Examining the Intersection of Literacy and Technology with Middle School English Teachers

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION

My Teaching

After teaching my first two years in a school where technology consisted of the

computer sitting on my desk, I felt like I was moving up in the world when I moved to a

new school, College Prep Academy, that had laptop carts I could borrow for use in my

classroom. This growing 6-12 school came with a high admission price, which meant

money was free flowing and invested in cutting edge resources. I was mainly excited that

my students could finally type up their writing and use the Internet for research. That all

quickly changed when the chief executive officer of the middle and high school told the

faculty at the end-of-school-year meetings he had convinced the board to invest heavily

in technology. He stated if College Prep Academy wanted to continue to be an innovative

place that prepares students for the future, technology was the way to go. In addition, the

school was spending the money regardless to buy more technology, so we had to find

some ways to integrate it into our classrooms. Most of the teachers took it in stride; it

wasn’t completely unfamiliar that the administration would mandate something new. One

older teacher, though, spoke up: “I’m a dinosaur, and I don’t know if I can do this.” He

started crying, and I rolled my eyes. Come on man! We all knew this was coming, and

you’re obviously not with it if you don’t know how to use technology. I was thrilled that

College Prep Academy was moving forward in their thinking, as I had just started

following the tech trends in education and was excited to try some new ideas in the

classroom. I left the meeting feeling self-righteous and ready to show that I was more

than up for the challenge.

I took a gamble to instead have relatively new technology in my classroom and

was given the opportunity to have a class set of iPod touches for the next school year. I

was beyond excited. Visions of revolutionary multimedia projects danced through my

head where students would create interactive presentations or collaborate online with

children from Africa to solve real world problems. I thought – no, I believed – that surely

this was the ultimate game-changer in education. My classroom would no longer be

bound to the drab and boring four gray concrete walls, and I would break free from the

tired, old way of teaching. Here was the chance to show off my professionalism and be a

leader in the school. The iPod touches were also a good publicity stunt. The chief

executive officer would stop by occasionally with photographers to take pictures of my

students and me working with the little devices and commend me for my good work. My

colleagues would occasionally peak their heads in to see what I was doing and to see if

the iPods were worth it. I assured them it was as I had my students visually display their

understanding of vocabulary terms and key ideas through the Poll Everywhere app,

creating comic books over what they read on the Comic Book Creator app, and recording

their voices to create podcasts summarizing what we did in class. Our school technology

director informed us at the beginning of year meetings that these were the types of

interactive assignments that promoted different learning in our classrooms and that

students enjoyed working with technology in this capacity rather than traditional

bookwork or writing assignments.

I was willing to try anything and everything on the iPods. I felt compelled to use

them as often as I could since my school paid thousands of dollars for them, and I wanted

to try something new to see how it would enhance my teaching and my students’

learning. I tried to create digital portfolios for each student to show their growth over the

entire year. I used the iPods for typing up short answer questions as I thought this would

motivate my students to be more thoughtful in their responses. I even had the students

take pictures for picture books on the iPods for a creative writing assignment just because

I wanted to try something different. I was basically trying to transfer everything we did in

English class over to the mobile devices even though I possessed very novice knowledge

of how to use them successfully.

Over time my students grew less enthused when they would walk in the

classroom and I would say, “Grab your iPods!” They did not like how much time it took

to enter different information for different assignments since writing was much faster

than the small keyboards on the iPods. My students were not really sure how to always

use programs to their full extent, and we often spent more time troubleshooting

technology problems in class rather then learning or producing. Sometimes the students

did not want to be bothered messing with the technology when they could accomplish the

same goals without it. I also found myself on more than one occasion unhappy with the

results of what they were creating. My students did not seem to be showing any new

insight into what I hoped they were learning, and I was disappointed when they were not

as excited as I was to be using them in class. There seemed to be a disconnect between

what I thought was supposed to happen if I put an iPod in students’ hands and what was

actually happening. I believed, though, it was because an app had not been created that

would solve my problems or that my students and I were not techno-savvy enough to

really effectively and meaningfully use the iPods. I was at a loss for how I should really

be using the iPods meaningfully and purposefully in my classroom.

Gradually the iPod cart started sitting in the corner of my room for longer and

longer stretches whenever the technology did not match up with my English curriculum’s

goals, means, and outcomes. I would go to faculty meetings where I would always hear

“Technology is good, use it,” without any real substance in between as we didn’t really

know how to match up technology to learning. I saw how other teachers were required to

use technology even when it did not match up with their class’s purpose or benefit the

students. I heard how different English teachers were required to integrate two or three

technology projects a quarter usually at the sacrifice of their old curriculum of reading

class novels or writing essays. Most of these new requirements were met with complaints

from parents, students, and teachers. Parents complained that their students were not

learning valuable reading and writing skills they would need for college. Students grew

tired as class after class required them to make iMovies over and over again about a book

they read in class or information they read in a textbook. Teachers felt they did not

possess the knowledge to use the new technology correctly. They also complained about

how the administration insisted on technology being used in the classroom when no

direction was given on how to effectively match up what they were trying to accomplish

in class to the technology. Although the technology supposedly represented innovation

and 21st century learning, few of the stakeholders at College Prep Academy felt

comfortable having it in the classroom.

At first I thought other teachers were being lazy and unprofessional when they

complained as they kept arguing that sacrificing what they believed to be core literacy

skills for new technological skills did not make sense. Teachers also thought students

were suffering because of all the technology integration since valuable time was wasted

on technology when they could have been reading and writing. I saw these teachers as

unwilling to even try new things in the classroom like I did with the iPod touches. If I

could do it, surely any one of them could, as well. I also argued with some of them that

we needed to find a balance, a work around, something that would keep English and

literacy learning progressive even though I could not really articulate what that meant.

While the other teachers at my school pushed back at the technology, I refused to let it go

because I had taken a gamble with the iPod cart and people were watching to see what I

would do. But as I clung more and more tightly to my unused iPod cart, I realized my

selfishness and lack of understanding had ultimately separated me from the other English

teachers in the school and the professional community in which I wanted to belong.

My Learning

These experiences greatly influenced my area of study when I decided to make

the transition to graduate school and started thinking about preparing pre-service

teachers. When I left the classroom, I left puzzled as to what I should have been doing

during our tech integration and whether or not I should have been focusing strictly on

literacy, technology, or the interplay between the two. The administration kept pounding

down ideas focusing only on the affordances of technology without understanding why it

was important to literacy learning while the English teachers – and I, to some extent –

kept regulating technology to the background as it did not support what we thought our

students should be learning. My graduate studies helped me realize that a broader notion

of literacy was needed, one that encompassed traditional reading and writing as well as

the ideas of video production, blogging, wikis, and the creation of websites, ideas

espoused by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE, 2005, 2013) and ideas

that failed to take hold at my school since literacy was never included in discussion when

considering what new technologies allowed us to do as teachers and our students to do as

learners.

From this experience, I turned my attention in graduate school towards the study

of literacy and what it meant in both print and technological formats; and extending it

beyond the four walls of the school to the types of literacies students encounter on a daily

basis. I read how Sternberg, Kaplan & Borck (2007) argued for embracing a new wave of

literacy practices and how schools must be willing to explore what technology has to

offer despite recognizing the extensive need for more research in these areas. I learned

how Sewell & Denton (2011) used multimodal anchoring techniques to reformat

traditional student activities to promote and instruct students about multimodal literacy. I

explored how Giffith (2010) used graphic novels to aid in vocabulary development,

engagement, multiple literacies, critical and image analysis, study of signs and images,

and multimodal reading. George (2011) helped me began to see that English Education

needs to be reframed to include multiple contemporary texts such as graphic novels,

online magazines, and podcasts to include a variety of literacy forms students use on a

daily basis. Through reading research, I was able to reflect on how I was focusing on

traditional facets of literacy when I was teaching and how I floundered once technology

disrupted those conceptions. My thoughts and understandings of literacy were moving

across a continuum from traditional conceptions to new progressive understandings.

Literacy became more than a set of conventions to be learned, but rather a way to

negotiate meaning (Leland & Casten, 2002). With these negotiations often occurring in

technological settings and engaging my students’ values and identities (Jewitt, 2008), I

soon turned to the concept of multiliteracies as espoused by New London Group (1996)

who view literacy as continuous, new, supplemental, and enhancing or modifying

established literacy teaching and learning rather than replacing traditional practices

(Rowsell, Kosnik & Beck, 2008) and relate specifically to the types of literacies students

interact with on a daily basis. To me, literacy is now multiliteracies as the pre-service

teachers I instruct, the teachers with whom I collaborate, and my everyday life is

increasingly multimodal in all types of literacy practices (Miller, 2007). These literacy

practices are found in the different tools and technologies I use and would like to

integrate into my classroom and my pre-service teachers’ future classrooms.

Teaching and Learning 1.0

I got the opportunity to work with pre-service teachers in my graduate studies and

decided to try out my new understandings of literacy with them. Teaching pre-service

teachers has taught me, though, that I need to continue to develop my own thinking of

these ideas before I can begin to change other’s understandings. If I do not fully embrace

what my new understandings are and enact them in my teaching practice, then I will

leave my pre-service teachers floundering as much as I did.

This became perfectly clear when I was leading a discussion about writing at the

secondary level in a 6-weeks methods course; one of my students asked if the class could

discuss technology in relation to writing. As time was short both in class that day and for

the duration of the course, I asked him to save his question for the next class, where the

designated topic was “technology and literacy.” It wasn’t until later that evening that I

realized I was still separating literacy and technology rather then integrating them; in that

moment, I failed to help my pre-service teachers develop “nuanced and critical

understandings of these technologies and the literacies with which they are associated”

(Swenson, Young, McGrail, Rozema & Whitin, 2006, p. 353). I wanted my pre-service

teachers to think of technology and literacy as more than just watching a movie based on

a book. Rather, thinking in a multiliterate way meant “to emphasize the differences in

thinking available across modes rather than the final product” (Graham & Benson, 2010,

p. 94).

Therefore, my continued study in graduate school has been on examining pre-

service and practicing teachers’ practices with multiliteracies in order to provide a more

thorough understanding of literacy and technology’s role in English education in a

constantly changing world. NCTE (2013) recognizes this changing nature of literacy in

the 21st century:

As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has

increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the 21st century

demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies:

many literacies. These literacies are multiple, dynamic, and malleable (para 1).

As a future English teacher educator, I want my pre-service teachers to be cognizant of

the ways technology aligns with or reformats traditional literacy activities so they can

draw upon students’ out-of-school literacy practices (Sewell & Denton, 2011) to extend

their students’ understandings of literacy beyond reading and writing. This is crucial to

not “overstate [technology’s] possibilities or dismiss its promise” (Adams & Hamm,

2001, p. 4) and to truly represent literacy as fluid and dynamic, both within and outside of

the technological realm.

What was missing in conversations with other teachers at my school – what I have

attempted to include in the few classes I taught with pre-service teachers in graduate

school – is showing how technology can align with curricular goals and not using

technology for technology’s sake. Staples, Pugach & Himes (2005) noted, “The initial

discussion of technology makes sense only insofar as it is directly related to the

curriculum and is not focused on the acquisition of technology resources – either

hardware or software” (p. 302). These discussions of curricular goals help address the

relationship between technology and English content while aligning with standards,

goals, means, and outcomes (Hew & Brush, 2007). Technology, then, is more of a

curricular tool and not something that is to replace textbooks, other print-based texts,

reading, and writing. I also believe it is important to move beyond simply focusing on

technology and literacy and instead expand both understanding and application of

literacies to include multiple forms of representation and communication (Shoffner, de

Oliveira & Angus, 2010). By telling my pre-service teachers that technology and literacy

should be thought of as separate ideas, I had rejected what I had come to know about

literacy and technology: in effect, I believed one thing while doing another. While this

realization was a key learning moment for me in the development of my understanding

about literacy, I still felt as stymied as when I rolled the iPod cart into my classroom back

in my middle school teaching years. However, I was determined to integrate my beliefs

into my teaching practice, so I completely revamped the course for the next semester to

do that.

Teaching and Learning 2.0

I decided to return to my teaching roots and see if the pre-service teachers and I

could make any sense of what had so befuddled me about personal electronic devices and

their role in literacy learning. Instead of iPod touches, a brand new device had been

created that school districts across the country are adopting in record numbers: the iPad.

Once again, I felt the familiar excitement as I told my new pre-service teachers that I

would be handing them all shiny new iPads and everything we did in class would be

centered around these (supposed) revolutionary devices. I was not as blinded by the

shininess as I was when I taught middle school, but I also did not know what to expect so

I kept an open mind about what would actually happen in class.

