from high angle). The romantic aria continues throughout, contrasting with the fast visual tempo of the violent shots.
This student-designed video includes the ironic contrast of romantic visual and musical symbols with the violent gestures, the symbolic contrast of naïve notions of love and a harsh reality with visual cross-cutting to create shock, and then, a fade to black. At the end, a fade-in and a music change support the strong final message of speaking out about physical abuse. Drawing on and orchestrating all of these multimodal resources to persuade with a meaningful message provides a clear example of multimodal composing as literacy, that is, encoding meaning with available resources. Focusing explicit attention to design provided students with new modes for understanding, representing, and learning. Composing multimodally in this way required translating between modes, that is, representing understanding from one symbolic system (e.g., print) to another (e.g., image or music).
Students Transmediated–MakingMeaning “Palpable”/Embodied
Portraying a print text meaning/concept in images and music or movement and gesture are examples of “transmediating,” a semiotic notion referring to the act of translating meaning from one sign system to another (Siegel, 1995; Suhor, 1984). The students’ multimodal composing activities required effortful attention to connect modes of representation (visual, auditory, gestural, spatial)—which are all human symbol-making systems (Kalantzis & Cope, 2008). Findings from the studies suggest that this symbolic translation generated depth of focus and opportunity for reflection as students created/composed connections between the original text/textbook concept and the emerging multimodal text.
Transmediating as thinking
In many of the metasynthesis studies, as students produced a multimodal text, they were providing evidence of their engagement with “semiotic/conceptual resources” as evidence of their thinking and learning (Kress, 2010). They learned, for example, the “division of semiotic labor,” how to use image to show what would take a long time to read and when to write words to name what would be difficult to show. So, for instance, in the Public Service Announcement described above, students translated the idea of naïve love into a school notebook doodle of a heart and a chanted jump-rope rhyme. At the same time, these students learned the content concept (how the law and social services address interpersonal issues) that was the focus of explicit curricular attention. In composing multimodally students transmediated text into sensory modes for representation (visual, auditory, gestural, spatial) to translate and link these symbolic systems (Kalantzis & Cope, 2008), to understand and communicate concepts. Digital composing provides ease in creating these translations between symbol systems like image and written text, juxtapositions that provoke and develop thinking (Dickson, 1985).
Examples of students’ descriptions point to their awareness of this translation process. A student in what the teacher called “the lowest performing group” was portrayed by the teacher as introverted (Arora, 2009), but she discovered a new resource for learning: “It’s easy to understand a story like Romeo and Juliet by acting it out. It’s easier to understand than reading a book and taking notes.” Students explaining their DV composing (Miller et al., 2013) said that revisiting literary text and performing scenes for DV helped them understand: “When you write, you kinda’ get a visual picture, but they’re just words. And then when you actually shoot the film, you get to be in the action of seeing what you’re doing and how it’s gonna’ end up.” Translating from “just words” to “what you’re doing” is transmediation enacted by materializing the interpreted scenes (“in the action”). For Chantal, this embodied action made the characters in literature “real”: It “showed us what type of person they are, what kind of personality they had.” Her transmediating from print to materialize action/gesture/space created interpretations about literary characters as she created embodied portrayals from words.
Most teachers in the studies noted the depth of students’ conceptual learning through transmediating in DV composing. Middle-grades science teachers (Goss, 2008) pointed to the deep learning that happened when students created a DV on the scientific process (a curricular requirement): The eighth-grade teacher saw that students “were really able to master the higher-order thinking through the movie.” Her classes that did not participate in the DV composing project, could define and compare the components of the scientific process, but could not apply them to everyday contexts. She credited DV composing with developing students’ ability to “synthesize.” The researcher concluded that designing with modes resulted in a “synergistic effect” that deepened “level of understanding.” Although the term was not used, transmediating seems to be at work, translating from textbook account to DV composing.
As a small group of 11th-grade boys collaborated to translate their mystery genre video into a print title for the opening screen, their thinking was palpable (Cercone, Knips, & Miller, 2009). The video of their group talk showed the three intently generating and evaluating titles for 7 min. They shook their heads, one held his head in his hands, another tapped his foot, a third played with his fingers, as they rejected in turn, Murder, Fear, and Darkness as insufficient to translate the sense of mystery. In the video replay of the group, their English teacher noted how one boy kept glancing off to the right, just as the teacher’s toddler did when trying to think. Then one tried out a new name—“The Knife”; in an instant the trio celebrated with high-fives, nodding heads, repeating the title with satisfaction. Their transmediation from multimodal text (the video) to print text (the title) was a rhetorical challenge, requiring consideration of the affordances of different modes and how they worked together to represent their genre.
