New Perspectives in Science Education

Multiliteracies represent a new approach to literacy pedagogy and instruction (New London Group, 1996). Multiliteracies supports and enhance the fundamental purpose of education that sees learning as benefitting all students by learning in ways that allow learners to become part of an educational process that goes beyond the classroom walls (Albers and Sanders, 2010). Education as a situated practice can enhance students’ motivation to learn across the content areas. This is due to the fact that motivation is the students’ ability to read different texts at different levels of complexity and understanding (Pahl, 2007). In turn, Education and Multiliteracies are paramount for supporting students’ motivation to read for meaning in the classroom.    

In this study, the author analyses the importance of designing and applying new media literacies in K-12 classroom. The scholar analysed the digital storytelling developed in a graduate literacy course by pre-service and in-service teachers. The participants were 11 teachers (n=11) attending a literacy across the content areas graduate course in a liberal arts college in Virginia. The participant developed 11 digital storytelling narratives in their area of expertise as a mid-term project by making different choices on the technology to use for this task in the course. The analysis of the digital storytelling was carried out by looking at four main components: (a) text; (b) sound; (c) visual aids to better comprehend the narrative and (d) voice or narrative support in the story. The findings of the present study suggest that digital technology can become an integral and systematic component of any curriculum to enhance student motivation to read and write. The further development of software and technology in K-12 schools in the USA will give teachers the opportunity to explore and experiment with technology to allow students to access different genres of texts in the curriculum.    

References

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1).

Pahl, K.(2207). Creativity in events and practices: A lens to understanding children’s multimodal texts. Literacy, 41(2), 89-89.