My pre-service teachers amazed me with what they created, as well as their

never-ending questions. Most of the time I would handle their questions with “I have no

idea how that works, what do you think?” or “I’m not sure what to expect when using

this app to create a lesson. I’ve never done this before,” or “Let’s just see what happens.

It will be fun!” and “That’s so cool. How did you do that?” Most importantly: “What

does this mean for literacy teaching and learning?” I focused specifically on centering all

their questions and all their creations on literacy learning as well as reminding them to

consider the purpose behind what they were having their students do before even

touching the iPad. This helped me remember what was important, as the iPads could not

accomplish every task; it also helped the pre-service teachers realize the iPad was just

one tool and not the only one they would use. Most importantly, I was beginning to enact

my own understandings of literacy in my teaching practice, something I hoped my pre-

service teachers that semester would do in their student teaching placements.

Experimenting with my pre-service teachers was fun and challenging as we

considered the affordances and constraints of the iPads and what literacy looked like and

meant when technology was a constant presence. Midway through their student teaching,

I had the opportunity to debrief with them about their experiences in the classroom with

technology and literacy. Most of them informed me that they ended up not using anything

they created in my methods class; their student teaching classrooms were not fully

equipped to use the iPads, as the schools did not have 1:1 technology integration or the

technical support for iPads in their teaching. They also explained that their teaching

assignment relegated them to teaching to mandatory test prep. For some, their mentor

teachers did not want them to use technology.

After this, my confidence was shaken in technology’s role with literacy learning.

Perhaps my understanding of multiliteracies was not yet possible in schools. Perhaps I

was not equipping my pre-service teachers with the right skills or mindset to use

technology effectively to expand understandings of literacy. Why were the pre-service

teachers not embracing what they had created and learned in the methods class and

integrating it somehow into their student teaching, despite any obstacles they came

across? There was a disconnect between what I taught and what the pre-service teachers

experienced. I needed to understand how to address this disconnect so I could help future

pre-service teachers.

This experience solidified my interest in exploring how English teachers reconcile

their own personal knowledge and views on literacy. I wanted to understand their

thoughts on technology’s role in literacy understanding and learning and how they do use

technology to support and enact their understandings of literacy in their own classrooms.

Furthermore, I wanted to know if any of these ideas support new understandings of

literacy, specifically the expanded notion of multiliteracies, and how English teachers

create learning opportunities for their students to be multiliterate as well.

New Learning

My middle school teaching experience, my experience with pre-service teachers

in the methods class, and my research on beginning English teachers’ emerging

understandings of multiliteracies (Boche, 2014) has left me searching for further

understanding of authentic and practical multiliteracies teaching experiences. My desire

is to pinpoint specific knowledge and concrete teaching practices to provide a clearer

understanding of how to enact these practices in my own instruction as well as for my

future pre-service teachers. Therefore, I thought I would return to the place where it all

started for me: my former middle school.

In the three years since I left, the school is now 1:1 where all students and

teachers have access to mobile devices and the Internet (Spires, Wiebe, Young,

Hollebrands & Lee, 2012), with iPads in the middle school and laptops in the high

school. All the teachers have undergone intensive training with the iPads, focusing on the

features, the different applications, and the iPad’s ability to aid student learning in a way

that cannot be accomplished with traditional pen and paper. They also devote their

Tuesday morning professional development time to improving their instruction and their

assessments with technology.

Designated as an ‘Apple Distinguished School’ and firmly entrenched in the 1:1

concept, College Prep Academy believes the 1:1 environment will “promote authentic

learning, enabling students to create both semantic and personal significance with

academic concepts in the context of the world around them.” (Spires, Wiebe, Young,

Hollebrands & Lee, 2012, p. 237). With the move to the 1:1 model, the administration

wants to see more hybrid learning environments, more project-based inquiry learning,

and more collaboration to enhance learning.

While studies have found that literacy teachers believe technology should be

integrated into curriculum and instruction (McGrail, 2006; Hutchison & Reinking 2011;

Ruday, Conradi, Heny, Lovette, 2013), much still needs to be learned about teachers’

beliefs and knowledge of the best ways to integrate technology into the curriculum

(McGrail, 2006; Ruday, Conradi, Heny, Lovette, 2013). In particular, researchers need to

turn to teachers to figure out how technology is impacting new conceptions of literacy

and the conflicts inherent in this process (McGrail, 2006) as teachers are experimenting

with connecting technology to student learning. To understand the interplay between

technology and literacy in a classroom setting, I approached five of my former English

teacher colleagues – two in 6th grade, one in 7th grade, and two in 8th grade – to

participate in this study to research the differing contexts in which literacy and

technology do and do not integrate into the English curriculum. I also sought to learn how

multiliteracies is or is not enacted in the classroom as well as the practical and

experiential knowledge that practicing teachers employ on a daily basis to better inform

my understanding of multiliteracies and subsequently help my pre-service teachers.

Four of the five teachers – Maggie, Lindsay, Lilly, Sophie – all have master’s

degrees; Rick is in the process of earning one. Their unique and diverse backgrounds and

experiences with teaching and literacy offer perspectives on what teachers face when it

comes to making decisions on technology’s role in literacy learning in the English

classroom. I was particularly pleased to have four of the teachers participate in the study

because they were recognized as successful in their teaching practice before the big

technology push from the administration. I was interested to see if their successes with

students’ literacy understanding and learning would translate naturally into a more

technology-infused environment. I was happy to be working with experienced and

recognized educators, and I thought their experiences and knowledge about literacy and

technology would help extend my learning and subsequently the learning of others.

I based this dissertation research on exploring how practicing English teachers’

make sense of and engage with literacy and technology in their instruction and classroom

practices and exploring how practicing teachers utilize technology to support their

understanding and enactment of literacy in the classroom. As my own story is rich and

complex in nature, I turned to narrative inquiry to help make meaning of my colleagues’

complex stories to more fully understand how they have come to comprise their

knowledge of literacy, literacy and technology, and classroom instruction and practices.

In addition to examining the formal knowledge my colleagues draw upon on a daily

basis, I also hoped to tap into the informal and reflective knowledge they have gained

through experience as well as any inquiry-based research they have conducted to enhance

their teaching and learning (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). To guide my conversation

with my colleagues, I first sought to understand how my colleagues defined literacy. I

then examined their views on technology and literacy. Finally, I focused the interviews

and my observations in their classrooms and further drew out my colleagues’ knowledge

of literacy, technology, and instruction by seeking to understand how they use technology

to support their understanding and enactment of literacy in their classrooms.

Understanding current knowledge and practices of practicing English teachers –

particularly given the constraints they face with standardized testing, the implementation

of the Common Core State Standards, and mandated technology integration – provides

both myself and other teacher educators with the ability to better prepare pre-service

teachers for literacy instruction in the 21st century. By examining how practicing English

teachers use technology, as applied in the context of literacy learning in classroom

teaching, teacher instruction, and teacher knowledge, I and other teacher educators will

be better informed to help both pre-service and practicing teachers purposefully and

meaningfully integrate technology into literacy practices in the classroom. Examining

teacher practice through narrative inquiry also encompasses the Conference on English

Education’s (CEE) (2008) dimensions of identifying and explaining how English studies

include “a wide range of intellectual content, a wide variety of communicative genres and

literacy practices, pluralistic and inclusive approaches to literacy use and instruction, and

diverse ideological perspectives” (para. 4). Making explicit connections between what is

currently happening in the classroom to what is happening in teacher preparation is

crucial to examine current ideas in teaching instruction and student learning. Listening to

teachers’ voices and examining their knowledge can shed light on this complex and

intricate field for the betterment of pre-service teachers.

CHAPTER 2 – REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

To understand these issues, I explored the literature to understand how others

have made sense of the interplay between technology and literacy. As my understanding

of literacy has grown to incorporate the notion of multiliteracies, I must understand the

overall multiliteracies framework that includes a specific multiliteracies pedagogy,

understand pedagogy of design, and understand how technological pedagogical and

content knowledge (TPACK) interact with these different ideas. I must also understand

how teachers’ formal knowledge and personal knowledge interact in specific

frameworks. Additionally, I need to be aware of the available literature that incorporates

teacher knowledge in relation to multiliteracies.

Multiliteracies

Both of the leading literacy professional organizations, the National Council of

Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) recognize

the changing nature of literacy in the 21st century:

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices

shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change,

so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity

of literate environments, the 21st century demands that literate persons possess a

wide range of abilities and competences: many literacies. These literacies are

multiple, dynamic, and malleable (NCTE, 2013, para 1).

These literacies will also continue to evolve in the future: “New literacies of today

will be replaced by even new literacies tomorrow as information and communication

technology (ICTs) continuously emerge among a more globalized community of

learners” (IRA, 2009, para 6). Literacy practices, therefore, are continually impacted by

technology and multimodality, and both continually shape the other.

A multiliteracies framework, as espoused by the New London Group (1996),

reflects these changing ideas. Multiliteracies recognizes both the increasing cultural and

linguistic diversity in the new globalized society as well as the new text forms from

multiple communicative technologies. There is also the need for people to possess new

skills to operate successfully in the changing literate, and increasingly diversified, social

environment. The New London Group (1996) argues “to be relevant, learning processes

need to recruit, rather than attempt to ignore and erase, the different subjectivities,

interests, intentions, commitments, and purposes that students bring to learning,” (p. 18)

as well as the different mediums and modes in which students operate. Teachers therefore

need new knowledge that reflects these varying and multiple discourses.

These new and multiple literacies call upon different skills and knowledge;

placing “increased cognitive demands on the audience to interpret the intertextuality of

communication events that include combinations of print, speech, images, sounds,

movement, music and animation. Products may blur traditional lines of genre,

author/audience, and linear sequence” (NCTE, 2008, n.p.). Therefore, educators have the

responsibility to adjust their classroom practice to prepare students to become “active and

successful participants in the 21st century globalized society” (NCTE, 2013, n.p.) by

becoming proficient with different technological tools. This proficiency includes

managing, analyzing, and synthesizing numerous types of continuous information.

Students must also be critical when analyzing and evaluating multimedia texts in order to

attend to the different ethical considerations and responsibilities in the differing

multifaceted technology environments.

Despite the recognition of technology’s role in multiliteracies and multimodality

in literacy education, adoption and implementation into the classroom has often been met

with resistance. This ranges from a skeptical viewpoint, requiring technology to prove its

usefulness before integration, to a neutral viewpoint, where technology could be good but

not necessarily connected to prime aspects of literacy, to a transformational view in

which technology redefines literacy (Bruce, 1997; Labbo & Reinking, 1999; Swenson,

Young, McGrail, Rozema & Whitin, 2006). Furthermore, Bruce (1997) argues that these

views often place technology and literacy into two distinct realms that do not overlap or

integrate. Labbo & Reinking (1999) and Walsh (2010) echo this sentiment in that

educators have far too long thought of technology in terms of its technological aspects

and less of what it means for different areas of literacy, particularly how technology

transforms literacy practices. Thus, a different understanding of technology’s role in

literacy is needed, one that is more dynamic and multifaceted, where literacy is expressed

through its technology rather than determined by it (Bruce, 1997) and “participation in

shaping literacies becomes even more important than acquiring literacies” (Bloome &

Enciso, 2006, p. 302, emphasis in original). Literacy and technology, then, act in

conjunction with each other through socially constructed practices (Myers, 2006) that

require new beliefs and new goals for the new digital multiliteracies.

Both Labbo & Reinking (1999) and Myers (2006) offer goals and beliefs about

technology’s role in literacy practices. For example, they agree that new literacies include

both old and new literacy practices and new digital technologies should be used to

support the idea of intertextuality and intersubjectivity (Myers, 2006; Labbo &

Reinking). Digital literacy views literate acts as strategic with technology, where old and

new literacies are used to participate in various discourse communities and empower

students. To this end, new technologies are be used to transform literacy instruction in

order to prepare students for the multiliterate future (Labbo & Reinking, 1999). Literacy

instruction is also employing digital tools to help compose with multimedia and

multimodal tools that reflect the collaborative and constructive social practices of

students (Myers, 2006). The question, then, is not whether technology’s role in literacy

education is ‘good,’ but rather how if it is a complex issue that is dependent on the

context, the students, and the role it plays in learning.

Jewitt (2008) argues that how knowledge is represented is important to

knowledge construction, thus making the form integral to meaning and learning in

general. With this in mind, Jewitt (2008) argues that there are new conditions and

conceptualizations of literacy. Print is no longer the primary medium of dissemination.