Mrs. Gorski (Blondell, 2009) described another kind of student learning through transmediation with DV: “The level that the movies are able to take ’em—like they were able to see from every character’s perspective, even the minor characters who we were talking about.” They saw the “things that are underneath that need[ed] to be brought out.” The act of translating print text into images and scenes demanded interpretation. For example, her 11th-grade student Natalie said she had never gotten “the point” of reading literature; she’d read the book and pass the test. At first, she “hated” the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. But in translating the words in her found poem on the book to images, she discovered understanding: “I think my favorite part [of the DV] is when [we filmed] trees blowing and all that. I liked that a lot because it kinda’ matched that line when [Janie] was looking and waiting, really. It kinda’ matched perfectly.” Transmediating from print to symbolic image and motion created this aesthetic response and seemed to rouse Natalie’s connection to and interpretation of the main character and the book. This video was a critical experience for her: As she took on a new interpretive stance, she said she learned that “Everything means something,” but that you have to “dig deep” to understand. Her new vision of representational meaning in literature and the world emerged through her transmediating activities, something her teacher noticed: “What I’ve observed from some is that they grew to love the literature in a different way, not just superficially.”
Although the studies did not aim to study student learning as connected to their writing or state testing achievement, examples emerged in long-term ethnographies that suggest the longevity of students’ learning through transmediation. For example, for 11th grader Nevin (Cercone, 2009), who could never write a good essay on literature—the kind he had to write for the graduation test—the problem became suddenly clear: The graduation essays “were easier than they seem.” The problem, he said, was that he had been “getting words on how to write words.” But after making a video that focused him on transmediating a key idea in The Giver, he understood: “I just took the scene and made it as my body, my body paragraph.” Using the video as a multimodal template for the essay, with scene corresponding to paragraph, mediated Nevin’s writing: His acting served as a kinesthetic understanding so that he could translate the scene as “my body paragraph.” The sense of embodied learning is strong in his description, evidence of his transmediating, his multimodal thinking. Nevin passed his 11th-grade ELA graduation exam, which required four such timed-writing essays.
Transmediating as embodied learning
Research in cognitive science over the last few decades has led to a new understanding of how the mind works through multimodal abstractions, suggesting that we learn multimodally through “the body in the mind” (Johnson, 1987). Although only one of the studies (Miller, 2011) took up this theoretical frame explicitly, many instances are evident in the rich descriptions and the videos themselves that support this interpretation of their learning.
Students’ transmediating from one mode to another appeared to lead to a kind of embodied learning that students did not forget. In classes taught by Mr. Williams (Lauricella, 2006), students showed a problem in the Progressive Era, in the performance space in the front of the room they filmed a group of three standing in a row; the one in the middle turned and handed the male a dollar bill and then turned to the female to drop a few clinging coins into her hand. She looked startled. This translation, a representation of unequal pay, brought alive the problem in the historical text they were interpreting for the DV movie trailer and, then, in their written essay for homework. The movement, sound, gesture, facial expression—together developed a vivid hard-to-forget image schema for unequal pay.
One example of transmediation from the study by Lauricella (2006) serves to illustrate the kinds of embodied abstractions evident in students’ videos. A scene from Paige and Nicole’s black and white video about Jim Crow laws uses metaphoric projection from the embodied path structure. The camera shows a medium shot looking from behind as a White girl interrupts a Black girl at the school water fountain under a “Whites Only” sign. As the evocative blues piano plays the introduction to “Strange Fruit” (by Billie Holiday), the White girl shakes her head and points her finger down the hallway in a gesture that is also a finger-wagging dismissal. The Black girl in the do-rag pauses a moment and looks down the hall toward the path appointed for her. As the camera cuts to look as well, the screen turns momentarily dark.
There are many metaphoric projections in this very short scene, too many to take up here. Trying to elaborate even one, in words, does not do justice to capture the meanings afforded in the multimodal representation—the showing—but the attempt may provide some insight. The from–to or path cognitive pattern (what Johnson, 1987 calls image schema) that we learn as toddlers from our bodily experience of moving from one place to another expands in the video scene to also include social meanings about separation, exclusion, power, inequality, humiliation, and more. The music, gestures, printed sign, refusal of water access, facial expressions, and light to dark, hint at the final destination of the path of Jim Crow laws, as the singer intones, “Southern trees bear strange fruit” (a reference to lynching). This representation through several symbolic systems for making-meaning created a visceral impact, elaborated the image-schema in a cultural remix, and generated deep-embodied learning in the students who made it. (Recall their determination and success in breaking up a fight in the cafeteria.) Their translation of “separate but equal” into a multimodal representation engaged them in multimodal thinking that fostered embodied learning.
