“It's That Easy”: Designing Assignments That Blend Old and New Literacies

This article recounts what happened when one of the authors, a pre-service teacher, introduced a digital multimodal composition project in her 9th-grade inclusion English classes to support junior high students as they read the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Rather than regard new literacies as competing with print literacy for attention, the authors argue that teachers serve students best when they design assignments that blend old and new literacies in ways that allow them to coexist and inform one another.     

What was out of the frame? A dialogic look at youth media production in a cultural diversity and educational context in Chile

This article accounts for an experience of digital storytelling workshops with indigenous adolescents in Chile, and proposes a theoretical and methodological approach to analyze digital creations with a dialogic and ethnographic point of view. Based on this, it discusses the possibilities of digital media production as a strategy for the self-expression of children and adolescents, particularly immersed in unequal and ethnically diverse educational contexts. The specific case of two Mapuche girls reveals complex ways of organizing and positioning their voices, where ‘girl power’ and ‘post-girl power’ discourses are relevant, but not so their ethnicity. The results show that television, with its main audiovisual genres, styles and stereotypes, appears clearly on the teenagers’ creations, while the absence of Mapuche signs along the creation process and also into the digital stories seems to be related with two important features of the Chilean educational system: ethnic inequalities and its fierce attachment to neoliberalism.     

Trust and Mobile Media Use in Schools

Abstract

This article shares findings from a year-long study about social practices of high school youth with mobile devices during school time. In particular, this study found that students see their school time as fluidly social and academic. Educators and policy-makers need to carefully consider these social practices when preparing 21st century youth for engaging with technology in responsible and meaningful ways beyond their time in school.     

Multimodal Hip Hop Productions as Media Literacies

Abstract

This study draws on ethnographic data from a year-long multimodal media production (MMP) course and the experience of an African American female adolescent who used the production of multimodal Hip Hop texts to express her creativity and growing socially conscious view of the world. The study demonstrates how students made meaning multimodally and how media production, in combination with participating in community-based research, provided powerful opportunities for youth to develop new literacies, especially critical media literacies.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of The Educational Forum for the following free supplemental resources: Figure 1 and Figure 2, which show pictures of Gina and her group, the lyrics to the raps, gestures used with the raps, and other pertinent information.]     

The Old and the New in the New Digital Literacies

Abstract

This article argues that both traditional literacy (reading and writing print) and new digital literacies (for example, playing video games) come in two grades or forms, one of which can lead to success in the modern world and one of which is less likely to do so. In both cases, the role of “academic” or “specialist” language is crucial in distinguishing between the two grades     

When ‘literacy is a bennie’: researching contested literacies in bilingual youth radio

This paper presents findings from an innovative school-based youth radio project for Mexican immigrant students. We draw on ethnographic and discourse data collected over an academic year, including multiple data representations from video and audio recordings, radio production artefacts, interviews, and still images. We begin our discussion with a close analysis of a rich moment in the project brought-on by the collision of divergent and contested models of literacy. We then follow the thematic development of literacy across chains of events and contexts to understand how literacy was constructed and enacted in relation to language, identity, empowerment and voice. The findings suggest that although school–community linked collaborations can give rise to contradictions and disturbance, such collaborations have the potential to become productive learning contexts for disaffected and underachieving students and their teachers.     

Thinking in hashtags: exploring teenagers’ new literacies practices on twitter

This research investigates how three high school students in the USA developed new literacies practices through their participation in teenage Twitter. Data was collected from two sources, including archival data from participants’ Twitter over a two-year span, and semi-structured interviews. Results found that teenagers developed a number of practices that facilitated orientation to cultural conventions of teenage Twitter, helped them mobilize followers for participatory events, and led to reflective awareness of how to tell stories on Twitter. This study suggests that teenagers used the affordances of Twitter in order to craft multimodal narratives that are co-constructed, participatory, nonlinear, and emergent. Thinking in hashtags, for participants, is a kind of action that serves to develop affinities of relation (to friends, to pop culture, and to new knowledge) through mediatized ‘vital life stuff.’     

Valuing production values: a ‘do it yourself’ media production club

In this paper, we identify how and why digital media production can contribute to the active participation of children in education and also consider how much of the existing work in this area is framed as a ‘miraculous’ answer to educational challenges without critical interrogation of either the process or product. To begin, we identify some of the prominent research and issues that have emerged from work of this kind and discuss the barriers to accessing equitable education in relation to new media production projects with kids. We discuss the changing state of knowledge production and communication in a new media world and address the place of literacy in this changing educational context. Following this, we present one example of a media production club and the way we look at this work to value students' productions in a way that differs from other research of this kind.     

在线交互艺术活动探秘

由于网络应用的普及,在线交互艺术活动日趋重要。本文分析了相关项目的设计．探讨了作者与访客的相互关系,强调了访客参与的重要性。