Different modes contribute to meaning making and vary from person to person (Jewitt,

2005). Literacy, then, is not seen as an autonomous set of skills to be learned in a school

setting. Instead it is localized and situated. This includes the idea of multiliteracies that

stretch beyond standard forms of written and spoken language to culturally and

linguistically diverse landscapes. Meaning is now made through many representations

and communicational resources that change what is possible to easily express and

represent (Walsh, 2010).

This huge shift from traditional literacy to 21st century multiliteracies reflects “the

impact of communication technologies and multimedia on the evolving nature of texts, as

well as the skills and dispositions associated with the consumption, production,

evaluation, and distribution of those texts” (Borsheim, Meritt & Reed, 2008, p. 87).

Educators are still grappling with what this means and what to do with the different types

of literacies. This is especially true in regards to the different messages teachers are

receiving as the accountability movement emphasizes traditional literacy practices. They

are expected to reinforce grammar and reading comprehension with testing in direct

contrast to the social-mediated practices of multiliteracies, technology, and

multimodality. In the instance of accountability, multiliteracies is applied as more skills

based: “It is as if learning with technology is being perceived as learning the technology

rather than using a range of multimodal literacy tools (supported by these technologies)

in the pursuit of learning” (Tierney, Band & Bresler, 2006, p. 360, emphasis in original).

Therefore, it is crucial that these new and emerging literacies contribute to increased

learning opportunities.

If technology and literacy continually shape each other, and if educators are going

to be truly equipped to prepare students to be active and productive participants in the

evolving nature of literacy, not only do they need a multifaceted framework that reflects

an integrated nature of knowledge, they also need an expanded view of literacy that takes

into account multiple realities (Labbo & Reinking, 1999; Walsh, 2010). They need a

pedagogy that ultimately supports the transformation of both practice and literacy

understanding. The multiliteracies pedagogy provides a flexible and critical framework

by which educators can prepare students.

Multiliteracies Pedagogy

Multiliteracies pedagogy recognizes the complex integration of four factors:

situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice (New

London Group, 1996). Situated practice is “constituted by immersion in meaningful

practices within a community of learners” (p. 33). This idea echoes the contextual nature

of schools where technology will not work for every student in every situation or for

every subject. Overt instruction allows teachers to scaffold learning activities to allow

learners “to gain explicit information at times when it can most usefully organize and

guide practice, building on and recruiting what the learner already knows and has

accomplished” (p. 33). This similarly reflects the necessary technological knowledge

teachers will need to pass along to students in topic-specific or subject-specific activities

(Cox & Graham, 2009).

In critical framing, learners constructively critique what they have learned to

extend and apply it to new and relevant innovations. Just as teachers need to be aware of

the affordances and constraints of technology and what this means for student learning,

teachers can also extend critical framing to ethical and social issues related to

technological capabilities. The goal of this transformed practice is where “students can

demonstrate how they can design and carry out, in a reflective manner, new practices

embedded in their own goals and values” (New London Group, 1996, p. 35).

Transformation takes place when students re-create knowledge and understanding suited

to their own purposes:

Teachers who are committed to a multiliteracies pedagogy offer their students

ample opportunities to access, evaluate, search, sort, gather, and read information

from a variety of multimedia and multimodal sources and invite students to

collaborate in real and virtual spaces to produce and publish multimedia and

multimodal texts for a variety of audiences and purposes (Borsheim et al., 2008,

p. 87).

Students should be able to move across the different modes and draw on technology to

achieve specific purposes. Technology aids switching modes by “scaffold[ing] students’

development of these traditional (literacy) skills and mak[ing] the purposes and processes

more authentic than they were in the past” (Borsheim et al., 2008, p. 88). Therefore,

teachers need to be mindful of how technology is present throughout and employed in a

more meaningful and purposeful way.

The four components of multiliteracies pedagogy require a combination of

traditional literacy practices with an understanding of the new design processes. Teachers

need to help students consider the affordances and constraints of particular modes while

also scaffolding these practices to help with cohesion, planning, and learning. In addition

“design may be the significant factor that will assist teachers in the future as they need to

incorporate traditional with multimedia and communication” (Walsh, 2006, p. 45). For

example, Heintz, Borsheim, Caughlan, Juzwik & Sherry (2010) used multiliteracies

pedagogy to emphasize the expanded nature of literacy with their pre-service teachers

through the use of video taping as a form of reflection during student teaching.

Technology was integrated into authentic literacy practices through overt instruction with

handouts containing instructions for the project. The critical reflection component

consisted of having the pre-service teachers review each other’s work. Situated practice is

reflected in the student teaching setting. Finally transformation took place through the

process of multiple practice with collaboration and revision.

Building upon the New London Group’s (1996) multiliteracies pedagogy, Cope

and Kalantzis (2009) reimagine the pedagogy as knowledge processes and pedagogical

acts to help extend literacy teaching and learning. Agency and diversity are still key as

learners are engaged in their own knowledge processes as well as working with others to

develop knowledge. Cope and Kalantzis (2009) offer up four processes by which teachers

can engage their students to look at literacy differently. The first is experiencing where

teachers focus on both known individual experiences as well as new experiences. The

second is conceptualizing in which teachers and students work together to develop

concepts and categories as well as becoming active theory makers. Analyzing is where

teachers help students reach higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy as well as helping them

critically interrogate diverse perspectives. Finally teachers and students apply their

knowledge in real world situations as well as ones transformed. Students and learners are

at the center of these knowledge processes and pedagogical acts as traditional notions of

literacy (reading and writing) are included and subsequently woven together with out-of-

school literacies, with learners being active agents in the process. There is no map to

follow; rather this type of pedagogy allows for alternate starting points for learning,

forms of engagement, divergent learning orientations, and different modalities in

meaning making (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009).

Pedagogy of Design

To this end, a multiliteracies perspective adopts a pedagogy of design (New

London Group, 1996), where “teachers and managers are seen as designers of learning

processes and environments, not as bosses dictating what those in their charge should

think and do” (p. 19). This pedagogy includes examining available designs, redesigning

them with available and appropriate technologies, and creating the redesigned through a

process of critical reflection. Individuals in the designing process “are now seen as the

remakers, transformers, of sets of representational resources – rather than as users of

stable systems, in a situation where multiplicity of representational modes are brought

into textual compositions” (Kress, 2000, p. 160). By engaging in the designing process in

the classroom, teachers equip students with the necessary skills to successfully participate

as transformation agents in the design process.

New technologies allow students to multitask across a wide variety of platforms

and combine out of school literacies with school conceptions of literacy. By combining

out of school literacies with in school literacies, schools need to examine how new and

emerging technologies can enhance what does happen in the classroom. Through the use

of new types of text, reading is no longer a traditional print-based literacy but rather a

hybrid that requires evolved thinking (Walsh, 2010). This is most certainly true, as people

have become the designers and producers of their own content. Therefore, it is crucial

that teachers “develop classroom learning experiences that are appropriate for both

conventional and new forms of literacy” (Walsh, 2006, p. 34) while tapping into both

formal and practical knowledge to do this successfully. In order to be successful, students

as designers need to know what modes are available and how to use them purposefully

(McLean & Rowsell, 2013). A pedagogy of design is appropriate as it “provides students

with a tool kit of relevant knowledge, critical skills, and multiple processes through

which to shape the world in which they live” (Williams, 2010, p. 250). This is reflected in

the collaborative and contributing nature of Web 2.0 technology, which allows users to

shape their technological literacy practices (Iyer, 2007). In this regard, “students need to

be equally immersed in functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies in order to fully

understand the digital communication technologies of Web 2.0” (Williams, 2010, p. 250).

This requires a new way of thinking and instructing for teachers in schools.

In the multiliteracies framework, design is the way meaning is actively

constructed through engagement in different patterns and conventions (Jacobs, 2012) and

includes six elements: linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and multimodal (New

London Group, 1996). The combination of these six elements requires teachers to

develop stronger understandings of what students know and think while putting

multimodal texts in the center of this critical reflection in order to realize the

“transformative potentials of such criticality” (Bearne, 2003 p. 99). Bearne (2003)

furthermore argues that we need a new frame of reference and new descriptive

vocabulary to “describe the features of multimodal texts in a similar way to the

descriptions offered of written texts” (p. 99). Teachers should help students recognize and

evaluate the different demands of a multimodal text as well as help students be cognizant

of the knowledge necessary to accomplish this pedagogically.

For example, Myers (2006) argues that writing and composing exist in social

practices, not necessarily technology. Digital tools, though, may help in the design

process, especially as the digital tools are already integrated into students’ everyday lives.

English teachers must keep in mind how different social practices are mediated by

multimodal representations of experience. In the same way, Tierney, Bond & Bresler

(2006) noted in their research with students engaging with multimodal tools how

“students’ knowledge might be represented via multilayered and dynamic graphic

interfaces” (p. 362) along with an increase in experimentation into how ideas and topics

might be accessed and approached in multimodal ways. Literacy learning is no longer a

linear process but rather crisscrosses multiple domains and modes. Walsh (2006) echoes

this idea after examining podcasting and whiteboard integration; the literacy practices

present in engaging with technology reflect an “interconnection and interdependence

between modalities of written text, image, and sound” (p. 37). Technology is not just

enhancing literacy but also promoting different learning altogether, an issue important to

teachers’ instruction in the classroom.

Through the pedagogy of design and multimodality, teachers can help students

develop what Vasudevan (2011) calls multimodal selves; “a concept that foregrounds the

multiplicity and fluidity of social practices that signify varying cultural affiliations and

act as markers of identity that are mediated by and with expressive modalities” (p. 89).

The development of multimodal selves begins with multimodal composing reflecting on

the fact that reading and writing have always been multimodal in nature, and that by

bringing in other modes, such sound and image, there are new possibilities for meaning

making. In this way, multimodality serves as a way to analyze both print and non-print

texts and practices. By engaging with these multimodal technologies, Vasudevan (2011)

contends that digital geographies (spaces that students inhabit actively) now become the

focus for different interactions among students. It is in these digital geographies that

students realize the interdependent nature of technology (modes) and literacy. In addition,

teachers should be cognizant of multimodality outside of the classroom, as they should

seek to connect larger communities and contexts that students inhabit to help them

become critically reflective of the types of literacies they encounter on a daily basis.

Mills (2010) extends the idea of multimodal selves by establishing multimodality

as central to the literacy practices of students. Written word, while essential, is no longer

the primary way with which to make meaning. With this in mind, “adolescents need

facility with an array of multimodal and digital literacies for different social purposes:

critical inquiry, creativity, and communication” (p. 36). In addition to developing a new

conception of the content area of literacy and technology’s role in literacy, teachers also

need to develop a new pedagogical approach.

Mills (2010) points out that problems remain in how educators currently approach

this in the classroom. First, not all students are digital natives; “teachers need to know

what multimodal practices count and for whom” (Mills, 2010, p. 37). Not every student

has equal access or equal experience with these types of digital literacies. Additionally, in

and out of school literacies must be recognized and given consideration (Perry, 2010).

Either extreme of literacies – strictly academic literacies or strictly outside of school

literacies – is not helpful in multimodal learning. Rather, it can be helpful to use out of

school multimodal practices as a way to connect with the traditional literacy practices

within schools. Students still need to know how to operate within an academic school

setting, and multimodal literacy practices can help. Finally, there is a need for scaffolded

multimodal practices within schools (Iyer, 2007) As Mills (2010) argues, “Providing

expert guidance by teachers, books, or technologies is one of the key responsibilities of

schooling, and it is unreasonable to expect students to reinvent pivotal literacy practices

of adults in social, recreational, and civic engagement by themselves” (p. 40). Instead,

teachers should point students in the right direction by helping and scaffolding

experiences. If “there are many synergies between technological literacy and the notion

of multiliteracies within literacy education, in developing relevant and engaging

pedagogies which promote the critical engagement necessary for students to contribute

and achieve to their full potential” (Williams, 2009, p. 247), then teachers need to be

aware of the types of knowledge needed in order to successfully relate these meanings

and conceptions of literacy to students.

TPACK

To use technology effectively as indicated in the previous examples, teachers

must possess specific knowledge about technology and how it can be used effectively in

different content areas and instructional practices. Technological pedagogical and content

knowledge (Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Koehler & Mishra, 2009) is built off Shulman’s

(1986) idea of pedagogical content knowledge, which integrates pedagogy and content.

With the advancement of technology’s role in education, a new understanding is needed

that reflects how technology has changed or has the capacity to change classrooms.