In multimodal composing, transmediating demands multimodal thinking, the ability to reason about one mode in terms of another mode of representation. The studies provide solid evidence for the embodied learning that occurred as students composed DV to learn curricular texts and concepts across subject areas. Taken together, the six thematic findings from this metasynthesis provide evidence for a framework for change in classrooms to support multimodal teaching, composing, and learning. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience provides a systematic explanation of what is happening to influence student engagement and learning in these classroom contexts, an explanation congruent with Mr. Williams’ goal (Lauricella, 2006) of “using all the modes life provides” to make “history palpable.” In the next section, I take up this explanatory theory of embodied learning—the crucial outcome of teachers’ mediation for multimodal composing on curricular content.
Discussion and Implications
The purpose of this metasynthesis was to increase the usefulness of qualitative studies on DV composing as a student learning tool by synthesizing findings to develop a framework for evidence-based practice (e.g., Sandelowski & Barroso, 2007). In this section, I incorporate the six major themes that emerged from the metasynthesis to develop a pedagogical framework for multimodal composing as embodied learning.
A Pedagogical Model for Embodied Learning through Multimodal Composing
The findings from the metasynthesis revealed six intertwined ideas that are closely related in the context of DV composing to some extent in almost every classroom: When participants in the DV composing studies had a felt purpose and opportunities to engage as agents in multimodal sense-making activities with the social support of others (teacher & peers) and access to cultural tools as resources (implicit media knowledge, lifeworld experience, video camera, computer, internet), they transmediated meaning to design multimodal representations; their DV composing experience resulted in embodied learning about content concepts, about meaning-making with representational tools, and about their own abilities as composers of meaning. In all, the tenets of embodied cognition provide an integrated explanation of students engagement and learning.
Embodied cognition theories based on extensive neuroscience imaging and other research argue that we maintain the structures of the body from everyday sensory experience and activity in cognitive frames for understanding the world (Stewart et al., 2010). These patterns are dynamic multimodal structures developed in agentive activity as our body moves through space, manipulates objects, and interacts through our senses. Understanding, then, is an event, an “evolving process or activity” (Johnson, 1987) that includes metaphorical projection from, for instance, such deceivingly simple cognitive frames as in–out, from–to, or path (also Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Research grounding the embodied mind paradigm demonstrates that we learn through embodied action and experience in the world, integrating the resulting multimodal representations into our conceptual understanding. Our ways of moving, orienting, and engaging in the world shape our thinking, and our embodied thinking shapes our activities and interpretations in the world.
From these perspectives of embodied cognition and learning, findings from the reviewed studies in this metasynthesis are brought into clearer focus. Studies traced how teachers’ embodied learning shaped a New Literacies stance as they engaged in PD and acted to transform their teaching. These changes were especially clear in Diane Gorski’s case (Blondell, 2009). In her presentation to teachers, for instance, she pointed to the literal position of teacher Keith Hughes crouched down beside a student at a computer as a visual guide to changes needed during the DV composing workshop. She had struggled with learning how to help students in ways that were really supportive and not overbearing—how to help students without telling them exactly what to do—and she said this image was instructive for her. Instead of telling teachers, then, “this is how you do it,” Diane pointed to this image of the teacher beside a student, looking up at her, asking questions. This enacted multimodal scene was familiar to Ms. Gorski from her experience with Keith as instructor for her professional development. In her conference presentation she elaborated for her audience, creating the teacher’s part of the interactive dialogue with the student: “What do you see? What do you want to communicate?” The image brought with it her new experiences with students and her language for interacting.
This image enacts the relational process of “participatory sense-making” as embodied coordination between two agents (DiPaolo, Rohde, & DeJaegher, 2010). The interdependence in the scene Ms. Gorski narrated provided a new cognitive frame in which the student is an active creator of meaning, and social understanding is enacted in the teacher–student dynamic. In almost every study, as teachers moved from student to student and group to group, their attention to students’ ideas and to their auditory, kinesthetic, and visual translations (transmediating) of concepts during composing constituted embodied experiences that many drew on to change their pedagogies. The importance of the “teachers first” dictum of Lankshear and Knobel (2006) was, thus, borne out by these studies, though there were cases in which teachers coming out of the PD did not or could not move toward a New Literacies stance and had difficulties in creating a social space for purposeful mediating, transmediating, and designing.