Teachers must learn the tools and also the techniques and skills needed to meaningfully

and purposefully use technology to support learning. Technology is not static, which

requires evolving thinking and knowledge. This is found in seven interwoven domains of

knowledge in TPACK:

• Pedagogical Knowledge – knowledge of general pedagogical activities

independent of content

• Content Knowledge – knowledge of possible topic-specific representations in a

given subject area

• Pedagogical Content Knowledge – knowledge of activities and representations

• Technological Knowledge – knowledge of how to use emerging technologies

• Technological Content Knowledge – knowledge of topic-specific representations

• Technological Pedagogical Knowledge – knowledge of general pedagogical

activities that can be used with emerging technologies

• Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge – knowledge of how to

coordinate subject or topic specific activities with topic specific representations

using emerging technologies to facilitate student learning (Cox & Graham, 2009,

p. 62-64).

Quality teaching takes into account technology, pedagogy, and content and does not

isolate them from each other. The TPACK framework can especially be utilized in

situations where new technologies are constantly being introduced.

Currently, technology is not seen as transformative but rather as an aid or

extension tool, and much of the lack of change in practice is dependent on the content

area. This lack of transformation is due to what Harris, Mishra & Koehler (2009)

consider ways in technology is currently being used and integrated into the classroom.

The first way is software-focused initiatives that focus more on the program and lesson

one the pedagogy. The second way includes basic demonstrations of sample resources,

lessons, and projects. The third is technology-based educational reform efforts, which

includes structure or standardized professional development workshops and technology-

focused teacher education courses. Though these initiatives are different, the focus is

more on the technology than on student learning. In addition, some technology is

commonplace and everyday (computers, cell phones) while other technology is complex

and multifaceted causing trouble for teachers, such as the Web 2.0 technology that

require critical skills and new knowledge to operate successfully (Williams, 2009).

Technology also has its own affordances and constraints and deciphering among these

can be difficult, especially as teachers and teacher educators contemplate how, when,

why, and to what extent to integrate them into classrooms (Koehler & Mishra (2009).

TPACK, then, helps clear up the messiness of meaningful technological integration into

the classroom by giving teachers a clear and concise focus in their classrooms.

TPACK is flexible and does not prescribe a certain approach in its development,

as “there is no single technological solution that will function equally well for every

teacher, every course, or every pedagogical approach” (Harris, Mishra & Koehler, 2009).

In addition, technology for technology’s sake is not the main focus. A “content-neutral

emphasis on generic software tools assumes that knowing a technology automatically

leads to good teaching with technology” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p. 1031). With this in

mind, “integration efforts should be creatively designed or structured for specific subject

matter ideas in specific classroom contexts” (Koehler & Mishra, 2009, p. 62, emphasis in

original). TPACK can be used across content areas according to specific goals, means,

and outcomes.

The TPACK framework can be implemented in multiple ways. Mishra & Koehler

(2006) advocate for a learning by design approach (design-based activities). In this

framework, “emphasis is placed on learning by doing, and less so on overt lecturing and

traditional teaching” (p. 1035). Pre-service teachers learn by becoming practitioners,

constructing artifacts, and taking an active role in learning. Harris, Mishra & Koehler

(2009) argue for developing different learning activities within particular content areas

that are matched up to digital and non-digital technologies, noting differences among the

different content areas:

Technologies’ affordances create opportunities for both enhancing existing

learning activity types and creating new ones. Effective teaching requires

knowledge of both the activity structures/types that are appropriate for teaching

specific content and the manners in which the particular technologies can be

utilized as a part of the lesson, project, or unit design (p. 406).

Spires, Hervey & Watson (2013) used a project-based inquiry model in a graduate

literacy, technology and media course to develop practicing teachers’ TPACK. Finally,

Wetzel & Marshall (2012) advocate for starting with the learning goals and activities in a

content area and then selecting digital tools to help in achieving those learning goals. The

goal is to have technology as an integrated component with content areas, not isolated.

This may mean that some technologies are not compatible certain elements in content

areas, and teachers will need to make the decision of when it is appropriate, thus allowing

for the flexible nature of TPACK and pedagogy.

As the TPACK framework “provides an explicit mechanism for discussing the

tools teachers use in the service of teaching and learning (Graham, Borup & Smith, 2012,

p. 532, emphasis in original), further information is needed to reflect content specific

pedagogical practices. Niess (2011) agrees that

the problem is that today’s teachers have not learned their content with these

technologies. They do not have essential experiences in learning with these

technologies nor have they been prepared to teach their content with these new

and emerging technologies; they have not been prepared to engage in the strategic

thinking for knowing when, where, and how to use domain-specific knowledge

and strategies for teaching with the technologies (p. 308).

As technological knowledge is interwoven with both pedagogy and content, a different

view and expanding notion of literacy is needed that reflects this integrated nature.

TPACK supports this more multifaceted nature of literacy practices. TPACK

supports “the relationship between traditional and digital texts, and capitalizing upon

their unique potentials in informed, flexible, and critical ways” (Swenson et al., 2006, p.

354). For example, Spires, Hevery & Watson (2013), in addition to using a project-based

inquiry model to examine literacy and technology to develop practicing teachers’

TPACK, also noted that a high intellectual rigor must be present in addition to

technology integration. Similarly, Wetzel & Marshall (2012) started with learning goals

and activities in literacy content areas to help teachers plan at the intersection of each part

of the TPACK framework. TPACK development does not happen overnight, instead it

must be scaffolded and continue to play an important role as a powerful tool for pre-

service teachers and teachers as they navigate new literacies with students.

With the ideas of technology, multimodality, and digital literacies all contributing

to becoming multiliterate, the definition and concepts behind the term multiliteracies can

become confusing and interchangeable. To clarify, Jacobs (2013, p. 101) provides an

overview of the concepts in the table below.

Technology

Integration

(TPACK)

Multimodalities

Multiliteracies Pedagogy

The knowledge about

teaching with

technology that a

teacher brings to

instruction

The relationship of the

elements within and

structure of a text

How teachers create learning

opportunities using multiple

modes of meaning making to

guide students toward the design

of social futures with a diverse

globalized society.

Focus on the

individual teacher

Focus on the text

Focus on the relationship between

pedagogy and learning

Figure 1. Overview of Difference Between Concepts.

To further clarify, digital literacies or new literacies (see Lankshear & Knobel, 2006)

focus more on the individual in a technology rich environment and do not account for

text consumption or production and are not mentioned as they do not suit the purpose or

conversation of this study. Text consumption and production are exclusively located in

multimodality, but text is of prominent importance and not the user or producer of the

text. TPACK is more focused on technology and how the teacher uses it to reach

instructional goals, but is less concerned with the social and contextual nature of

technology (Jacobs, 2013). The focus for this study is on the broader picture of

multiliteracies that “acknowledge the productive power of individuals as they engage in

multimodal texts regardless of the technology required for that engagement” (p. 102).

Multiliteracies also includes teachers’ knowledge of the interplay between literacy and

technology and how their practice supports learning within the larger multiliterate world.

Teacher Knowledge Frameworks

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) provide a framework that differentiates between

prominent knowledge conceptions of teacher learning. This framework consists of

knowledge-for-practice, knowledge-in-practice, and knowledge-of-practice. Their

purpose in creating this framework is to understand teacher learning that is “based on the

images and assumptions that underlie methods and on the educational purposes that drive

various teacher learning initiatives” (p. 251). Each piece of the framework will be

explored in the following sections.

Knowledge-for-Practice

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) classify knowledge-for-practice as “the formal

knowledge and theory for teachers to use in order to improve practice” (p. 250). It is

based on the assumption that if a teacher possesses more knowledge of subject matter,

theory, pedagogy and instruction, this will lead to more effective practice. Teaching,

then, “is understood primarily as a process of applying received knowledge to a practical

situation: Teachers implement, translate, use adapt, and/or put into practice what they

have learned of the knowledge base” (p. 257). This knowledge base is provided

exclusively from experts outside the classroom.

Knowledge-for-practice is built off from the idea that there is a science-based

approach to knowledge, one that is standard, formal, and gained from research based on

scientific methodology (Fenstermacher, 1994). Knowledge-for-practice does recognize,

though, knowledge of both content and pedagogy, as advocated by Shulman’s (1986)

conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge. Content and pedagogy have always been

an important knowledge base for teachers; what was usually ignored was “how subject

matter was transformed from the knowledge of the teacher into the content of instruction”

(p. 6) and “how particular formations of the content related to what students came to

know or misconstrue” (p. 6). Thus, Shulman (1986) argues that content and pedagogy

separated from each other are useless.

In addition to pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge-for-practice is also

informed by Shulman’s (1986) other forms of teacher knowledge, including propositional

knowledge, case knowledge, and strategic knowledge. These types of knowledge

recognize theory, the practical aspects of teaching, and the moral and ethical implications

in practice. Teachers can access this knowledge through the accumulated scholarship in

the content disciplines, from educational materials and structuring bodies, formal

educational scholarship, and the wisdom of practice (Shulman, 1987). This knowledge

base, Shulman (1987) argues, “must therefore deal with the purposes of education as well

as the methods and strategies of educating” (p. 13). Knowledge-for-practice should also

meet certain standards of significance, generalizability and validity (Fenstermacher,

1994) in order to move beyond context, situation, and time.

While knowledge-for-practice is essential to teacher learning, teachers use and

blend many domains of knowledge in their teaching. Fenstermacher (1994) argues that

Shulman’s idea of formal knowledge as found in pedagogical content knowledge takes

precedent over personal practical knowledge of teachers. Therefore, Cochran-Smith and

Lytle (1999) argue that, in addition to knowing content and pedagogy, teachers’

knowledge should be funneled through constructivism by which they dialogue and reflect

on formal knowledge and become knowledge users and generators. This overcomes

enacting change simply by implementing formal knowledge rather than creating it by

themselves. This knowledge creation includes formal knowledge as well as the practical

knowledge discussed in the next section.

Knowledge-in-Practice

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) define knowledge-in-practice as practical

knowledge that is embedded in practice and reflection. Teachers learn this knowledge

“when they have opportunities to probe the knowledge embedded in the work of expert

teachers and/or to deepen their own knowledge and expertise as makers of wise

judgments and designers of rich learning interactions in the classroom” (p. 250).

Knowledge-in-practice, therefore, is acquired through experience and reflection.

Knowledge-in-practice is based in part on what Connelly, Clandinin, and He

(1997) describe as personal practical knowledge that is firmly rooted in teachers’

experiences. In this regard, “knowledge is not something objective and independent of

the teacher to be learned and transmitted, but, rather, is the sum total of the teacher’s

experiences” (p. 666). Personal knowledge is in relation to circumstances, actions, and

undergoing’s that may contain emotional content. This personal knowledge can then be

discovered in a person’s actions or discourse or conversation (Clandinin, 1985). Personal

practical knowledge, then, is the “body of convictions, conscious or unconscious, which

have arisen from experience, intimate, social, and traditional and which are expressed in a

person’s action” (Clandinin, 1985, p. 362). Studying teachers’ experiences is crucial to

access their personal practical knowledge in order to understand more fully what they

know and understand.

Reflection also figures prominently in knowledge-in-practice. Reflection helps

teachers examine the teaching practice and research taken-for-granted assumptions that

influence the approach to practice. Grounded in Dewey and Schon, reflection “is

presented as a conscious effort by the individual to explore an issue and seek a

conclusion, grounded in the individual’s purposeful engagement in reflective thinking”

(Shoffner, 2008, p. 124). Reflection provides opportunities to understand stories of

teachers’ lives through reflective practice (Loughran, 2002). Reflection helps teachers

confront the complexity of students, learning of selves and teaching, subject matter, and

various contexts. Reflection is also a powerful strategy to engage with another person in a

way that encourages talking, questioning, confronting, examining planning, implantation,

and evaluation of teaching (Hatton & Smith, 1995). Providing teachers with the

opportunity to share their experiences will therefore provide a deeper foundation for

knowledge of teacher practices.

The knowledge gained through reflection and practice has the ability to contribute

more to the teaching profession than formal knowledge can by itself (Fenstermacher,

1994) as it provides justification not found in formal knowledge and is embedded in what

is of primary concern in teaching: practice. In this shift of knowledge to where the

teacher can produce knowledge, the teacher is now one “who questions his or her

assumptions and is consciously thoughtful about goals, practices, students, and contexts”

(Richardson, 1994, p. 7). To improve teaching, then, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999)

argue that “teachers need opportunities to enhance, make explicit, and articulate the tacit

knowledge embedded in experience and in the wise action of very competent

professionals” (p. 262-263). Discussing and sharing their knowledge can only add to the

larger knowledge base of teaching.

Knowledge-in-practice, though, is one piece in the larger knowledge base for

teacher learning as researchers may ignore formal knowledge altogether or else create a

huge dichotomy between formal and practical knowledge (Cochran-Smith & Lytle,

1999). There is also the danger if teachers actually know what they know and whether or

not the researcher is inferring the practical knowledge of teachers (Fenstermacher, 1994).

While Richardson (1994) views practical knowledge for everyday improvement and

formal knowledge for the larger community base, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999)

explore knowledge-for-practice and knowledge-in-practice in their third knowledge

construct, knowledge-of-practice.

Knowledge-of-Practice

Knowledge-of-practice is knowledge teachers need to teach well that “is

generated when teachers treat their own classrooms and schools as sites for intentional

investigation at the same time that they treat the knowledge and theory produced by

others as generative material for interrogation and interpretation (Cochran-Smith & Lytle,

1999, p. 250). Knowledge-of-practice, then, is seen as local knowledge that is created in

inquiry communities for their own contexts to connect to larger social and political

issues. Knowledge-of-practice does not exclusively build upon the first two knowledge

types. Instead “understanding the knowledge of teaching means transcending the idea that

the formal-practice distinction captures the universe of knowledge types” (p. 274).

Knowledge-for-practice is context based, connected to the knower, and relevant to

immediate situations as well as a process of theorizing.

Numerous initiatives are found in knowledge-of-practice and most focus on

teacher research and teacher action research. Lytle and Cochran-Smith (1992) advocate

for teacher research as

it allows us to reclaim and reexamine more of the existing literature on teaching

written by teachers themselves and enables us to make distinctions about a variety

of teacher-research texts and the contexts in which they are produced and used (p.

300).

Teacher research provides information about classroom life, rich classroom cases, and

describes what teachers consider important issues. This is often seen in how teachers

organize their time and activities, how they jointly construct knowledge in their written

and oral discussions, and how they interpret the task of teaching and schooling. Noffke

(1997) uses teacher action research to discuss the professional, personal, and political

implications of teaching. Teacher action research addresses the difference between

knowledge production and staff development through the knowledge based on

experiential knowledge. This includes legitimizing knowledge through the quality of data

analysis, drawing from theories, and justifying knowledge through the experience of

teachers. Teacher action research also differentiates between personal knowledge and the

personal knowledge disseminated to a wider audience.

In knowledge-for-practice, Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1999) recognize the

importance of contributions from all types of teachers to the knowledge base: “Teachers

across the professional life span – from very new to very experienced – make problematic

their own knowledge and practice as well as the knowledge and practice of others and

thus stand in a different relationship to knowledge” (p. 273). Teachers, not just university

professors, should be knowledge generators and teacher knowledge research “is not for

researchers to know what teachers know, but for teachers to know what they know”

(Fenstermacher, 1994, p. 53). Teachers should be knowers of the known and therein lays

the challenge of teacher knowledge research, as it “is not simply one of showing us that

teachers think, believe, or have opinions, but that they know and even more importantly

that they know that they know” (p.53). Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) end their

discussion by advocating for inquiry as a stance for teachers to emphasize “the

importance of local knowledge that may also be useful to a more public educational

community” (p. 290) that does not distinguish between formal and practical knowledge.

Instead, inquiry as stance forms and reforms understanding of practice in order to show

how teachers engage in important intellectual work.

Knowledge-for-practice, knowledge-in-practice, and knowledge-of-practice are

crucial to establishing the knowledge base of teacher learning. All three interact to form a

more complete picture of what teachers know. They also work together to help teachers

struggle with issues relevant to them by questioning and posing problems rather than

solutions (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). These three knowledge bases as well as inquiry

as stance can be seen in multiliteracies research with both pre-service and practicing

teachers.

Knowledge for/in/of Multiliteracies Practice

Although not specifically broken down into the categories of knowledge-for/in/of-

practice, the available studies that highlight teacher knowledge in multiliteracies practice

nevertheless lend themselves to categorical distinction. Furthermore, the studies can be

broken down into pre-service teachers and practicing teachers. Pre-service teachers refer

to those still in undergraduate or graduate school with no teaching experience. Practicing

teachers refer to teachers who are currently in classrooms interacting with these ideas.

Examining the two different populations provides more insight into what is currently

happening in the field as well as what is missing and needed to better inform teacher

education.

Practicing teachers knowledge for/in multiliteracies practice

There are limited studies that provide information about practicing teachers’

knowledge-for and knowledge-in-multiliteracies practice. The studies available do share

insight on practicing teachers’ knowledge and are centered on the creation of

multiliterate/multimodal projects that demonstrate how teachers used their knowledge-

for-practice and knowledge-in-practice to foster multiliteracies in their respective

classrooms.

For example, Iyer (2007) describes a study of a first grade teacher who combined

traditional print-based literacy with technology to have students create digital storybooks.

The teacher drew on personal understanding of multiliteracies and student learning when

creating the project as the teacher provided models, exemplars, different technological

tools, and extensive scaffolding to help the students critically examine picture books and

their features through multiple modes. Similarly, Walsh (2009) focused on using

technology to redesign school texts to be critical of the representations of Chinese

immigrants in history textbooks as this reflected the situated practice of her student body.

Through her own knowledge for and in practice, Walsh (2009) used overt instruction to

link thematic ideas across a variety of print and digital texts. Her students critically

framed these themes from viewpoints of people from different backgrounds. This then

helped her students to transform the school texts using multimodal representations to

examine issues of power.

Wetzel and Marshall (2012) and Cox and Graham (2009) focused exclusively on

TPACK in practicing teachers’ classrooms. Wetzel and Marshall (2012) looked for

evidence in a middle school teacher’s classroom that fits the TPACK model. Through the

use of technology in a writing workshop to research, create, and share classwork, the

study showed how the teacher used technology as a tool to enhance student learning. Cox

and Graham (2009) examined a middle school teacher who used weblogs to enhance

history learning by looking at the various representations of history found online.

Additionally, the teacher pedagogically motivated students to increase communication

through the weblog tool. Both of these provide real and practical examples of how

teachers used their knowledge-for-practice and knowledge-in-practice.

Finally, Kitson, Feltcher, Kearney, and Houston University (2007) highlight one

teacher’s knowledge-for-multiliteracies-practice and the disconnect between this

knowledge and knowledge-in-practice. The authors suggested that the teacher viewed

multiliterate people having knowledge and use of both traditional and non-print materials.

The teacher also conducted many types of activities in the classroom that centered on

technology materials, print-based materials, and human resources. Ultimately, Kitson,

Feltcher, Kearney and Houston University (2007) found the teacher did not have cultural

and linguistic diversity nor an awareness of the critical conversations necessary for

making meaning from semiotic systems.

Pre-service teachers’ knowledge for multiliteracies practice

The overwhelming majority of the studies of multiliteracies practice focus

exclusively on pre-service teachers with an emphasis on knowledge-for-practice. These

studies highlight how teacher educators have sought to integrate multiliteracies theory

into education programs to boost pre-service teachers’ knowledge-for-practice. The

studies can furthermore be broken down into categories that focus on technological tools,

focus on fostering TPACK in pre-service teachers, and a general focus on multiliteracies

and multimodality.

Tools. To begin with, new technological tools are placed in the center of learning

for pre-service teachers as “preparing pre-service teachers with opportunities to engage in

literacy activities in digital environments may increase their competence and attitudes

toward technology, thus increasing their use of technology to promote digital literacy in

their future classroom” (Hutchinson & Wang, 2012, p. 264). This includes interacting

with various Web 2.0 technological tools that promote collaboration and active

participation from users. For example, Hutchinson & Wang (2012) used blogging

software with their pre-service teachers. Blogging’s asynchronous nature provides a

space for informed response and a way to post discussion and receive comments. In their

study, blogging was used both as a workplace and a social network. They found that pre-

service teachers did not readily adhere to the thought process that technology tools such

as blogs will shift literacy understanding and practice. Instead, teacher educators needed

to explicitly model and make connections for pre-service teachers, such as showing

different affordances, showing social capabilities, and showing how the design and

format of different tools can lead to increased literacy understanding. However, the pre-

service teachers did gain knowledge-for-practice; through working with the software,

they saw blogging as a new and existing forum for writing and as a way to supplement

classroom discussion.

Matthew, Felvegi and Callaway (2009) used wikis as collaborative learning tools

in their Language Arts methods course. Wikis enable collaborative communication in an

online environment where multiple users can easily access and create content. Through

the pre-service teachers’ written reflections and interviews, Matthew, Felvegi and

Callaway (2009) noted that much reading and rereading occurred and multiple

connections to other information and coursework were made. Most pre-service teachers

found the wiki personally useful. They felt ownership over the material and creation and

gained the knowledge-for-practice as they indicated on using it in their future classrooms.

Miller (2007) used digital video composing in an English Language Arts teacher

education course to prepare pre-service teachers to be more multimodal thinkers and

teachers. The pre-service teachers created digital videos and metacognitive strategies.

Reading and writing were mixed in with multimodal theory and practice in order for pre-

service teachers to become critical consumers and thoughtful practitioners of multimodal

teaching. With the integration of this technological tool, Miller (2007) argues that the

pre-service teachers saw their future students as more active readers and consumers of

literacy as the pre-service pursued their own understandings, which in turn led to more

metacognitive awareness of what pre-service teachers were doing when designing their

digital videos.

Finally, Smith and Dobson (2011) sought to prepare their pre-service teachers’

21st century skills through the integration of Voice Thread, a web-based collaborative

multimedia presentation tool that requires reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.

The pre-service teachers in the study recognized how Voice Thread could aid in the

development and improvement of English Language Arts instruction and were motivated

to create high quality presentations. Smith and Dobson (2011) extended the pre-service

teachers’ knowledge-for-practice into critiquing the current condition of schooling. The

pre-service teachers focused on specific challenges such as having adequate access to

such technologies in schools, dealing with safety and publishing issues, and gaining pre-

more freedom when creating assignments that incorporate differing technological tools.

TPACK. If teachers are to understand technology and the different ways it can

support literacy, it is important to understand the different situations and experiences that

might cause this shift in thinking (Boling, 2008). The development of technological and

pedagogical content knowledge, TPACK, also features prominently in pre-service

teachers’ knowledge-for-practice. Boling (2008) examined pre-service teachers in

literacy and technology graduate methods course and noticed that pre-service teachers

thought of technology as an add-on to literacy instruction. The pre-service teachers

believed that technology did not support literacy that was found in schools. As more and

more discussions were centered on new literacy skills, the pre-service teachers gradually

began to make connections between their grown TPACK and foundational literacy skills.

O’Connor, Atkinson, Matusevich, Greene, Pope, and Good (2007) sought to

develop the TPACK of their pre-service teachers through the use of videoconferencing

with local schools to see how practicing teachers in diverse and authentic classroom

settings use technology on a daily basis. The pre-service teachers learned the importance

of having a backup plan for when technology fails, securing technological assistance, and

being flexible and adaptable in instances where change may be needed to achieve the

same results. Hicks (2013) helped his pre-service teachers develop TPACK through the

creation and use of digital portfolios. Hicks (2013) used an inquiry-based approach to

integrating technology into literacy practices to help his pre-service teachers be flexible,

collaborative, and think rhetorically about the issues of technology in teaching. Content

and pedagogy were present in the portfolio creation, but technology changed what the

pre-service teachers were able to do, thus meeting at the intersection of technology,

pedagogy, and content knowledge. Hicks (2013) argues that while the creation and use of

a digital portfolio is a small technology piece in the larger picture, it starts the

conversation of how to “structure meaningful, design-based tasks that will encourage

robust technology learning” (p. 28).

Graham, Borup and Smith (2012) examined their educational technology class

with pre-service teachers as they designed materials for their future students’ learning.

The aim was to study content-specific pedagogical strategies and foster technological

pedagogical content knowledge to focus on technology “as a content domain itself to be

learned rather than as a tool to be used in the service of learning another content” (p.

537, emphasis in original). The authors concluded that exposing pre-service teachers to

more content specific technology integration examples not only emphasized technology

integration but also when and where it should be integrated. Similarly, Groth, Dunlap and

Kidd (2007) redesigned their methods courses to provide pre-service teachers

opportunities to “apply, test, and analyze technology-related activities and literacy-based

strategies with their (future) middle and high school students” (p. 370). This included

integrating more practice based projects that could be directly implemented into the

classroom by primarily focusing on what would first and foremost impact student

learning. The authors concluded that the challenge is to figure out how to make

technology integration meaningful rather than technical or redundant by focusing on

TPACK and how it will impact student achievement.