The New Literacies stance can be understood as an embodied pose representing a structure enacted by a teacher to move to new concepts of students as sense-makers, texts as multimodal, and meaning as constructed through social interaction. The shift to a New Literacies stance, then, was linked to teacher success in creating a classroom social space for mediation.
The importance of the social space for a multimodal pedagogy in the metasynthesis findings is congruent with and explained by embodied cognitive science: “The locus of cognitive activity is not exclusively internal and mental, but rather external, taking place in the interface where organism and world meet” (Stewart et al., 2010, p. xii). As also articulated by Dewey (1925) and Vygotsky (1978), the social and cultural context of this external environment is not secondary, but “a central feature of human cognition” (Stewart et al., 2010, p. xii). More explicitly, Johnson (2007) argues that our “abstract cross-modal thought” (p. 149) emerges from action and social mediation in the world, as “essential to the development of our capacities for cross-modal image schemas, language, and abstract reasoning” (p. 150). In short, we create our “minds” through coordinated social activity and multimodal meaning-making.
By creating a classroom context with social resources and tools for students to transmediate meaning and design representations, teachers created the context with resources that promoted students’ embodied learning about curriculum, self, and the world. Classroom spaces involved groups collaborating to draw on all participants’ semiotic and knowledge resources to fulfill communicative, representational intent. This finding is congruent with media and NLS in their notions of 21st-century transformations to literacies enacted in “networked publics” (Ito et al., 2009), “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006), and “affinity groups” (Gee, 2004), which hold in common the idea that resources, including cognition, are distributed and participants benefit from interactive, shared learning (also, Davidson & Goldberg, 2009).
Successful teachers engaged students in purposeful activities of transmediating for multimodal composing that required social and cultural resources to compose multimodally. In this way, teachers further created an environment that prompted a felt need for interpretation and representation. Johnson (2007) explains the import of such a context for embodied learning: “Both socially distributed cognition and cognitive artifacts are environmental factors that we use in our daily cognitive feats” (p. 151). The human mind reaching after meaning in the environment, drawing on all cognitive, social, and material resources is the essence of human experience. Thus, the embodied learning in these DV composing classrooms followed the processes of human learning in the world from infanthood onward.
A central finding in the metasynthesis was the importance of expanding the available resources for making meaning—from print text to also images, sounds, movements, and gestures. The embodied cognition perspective explains this expansion in terms of shifting from disembodied language-only propositions to learning curricular texts and concepts through embodied activities that provided sensory experience to make sense of concepts by performing them with representations. Teachers who mediated students’ attention to elements of design—the orchestration of multiple modes—made implicit student media knowledge explicit, providing more satisfying, coherent translations of meaning in student representations. In transmediating meaning and designing for the purpose of representing what they were coming to understand and communicating it to others, students were sustaining themselves as human organisms with a cognitive system that must “build itself” at the level of identity, define its own organization, “enact a world” (DiPaolo et al., 2010, pp. 37-39). This dynamic “biologically grounded theory of sense making . . . strikes at the heart of what it is to be cognitive” (DiPaolo et al., 2010, p. 40), with meaning emerging out of embodied and situated activity. Findings are also consistent with social semiotic theories of transmediation (Siegel, 1995) and design (Kress, 2010), which present multimodality as a significant and overlooked means in schools of expanding access to learning and developing thinking.
There is evidence in the metasynthesis of Kalantzis and Cope’s (2008) formulation that a “profound growth in human capacities” results when multimodal forms of representation “relate to each other, forming structures or systems of symbol-to-symbol relationships” (p. 152). For instance, the kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and print texts of his group’s DVs all seemed to work together in Nevin’s epiphany (Cercone, 2010) about how to structure academic essays, when “words about words” had not worked for him. His DV composing experiences expanded mind through the body. Through mediated DV composing students understood the scientific process as a usable concept (Goss, 2008), and immigrant students learned English to communicate their experiences in a new country (Kim, 2011). As an 11th grader, Natalie finally understood meaning-making about literature (Blondell, 2009), and Paige and Nicole came to a deep understanding of racial issues in American history (Lauricella, 2006) through the embodied activity of multimodal composing with the mediation of the teacher, their peers, and varied cultural tools. According to the studies and to participant students, their DV composing experiences helped them learn for the long term and made school engaging and challenging.