Multiliteracies & Multimodality. Finally, numerous studies focused on

multiliteracies and multimodality in a general sense to develop knowledge-for-practice in

pre-service teachers. Ajayi (2011) used a survey to bridge the gap between theories of

multiliteracies and multimodality and pre-service teacher’s perceptions of how to teach

these new theories. Findings indicated that pre-service teachers recognized the need for

skills to access and read multimodal technologies in everyday life, and there is a need to

expand curricula of traditional literacy education to include digital and multimedia in

schools. Rowsell, Kosnik & Beck (2008) utilized multiliteracies pedagogy in their pre-

service teacher education program with an expanded range of literacies with non-fiction

writing and digital-based literacy as well as connecting literacy practices to the pre-

service teachers’ future students’ lives. However, the pre-service teachers’ knowledge-

for-practice was hampered by a lack of clarity about multiliteracies pedagogy and an

inadequate range of literacy forms.

Grabill and Hicks (2005) and Graham and Benson (2010) used different

technologies to foster pre-service teachers’ knowledge-for-practice. Grabill and Hicks

(2005) employed digital writing in their methods courses; multiliteracies recognizes the

socially constructed nature of literacies, especially in terms of how technology has

transformed the understandings of texts, reading, and writing. By using digital writing,

Grabill and Hicks sought to create the same “critical and rhetorical types of technology-

rich literacy activities that we would ask them to design for their own students” (p. 307).

Graham and Benson (2010) had their pre-service teachers analyze non-print artifacts

through multimodal modes including analyzing TV shows to create an overall summative

meaning and creating media plans for future classrooms with the end result of a non-print

product. The focus was on breaking free from traditional forms of literacy. The goal of

the plans was to foster awareness, critical thinking, and multiple modes to create

meaning.

Using multiliteracies, multimodality and TPACK as a framework, McVee, Bailey

and Shanahan (2008) examined their 15 week methods course in new literacies and

technology to bring about a shift in thinking about literacy. To encourage problem

solving, encourage metacognitive awareness and encourage pre-service teachers to think

of themselves as reflexive learners, the course was designed around a collaborative

environment where teachers taught and learned from each other. Findings included pre-

service teachers learning to give up control for shared problem solving and distributed

learning, learning print-based texts shifting to multimodal redesigns, and learning how

literacy and technology as transactional processes. McLean and Rowsell (2013) also

designed a graduate pre-service education course to reflect the pedagogy of design

process. By developing key terms and tenets of multimodality and using these terms and

tenets to inform the design of a multimodal pedagogic text, the pre-service teachers were

better able to move from one mode to the other and embrace the process of redesigning

literacy learning. Through this process, their knowledge-for-practice better reflects the

21st century logic of learning and teaching that “calls upon educators to navigate hybrid

and interdisciplinary multimodal resources, understand the affordances and constraints of

each mode, and remix these modes into the existing curriculum in meaningful ways” (p.

22).

Finally, Roasean and Terpstra (2012) created a collaborative self-study with

themselves and their pre-service teachers to develop knowledge-for-practice that viewed

literacy not as reducing activities to either old or new, but competency in a variety of

areas (cultural, digital, environmental, social, and emotional). The authors argued “the

ways we work, play, communicate, and represent ourselves to others are all part of our

developing literacies” (p. 36). Roasean and Terpstra developed new conceptions of

literacy in order to help their pre-service teachers design new literacy experiences for

their future students. The pre-service teachers created new projects revolving around new

literacies and then examined and discussed each other’s projects. A lack of explicitness

from the teacher educators led to some confusion about what was expected and what was

ultimately learned by the pre-service teachers leading to the need to make goals for the

course more explicit and providing resources for technology integrated lessons and

increased social interaction.

All of these studies show how pre-service teachers developed knowledge-for-

practice, even if they are somewhat limited in developing the other types of knowledge

important to Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1999) conception of inquiry as stance.

Pre-service teachers knowledge for/in multiliteracies practice

A handful of studies concerning pre-service teachers and multiliteracies extend

the knowledge-for-practice into knowledge-in-practice. Karchmer-Klein (2007), Doering

(2007) and Pope, Beal, Long and McCammon (2011) had their pre-service teachers work

with students to integrate their formal knowledge into practical knowledge. Karchmer-

Klein’s (2007) pre-service teachers observed and participated in the same activities as a

classroom teacher by corresponding with students in the class with in-class literature

discussions and email correspondence, developing technology-based extension activities

for the students to complete, and then evaluating the activities. The pre-service teachers

in Doering’s (2007) study completed a multimedia project with middle school students in

the creation of multimodal pieces of digital writing. In Pope, Beal, Long and

McCammon’s (2011) study, the pre-service teachers collaborated with middle school

students on a technology and YA literature study. By placing real students at the forefront

of the experiences in these studies, the pre-service teachers learned practical knowledge

of a more multiliterate view of literacy that required extensive scaffolding, modeling, and

being cognizant of the affordances and constraints of technology integration.

The authenticity of the knowledge-in-practice the pre-service teachers gained

through these experiences reflects what Kadjer (2005) argues is lacking in the knowledge

concerning how pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs shift during their

undergraduate and student teaching experiences. Kadjer (2005) argues that pre-service

teachers need constant and various experiences and ways to increase confidence as well

as technology use for pedagogical purposes that extend beyond the methods classes. If

the expectation is for pre-service teachers to integrate technology, then they need

cooperating teachers and practicing teachers who serve as good role models and offer

practical examples of turning multiliteracies theory into practice.

These studies demonstrate that there is still much to be learned on helping pre-

service and practicing teachers find more meaningful and purposeful ways to incorporate

multiliteracies into their classrooms. Pre-service and practicing teachers need to consider

the affordances and constraints of particular modes, integrate scaffolding of these

practices to help with cohesion with planning and learning, and learn the process of

design as it “may be the significant factor that will assists teachers in the future as they

need to incorporate traditional with multimedia and communication” (Walsh, 2006, p.

45). What is currently missing is information concerning practicing teachers’ knowledge-

for and knowledge-in-multiliteracies practice and how they approach inquiry as stance in

their practice. This study aims to add clarification into this missing gap to ultimately

provide more authentic and practical experiences and knowledge for pre-service teacher

education.

CHAPTER 3 - METHODOLOGY

The teachers in this study possess unique backgrounds and lived experiences,

which contribute to their complex knowledge of literacy, technology and teaching

practice. In order to characterize “the phenomena of human experience and its study”

(Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 2) as well as “make visible the puzzles of the mind –

framing, evidence, stances, theories, and questions” (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011, p. 8),

narrative inquiry was used as a means to access teacher knowledge to answer the

following research questions:

1. How do practicing English teachers define literacy?

2. How do practicing English teachers view technology and literacy?

3. How do practicing teachers use (and not use) technology to support their

understanding and enactment of literacy in their classrooms?

Narrative inquiry as a methodology is outlined first before describing the different

elements of the study: context and participants, methods of data sources and collection,

data analysis, and the role of the researcher.

Narrative Inquiry

This study is grounded in the narrative inquiry approach as designed and outlined

by Clandinin & Connelly (2000). Narrative inquiry recognizes human beings as

storytellers who have lived storied lives (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Savin-Baden &

Van Niekerk, 2007; Clandinin, Pusher, and Orr, 2007). Teachers have numerous stories

to share about their experiences in their classroom. In this regard, narratives are seen as

homegrown, indigenous and disciplinary, especially in relation to specific educational

contexts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Reissman, 2008). These ideas are explored in this

study, as it is important to understand practicing English teachers’ stories of

understanding and enacting literacy and their views on technology and literacy, as the

stories provide a more authentic glimpse into what happens in actual classrooms.

Clandinin & Connelly (2000) argue that narrative inquiry is a way to think about

the lived experience and is especially true for teachers: “We see teaching and teacher

knowledge as expressions of embodied individual and social stories, and we think

narratively as we enter into research relationships with teachers, create field texts, and

write storied accounts of educational lives” (p. 4). Narrative inquiry seeks to discover

teachers’ ways of knowing as well as showing that thought processes are just as

important as behavior (Behar-Horenstein & Morgan, 1995). Narrative inquiry also seeks

to broaden or generalize teachers’ stories to larger themes all while examining present

and future considerations to discover meaning (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). As this

study focuses specifically on practicing teachers’ knowledge of literacy and their views

on technology and literacy, narrative inquiry aids in this process as it seeks to understand

how knowledge is narratively composed, embodied in a person, and expressed in practice

(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Behar-Horenstein & Morgan, 1995; Reissman, 2008;

Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011).

With this in mind, narrative inquiry highlights two important features that are

often neglected in educational research: teacher voice and teacher knowledge. As

experiences shape how teachers operate in school, narrative inquiry show what is really

happening in schools (Schaafsma, Pagunucci, Wallace & Stock, 2007). Narrative inquiry

also provides an opportunity for teachers to make meaning from their continuous

experiences. Narrative inquiry can help researchers understand the difficulties in

teaching, understand the contextual background of teachers’ knowledge, and better

understand the teaching profession (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011) as stories help make sense

of these complex experiences. In this study, narrative inquiry will use these features to

give voice to practicing teachers’ knowledge of literacy and the interaction between

literacy and technology.

Teacher Voice

As this study focuses specifically on practicing English teachers’ stories, the

stories will aid in bringing the teachers into more accord with themselves and with others

(Atkinson, 2007) as the sharing of stories will provide an opportunity for the teachers to

reflect and make meaning from their experiences. This meaning making includes

organizing and creating order out of experiences and allows for interaction between

individual’s experiences and beliefs in the past, present, and future (Moen, 2006). By

highlighting the teacher in this process, narrative inquiry shows how teacher thought

processes are important in the knowledge base of teaching, just as the teacher’s social

relationships and experiences are important for knowledge development. This practical

knowledge is interwoven in the teacher’s expertise (Behar-Horenstien & Morgan, 1995),

something this study aims to understand. With teaching and teacher education becoming

more regulated and technical (Goodson, 1997), this study will use narrative inquiry to

include teachers who normally have had little opportunity to participate (CEE, 2008) and

provide “the catalyst for pursuing understanding of the teacher’s life and work” (p. 112)

in order to contribute to furthering the field of English education.

As both the teachers and I will be sharing stories with each other, as well as

making sense of our experiences together, our teacher voices come to the forefront of the

inquiry process. The relationship between the researcher and the ‘researched’ is no longer

seen as static and decontextualized (Huber, Cainer, Huber & Steeves, 2013). In this

sense, stories are shaped through discussions between researcher and participant

(Clandinin & Connelly, 1986; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Moen, 2006; Reissman,

2008) in a highly collaborative fashion. As personal narratives are complex, both the

participants and I will participate in the construction of the narrative told and analyzed

(Reissman, 2008) in order to provide an accurate account of the experiences. Teachers

will have a voice in this study and may be empowered in the process by emphasizing the

professional significance of their participation (Rogan & de Kock, 2005), especially in

regards to the specific type of knowledge they embody in practice.

Teacher Knowledge

Teaching practice is contingent upon context and the particular so it is difficult to

generalize or even universalize the knowledge gained through practice (Doyle, 1997). In

this regard, narrative inquiry is good for enhancing teaching development or for

ascertaining how teachers understand their work; “ if teaching is event and action with

respect to a curriculum, then story is quite appropriate, if not the only way of knowing

teaching” (p. 95). Truth can then be found in what teachers’ experience on a daily basis.

Narrative is an effort “to bring the richness of this particular way of knowing to the

complex world of the classrooms” (p. 96). Truth is a variable found in multiple places

and thus much like what is found in stories. However, by bringing out truth in the

knowledge that teachers possess through narrative inquiry, their stories provide “insight,

expands understandings, and pushes credibility, but none settles it once and for all” (p.

96). Narrative inquiry has the ability to provide multiple truths through theoretical lenses.

Applying this truth to theory, narrative research provides a richer and thick

description about practice based theory and what happens in everyday classrooms

(Behar-Horenstein & Morgan, 1995). Theory, then, is interwoven and not separable:

The contribution of a narrative inquiry is more often intended to be the creation of

a new sense of meaning and significance with respect to the research topic than it

is to yield a set of knowledge claims that might incrementally add to knowledge

in the field (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 42).

This is often found in the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space as outlined by

Clandinin & Connelly (2000): interaction, continuity, and situation. Interaction refers to

the personal and social nature of the narrative; continuity looks at past, present, and

future experiences; and situation takes into account the notion of place (p. 50). This three-

dimensional inquiry space is then embodied in teachers through personal practical

knowledge:

We see personal practical knowledge in the person’s past experience, in the

person’s present mind and body, and in the person’s future plans and actions. It is

knowledge that reflects the individual’s prior knowledge and acknowledges the

contextual nature of that teacher’s knowledge. It is a kind of knowledge carved

out of, and shaped by, situations: knowledge that is constructed and reconstructed

as we live out stories and retell and relive them through processes of reflection

(Clandinin, 1992, p. 125).

Narratives, then, can be seen as cultural scaffolds that can help in the development of the

teaching profession (Moen, 2006) by highlighting the different types of knowledge

related to practice as “narratives from classrooms and teaching incorporate both empirical

data and relevant theory” (p. 9). This knowledge of practicing teachers can then be better

articulated to other educator as in narratives, “it will appear that the constant interaction

between theory and empirical data is where it is possible to understand and gain new

insight” (p. 9). Narrative inquiry provides the opportunity to examine the day-to-day

work of teaching and learning by gaining multiple perspectives on experience and teacher

knowledge in education (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011).

Context and participants

This study used purposive sampling as I returned to my former school, College

Prep Academy. College Prep Academy is a 6th – 12th grade private religious school in a

suburban Western location of the United States. The student body is approximately 1,300

students with 600 in the middle school and 700 in the high school. The student body is

primarily Caucasian from a mid to upper socioeconomic status. In the past 5 years,

College Prep Academy has transitioned to a 1:1 technological environment where every

high school student has a laptop and every middle school student has an iPad tablet

device. College Prep Academy has integrated technology into all subject areas and

implemented extensive professional development with its teachers to be prepared to use

technology in the classroom. The context of the school and the participants may not

necessarily be typical of other private or public high schools. However, although this is a

unique school setting, this study may provide rich insights into other schools that

experienced the same phenomena with literacy and technology and are struggling to

make sense of how to meaningfully and purposefully adjust to the 21st century and its

expectations for English education.

This study used homogenous sampling (Huberman & Miles, 2002) to identify

practicing middle school English teachers who have used or not used technology to

support their understanding of literacy in their classrooms and teaching practice. The

homogenous sampling allowed for the topics of literacy and technology to be focused on

exclusively and studied in-depth. The practicing teacher participants for the study were

middle school English teachers who have undergone similar professional development,

have had similar interactions with teachers and students in regards to the technology, and

teach towards the same objectives and curriculum in regards to the implementation of

technology in the classroom. For example, all the teachers attended the same training to

learn how to use iPads, participate in a weekly collaborative professional development

session over integrating technology into their lessons, and teach the same curriculum in

each grade level. The 1:1 with iPad tablets has sought to connect their curricular goals

and outcomes to these personalized learning devices as well as broaden both their own

and their students’ understandings of what it means to be literate.

The school has approximately 10 middle school English teachers in grades 6, 7,

and 8. After soliciting participation in the study through an e-mail inquiry (Appendix A),

five of the 10 middle school English teachers consented to participation ahead of data

collection (see Appendix B for example consent form). The participants have a wide

range of teaching experience, from five years to over 25 years of experience, have a wide

variety of ages, 26 to over 50, and consisted of four Caucasian females and one

Caucasian male.

- Lilly graduated with a special education and psychology bachelor’s of science

degree and spent the first five years of her more than 25 year teaching career in a

middle school resource room. After earning her master’s plus 32 credits in

reading, she taught in self-contained 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classrooms for a

number of years before moving to a departmentalized middle school where she

taught literature. She has spent the last nine years at College Prep Academy where

she teaches 6th grade Literature, Language Arts, and World History.

- Sophie has been teaching for 11 years, nine of which have been at College Prep

Academy in the 6th grade. Her bachelor’s degree is in elementary education with

an emphasis on English Language Arts and coaching. Sophie also holds a

master’s degree in coaching and administration. She currently teaches 6th grade

Literature, Language Arts, and World History.

- Maggie is in her 27th year of teaching, all of which have been at College Prep

Academy. Although she has taught all age levels, including middle school and

high school, she currently teaches just in the middle school, the first time this has

occurred in her 27 years of teaching. Maggie holds a master’s degree in English

education and teaches three sections of just the 7th grade advanced English

classes.

- Lindsay graduated in 2005 and has spent her entire teaching career at College

Prep Academy. She has spent the last nine years teaching mainly 7th and 8th grade

English, both advanced and regular, and has primarily focused on 8th grade in the

last few years. Lindsay recently completed a master’s degree in psychology with

an emphasis in child and adolescent development.

- Rick is in his sixth year of teaching, all of them at College Prep Academy. He

primarily teaches three sections of advanced 8th grade English. He also has one

section of regular 8th grade English, a middle school journalism class, as well as a

middle school speech class. Rick has a degree in middle level/secondary

education with a English Language Arts field endorsement. He is currently half

way through earning his master’s in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis

on technology.

Data Sources and Collection

Data from the participants consist of teacher literacy narratives, interviews,

observations, and the collection of curriculum materials. Literacy narratives are “a form

of narrative inquiry…to make connections between personal experience and pedagogical

beliefs…[exploring] ones own literacy development…[in order to be] more able to

engage in debates and discussions about what counts as literacy and who ‘defines’

literature (Sharkey, 2004, p. 499, as cited in Edwards, 2009). The literacy narratives

allowed me to explore how teachers construct themselves as literacy teachers and how

this has influenced their pedagogy (Edwards, 2010) while specifically focusing on their

understandings of and experiences with literacy and technology. Topics and questions

were offered to the participants even though what they wrote was up to their discretion

(see Appendix C). Topics for the literacy narratives included looking at prior educational

experiences with conceptions of literacy, looking at classroom and teaching events that

may have shifted the participants understanding of literacy, and looking at other events

such as professional development, interactions with colleagues and/or administration, and

curriculum development. Topics and questions were created and validated through

reviewing wording and context carefully for appropriateness and relevance by myself,

literacy professionals (i.e. English education and literacy education professors), and

practicing and forming teachers before the participants wrote their literacy narratives.

I conducted three open-ended interviews (Seidman, 2006) with each teacher

participant at different points in the spring semester (2014) in order to provide a more

complete picture of the practicing English teachers’ understandings and applications of

literacy and technology. Interviews help participants make meaning from their stories by

“selecting constitute details of experience, reflecting on them, giving them order, and

thereby making sense of them” (p. 7). Each interview ranged from 30-60 minutes in

length and were recorded electronically and subsequently transcribed by myself. The first

interview occurred prior to classroom observations and followed the protocol as indicated

in Appendix D. The first interview focused on life history and past experiences in order

to place the participants’ experiences in context (Seidman, 2006). The interview

addressed questions related to the teachers’ experiences and understandings of literacy as

indicated in their literacy narratives, their views on technology, and how their ideas

influence their understanding of literacy in their classroom instruction and practice.

The second interview focused on concrete details of participants’ present lived

experiences (Seidman, 2006) and occurred after three observations of each teacher’s

classroom. This interview focused on exploring what was observed in the classroom to

what the teachers indicated in their literacy narratives and the first interview and followed

the protocol as indicated in Appendix E. Questions for the interview centered around the

disconnect and harmony between what the teacher said in their first interview and their

literacy narratives and what was observed by the researcher in each teacher’s actual

classroom instruction. Thus, the information gathered in the first and second interview

built upon each other to supplement and clarify the knowledge of each teacher

concerning literacy and technology.

Finally, the third interview occurred towards the end of the school year in order to

allow the participants to reflect on the meaning of the experience (Seidman, 2006). The

third interview served as a member check and validation of the initial analysis of the data

in order to clarify and solidify each teacher’s knowledge of literacy and technology. The

third interview allowed for further clarification in this study because “the combination of

exploring the past to clarify the events that led participants to where they are now, and

describing concrete details of their present experience, establishes conditions for

reflecting upon what they are now doing in their lives” (p. 19).

I conducted three classroom observations of each practicing teacher. The purpose

of the observation was to see how the teachers’ enacted their knowledge of literacy and

technology in their instruction and teaching practice. The observations took place

immediately after the first interview. I took detailed field notes of curriculum presented,

teacher interactions with students, the classroom layout and design, the teacher’s

instruction, and other features of normal classroom practice. Any teacher materials and

curriculum used in the observed lessons were collected from each teacher. These

materials included lesson plans, unit plans, student handouts, instructional examples and

content, lecture notes and/or multimedia presentations.

The interviews, classroom observations, teacher literacy narratives, and teacher-

created curricular materials serve as multiple data points for analysis. These multiple data

points provide a richer and more thorough foundation for examining the teacher’s

knowledge of literacy and technology.

Data Analysis

Data was reduced into manageable and meaningful segments (Corban & Strauss,

2008, Creswell, 2013) by initially analyzing the data through the topics of literacy,

technology and literacy, and technology and literacy instruction and practice. These

topics were framed through the narrative inquiry space of interaction, continuity, and

situation (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Analyzing data through the narrative inquiry

space helps delineate among the temporal nature of stories and experiences, the need for

balance between personal and social factors, and the influence of setting and context on

experiences.

I first assigned data names or codes using key words or phrases from the data as

support and evidence. For example, if a teacher discussed how sounds, images, and text

all combine to support student learning, I assigned this data the code multimodality. All

the codes were then combined into larger categories and themes for each research

question. For example, under the first research question of teachers’ definitions of

literacy, themes were dependent on each teacher and included themes such as

foundational thoughts of literacy, reading and writing, meaning making, and different

purposes in literacy. (See appendix G for a complete list of categories/themes for each

research question).

The data were then filtered through the narrative inquiry space of continuity,

situation, and interaction for each research question. By filtering the data through the

narrative inquiry space of continuity, for example, I was better able to understand how

the different lived experiences of the teachers shaped their understandings and

enactments of literacy over time, especially as technology has more recently influenced

their understandings. The narrative inquiry space of situation highlighted how the context

of College Prep Academy has influenced their understandings and enactments of literacy

as well. Finally, filtering data through the space of interaction helped me understand how

other teachers, administrators, professionals, and students have influenced their

understandings and enactments of literacy. The goal for this method of data analysis was

to search for patterns, threads, tensions and themes by reading and rereading in order to

theorize across the various teacher participants (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Reissman,

2008).

As the primary analyzer of the data, I must be aware of any previous conceptions

I bring to the analysis such as finding desired results (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). To

corroborate the findings from the analysis, another qualified coder, a professor of literacy

education, also examined the data to reach agreements on which codes and themes apply

to specific information (Creswell, 2013). An 80% agreement on the coding (Miles &

Huberman, 1994) served as the basis for a reliable and accurate depiction of the data.

Using multiple sources of data in the research process, such as the interviews, classroom

observations, literacy narratives, and curriculum materials, allows for a more accurate

descriptive validity in the results of the analysis. In the same way, a stronger

interpretative validity of the results is achieved through inter-coder agreement of the data,

member checking with the participants through the third interview, and reviewing the

narratives written about them to see if they agree with the analysis in order to accurately

represent their meanings and ways of thinking (Moen, 2006).

Researcher’s Role

I taught for four years at the participants’ school and also had personal friendships

with some of the participants. Therefore, I kept in mind three issues that Glesne (1999)

cautions researchers to be aware of when having an already established rapport with

participants. First, I opened up the study to all available middle school English teachers –

not just my personal friends – in order to overcome an unconscious subjective selection

process (Creswell, 2013). Second, although some of the participants are my friends, I

made it clear to them the purpose of this research and the potential implications that

could arise in an attempt to not deny access to the best data sources. Third, I repeatedly

reminded the participants that I was there to hear their stories, their experiences, and

research their knowledge. I tried to remain as objective and maintain a researcher stance

and relationship with the participants so they would not begin to act or say things in ways

to impress me or tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. Instead, as narrative inquiry

allows for a collaborative process in the sharing and creating of stories, there is more

opportunity for the participants and me together to guide the research process and content

(Glesne, 1999; Moen, 2006; Rogan & de Kock, 2005).

CHAPTER 4 – FINDINGS

A Continuum of Teachers Literacy Understandings

When considering Maggie, Lindsay, Lilly, Sophie, and Rick’s literacy

understandings in light of the research questions, the findings can be organized across a

continuum. On one end, there are traditional understandings of literacy and technology

and their role in classroom instruction. In the middle are more emerging and progressive

understandings of literacy and technology where traditional ideas are still present but new

understandings have developed. Finally, on the other end are new conceptualizations of

literacy and technology and their role in the classroom. Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay can be

categorized in the traditional understandings end of the continuum, Maggie can be

classified in the middle, and Rick can be categorized in new conceptualizations end of the

continuum. Findings from the research questions are presented starting with the

traditional conceptions of literacy portion before moving along the continuum and

addressing new conceptions of literacy.