Finally, these pedagogical principles worked in synergy, not separately, to generate embodied learning. Teachers can initiate the development of the classroom social space with challenging tasks, but they have to mediate activity and students have to develop it by engaging purposefully in their joint composing endeavor (e.g., Arora, 2009; Borowicz, 2005; Cercone, 2010; Knips, 2009; Lauricella, 2006; Miller, 2010a). Design instruction for students serves little function if they do not feel that their multimodal composing is a purposeful communication that prompts transmediating and designing (e.g., Blondell, 2009; Cercone, 2009; Goss, 2009). Engaging student lifeworlds and identities in DV composing is a key strategy to create purpose in representation, but it seems to function best when students work together in social learning spaces to draw on mutual and diverse experiences and communicate something important (e.g., Arora, 2009; Blondell, 2009; Cercone, 2010; Goss, 2009; Kim, 2011; Knips, 2008b). Students’ drawing on their tacit knowledge of multimodal design provides opportunities for embodied learning; however, with teacher mediation students can move from latent knowledge of media from lifeworlds, to conscious awareness of strategies to use them to transmediate and critique their use for robust embodied learning (e.g., Cercone, 2010; Goss, 2012; Kim, 2011; Lauricella, 2006).
The components of the integrated pedagogical framework for embodied learning, focus attention to strong signs that teachers are critically reframing their classrooms to transform teaching and learning. The framework is congruent with what we know about teacher change (Bransford, Darling-Hammond, & LePage, 2005) and embodied learning and provides an evidence-based grounding for a pedagogical framework for multimodal practice that includes students’ sense-making—their bodies in their minds.
Implications
These findings and the resulting pedagogical framework point to the direction of needed change and efforts by teachers, teacher educators, and those conducting PD with teachers and administrators. The evidence base is small for how teacher learning influences what teachers do in classrooms and what their students learn—and even smaller for how teachers learn the practices that research shows make a difference for students (Bransford, Darling-Hammond, et al., 2005, p. 23). To contribute to building a professional consensus through evidence-based practice, the field of education plainly needs more long-term studies and metasyntheses of qualitative studies that examine how teachers take up PD experiences and enact them (or not) in classroom contexts.
The complexities of developing teachers as “adaptive experts” who can balance routine efficiency and innovation (Bransford, Derry, Berliner, & Hammerness, 2005, p. 48) is daunting in teacher education and in school contexts. A serious need is creating new ways to promote teachers’ questioning of traditional beliefs about the primacy of print texts and the often decontextualized, disembodied nature of learning as typically practiced in school. Teacher education and PD must provide pre- and in-service teachers with purposeful opportunities to compose multimodally so they can feel first-hand the social, transmediating requirements as they plan, collaborate, and enact. They need mediation to prompt reflection on embodied learning through their own curriculum-based multimodal composing. Where possible, developing a social support network of practicing teachers as a learning community could also sustain teachers isolated in schools that do not (yet) support such innovation.
The education field urgently needs more research on the challenges and supports for teachers attempting to sustain students’ multimodal composing for embodied learning of subject-matter concepts across disciplines and contexts. The metasynthesis provides evidence of student learning in the studies that focused on that. There are still questions about DV composing and appropriate student age-levels, kinds of conceptual content, and other content areas (e.g., mathematics). What are the influences of other forms of multimodal composing? What findings emerge from suburban and private schools or urban schools that are not struggling? Studies of multimodal composing and student learning will help address the theoretical issues of embodiment in schools, an agenda taken up by more recent work (Miller & McVee, 2012).
As Fullan (2001/2007) argues, any plan for changing educational institutions must be guided by the need to make a positive difference in society (also Fullan, 2010; Miller et al., 2003). The underpinnings of NLS include this guiding purpose: creating classrooms where all students develop social futures and performance competence for contemporary life (e.g., Kalantzis & Cope, 2008; New London Group, 1996). In a review of research on and theories of new literacies, Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, and Cammack (2004) warned of potentially severe consequences of ignoring the need for access to New Literacies in all classrooms, “if we hope to avoid societies in which economic advantage is sustained by the wealthy and denied to the poor” (pp. 1600-1601).
In all cases, navigating tensions in schools around the intensive testing culture and its intended and unintended consequences will be necessary. This study suggests that the outcomes are worth these efforts. A pressing need is transforming schools with multimodal composing to create purposeful classrooms where all students experience embodied learning and develop constructive social futures and performance competence for 21st-century life.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author Biography
References
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