Traditional Conceptions of Literacy

Lindsay

Lindsay’s contagious laugh can be heard all the way down the hall on a regular

basis each class period, but don’t let that confuse you. Despite the relaxed atmosphere of

Lindsay’s classroom, Lindsay is very much business-oriented in her teaching. She is here

to help her students, and this shows in the way she treats them with respect and they, in

turn, respect her by quietly listening, quickly following directions, and staying on task.

After asking for her students’ attention as each class period begins, she is always quick to

follow with “Thank you for quieting down so quickly. I really appreciate that.” Then the

teaching and learning begin.

As a teacher of 8th graders, Lindsay recognizes her students are mature enough to

stay on task when working as individuals or in groups, listen carefully as Lindsay

lectures or reviews notes, and be responsible for deadlines and missing work. Lindsay

feels confident enough to let her students move around the school grounds on their own

as they film small movie clips for a class assignment without constantly watching to see if

they stay on task. She expects them to successfully film, edit, and use the technology to

accomplish all of this while providing small troubleshooting help when needed. From an

outsider’s perspective, it may look like Lindsay has relinquished control of the class to

the students, but on closer inspection, Lindsay is firmly in control as she guides her

students in completing necessary small tasks to achieve the larger learning objectives.

Part of this control can be attributed to the fact that Lindsay has high

expectations for her students. She is constantly pushing them to become better writers, to

engage more in what they are reading, and to try new things to help in English class.

Lindsay is comfortable with returning to the basics, such as sentence diagramming, if she

thinks it will help her students understand writing better. However, she engages her

students in the process by making it a game, having her students advance to new levels of

more difficult sentences once they’ve mastered a particular skill. Lindsay’s goal is to help

her students feel at ease in her classroom even when reading about difficult subjects,

writing about complex topics, or creating complex projects.

Sophie

Since College Prep Academy is a 6-12 school, Sophie takes her 6th grade students

under her protective arm on day one as they move from the comfortable confines of

elementary school to the imposing nature of a middle and high school. She spends as

much time helping them adjust to the confusing hallways and expectations of College

Prep as she does on teaching them English. Following a built-in 10-minute play break at

the beginning of English class, she takes the time to discuss the concept of being a “poor

sport” after some of her students complain about losing a game of four-square. Sophie

starts with “Is being a poor sport part of what it means to be a student at College Prep

Academy? No, it doesn’t.” After sharing her thoughts on the subject, Sophie then has her

students share their insights and stories about being respectful towards others even when

situations haven’t gone the way they imagined.

Caring for her students has increased, Sophie admits, since she became a mother

just last year. Her teaching is sprinkled with stories of motherhood, and Sophie always

takes time to laugh along with her students after sharing funny stories of her twins.

Watching the different elements of development in her twins has caused Sophie to rethink

what she does in English class. She’s a little more hesitant with her students constantly

using their iPads as they can get lost for hours on video games or new apps. Sophie tends

to over plan when introducing new topics by including multiple examples for extra

reinforcement so none of her students feel lost or confused. Above all, she wants her

students to figure out problems on their own and not just rely on Sophie giving them the

answer whenever they feel helpless.

Sophie also wants her students to enjoy English class because of all the creative

elements inherent in the subject. She wants her students to enjoy reading as much as she

did when she was her students’ age and has returned to sharing some of the books she

grew up loving. Sophie has her students take the time to illustrate their typed poems

during a poetry unit as a way to liven up the otherwise dull pages. She takes her students

outside to write if the weather is nice for a different atmosphere to encourage different

writing. Sophie tries to get her students to enjoy English as much as she does and

integrates activities that she herself enjoys in hopes that her students will enjoy them as

well. Most of the time, her students do enjoy English simply because they seem to care

about Sophie as much as she cares about them.

Lilly

The first thing you might notice about Lilly is the relaxed nature of her 6th grade

classroom. Lilly can be seen laughing and joking with the students as they enter her

room, get settled, and prepare for the upcoming lesson. When one student asks if “Emily

and me can go print,” Lilly responds with, “Emily and I. You’re welcome, Grace. Good

thing you have such a good Language Arts teacher.” Lilly welcomes her students by

calling them “princes and princesses” with her rich Southern accent. She might begin a

class by having students come and sit on the “sharing stool” to review their recent

homework, highlight good student work, or have her students help her with the schedule

for the day.

Lilly believes students should be in charge in more ways than one. First and

foremost, Lilly tries to put her students in charge of their own learning. When it comes to

creating presentations, taking notes, or completing assignments, the discretion on how to

accomplish these tasks is left up to the students unless Lilly indicates otherwise. Lilly

feels this is especially important in regards to students having their own iPads. She refers

most technology questions to other students to have students learn from each other and

picks up on any tips and tricks her students come up with on their own. She is “constantly

impressed” by what the students create or access and enjoys learning from them as well.

That’s not to say Lilly’s English class is completely experimental. Lilly adheres to

elements you would find in a “typical” English classroom. Students are reading and

writing on a constant basis. She takes the time to share books she loves with her students

and books related to topics they might be addressing in class. Discussion is centered on

basic comprehension or clarifying questions over material being covered that day. Lilly

floats around as students type up their answers to questions saying “Be specific in your

examples,” or “Have a discussion. These are not short answers.” Still, Lilly recognizes

that technology will become an important element in the classroom, and the sooner she

can learn how to more meaningfully integrate it into her English class, the better.

What is literacy for these teachers?

Sophie, Lilly and Lindsay have stayed firmly grounded in the notion of reading

and writing serving as the foundation for literacy understanding even when incorporating

ideas like communication or reading and writing for different purposes. This influences

their knowledge for their teaching practice.

Sophie defines literacy as “[reading and writing] with a purpose, which leads to

the understanding of technology, finances, geography, health (the list goes on and on and

on).” Sophie sees literacy influencing all areas of her personal life: reading a recipe,

reading test results, or signing papers for a new house. Without the ability to read and

write, Sophie “could not function on a day-to-day basis.” Sophie imparts this

understanding of literacy to her students:

I actually talk to my students all the time about reading and writing impacting all

parts of your life. I can go as far from how important it is to my financial situation

as far as sitting down and budgeting and learning more about that to reading a

recipe to make dinner to reading housing documents so I know that my husband

and I are making the right decisions.

This understanding is then linked to her teaching:

In order to learn about the latest strategies, I have to read up on them. In order to

teach my students to read and write, I too have to be proficient. We read and

write with a purpose everyday, so it is so important.

Even though “literacy is related to everything we do,” Sophie grounds this idea in the

context of reading and writing.

Similarly, Lilly speaks of reading and writing in relation to literacy as literacy “ is

the ability to read, comprehend and function in society, regardless of education,

background, etc.” She understands literacy “as a source of information, whether it be

reading the newspaper, looking for recipes, finding information about certain products,

clothing, communication with friends and family that affect my daily life.” Lilly,

however, further develops the basic notion of literacy as she sees reading and writing

having different purposes for both her and her students. These purposes include anything

from being able to “read a stop sign, to read directions…to go grocery shopping, to fill

out forms, [and] to be aware of your surroundings” to more academic purposes such as

“the different types of reading and how they read differently for world history

assignments than literature, talking about writing, or when they read novels on their

own.” These different purposes also extend into writing, whether it’s making deductions

from facts and information in order to support analysis and research or in creative writing

where Lilly wants her students to “write more from what comes from their heart and their

own experiences and the whys and the hows.” For Lilly, to become literate means to

“continue to grow creatively and academically” in both reading and writing throughout

life.

Key to Lindsay’s understanding of literacy is the concept of communication

focusing specifically on reading and writing: “What do books communicate to their

readers? How do people communicate in different ways via writing?” Lindsay sees

literacy being connected “through stories and written communication” as a way to “bring

feelings of self worth and belonging.” She also recognizes that communication has many

different purposes for both her and her students:

You can’t communicate in a professional way with your boss if you don’t know

how. The way I communicate with my friends is different from the way I

communicate with my students. They all have value, but it’s going to be

different… If I am writing a short story or a narrative, it’s going to be different

than if I am writing a paper for my master’s class. I just think knowing when to do

that and when to separate into those categories is so important and crucial for kids

for that communication.

For Lindsay, literacy will always be closely associated with communication, reading, and

writing.

Views of technology and literacy learning

Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay also hold a fairly traditional view of the interplay

between technology for both learning and teaching. This shapes how they connect

technology to their literacy teaching practices.

“It’s very scary”. Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay recognize that technology is a

necessary component in education today and for their students’ learning. With technology

important to functioning in the world, Sophie thinks getting her students “to use

[technology] as a tool to enhance their learning is important because they are going to be

using this for the rest of their lives. It’s not going to go away.” Lilly agrees and “couldn’t

see [my students] coming without it because that is the world we live in now and it’s

going to just continue to develop and grow. There is going to be new technology coming

out constantly.” Lilly thinks her students constantly interacting with technology “helps us

understand that they don’t learn the same way we did,” but for Sophie and Lindsay in

particular, they don’t see this type of learning as something always positive.

Lindsay primarily sees students interacting with their computers and there is

“very minimal interaction and communication with your teacher, and I feel like that’s

starting to clash and I don’t think I’m going to be okay with that.” Lindsay wants her

students to use technology to “learn something and not just produce something….but

from what I’m hearing technology is supposed to be and what I am seeing they are using

technology for, that’s not the same.” Since Lindsay hasn’t had conversations or

clarification about a “whole classroom reversal” where technology is supposed to change

the way her students learn, she doesn’t want to see her students to be lazy in their

learning:

I just feel like they are getting lazier and lazier when it comes to paying attention

to detail with their writing and then paying attention to detail as they read. So I

just hope that technology steps up in the right place and helps their creative minds

because I know the way they think and look at the world is different, but yet that

doesn’t change what they need to be in order to be a contributing person.

To solve this problem, Lindsay thinks either the teacher or the student must change the

approach to literacy and technology learning.

Sophie thinks the “pendulum is probably going to come back at some point to

how I was taught. I feel like research is going to come out that says maybe technology

isn’t the best thing for kids…” She believes this because she’s “finding with kids that

their love for reading seems to be diminishing through the years because they are so

focused on their video games.” Additionally, in Sophie’s nine years of teaching, she

thinks her students “handwriting has gotten worse and their spelling has gotten worse and

their ability to capitalize letters has gotten worse…I think a lot of that is coming from

technology.” Sophie thinks this decline in their ability to read and write is “very scary” as

technology “corrects everything for them,” and “they are not learning necessarily. It’s

doing the work for them.” The traditional writing process, as Sophie puts it, would help

her students learn those valuable skills and not negatively impact their literacy learning.

Sophie, Lindsay and Lilly’s views of technology negatively affecting literacy learning

also can be attributed to them seeing students using technology as a crutch for learning

and technology distracting from learning.

“I want them to be in control”. Although Sophie recognizes how technology can

make a difference for those students who struggle to read and write as technology can

record her students’ voices and transfer it into a written document or read a book for

them, for others she feels “that they are using [technology] as a crutch or an easy way

out.” Sophie thinks the students who are proficient readers and writers “take advantage of

[technology] when they are capable of doing it on their own…instead of getting

proficient at skills they are going to need in the future. I think they are using it as a

crutch.” Lilly agrees that she wants her students’ literacy skills to develop as well as their

confidence, and she wants them “to be in control, in charge, not some kind of device.”

She doesn’t want “some piece of technology to replace” her students’ reading and

writing, but would rather have her students see technology as a tool. For Lilly, there is a

danger technology would get in the way of helping her students academically and so

much of the attention will be on the device, but “they don’t know how to think.” Sophie

agrees that her students “are not learning along the way where I feel like we did. I

struggle with that.” She sees having instant access to information actually impedes upon

her students’ “learning along the way…and learning new information.” She thinks

teachers and society gives students “an easy way out instead of making them think on

their own.”

Lindsay wraps the idea of technology as a crutch around the ideas of basic

technology troubleshooting issues. She thinks technology problems could be used as “an

excuse for my students not to read.” She doesn’t think glitches like the Internet not

working or students forgetting their laptops or iPads at school should hinder the learning

process. The expectation is still there for homework to be done as Lindsay thinks you

cannot “rely on [technology] because there are so many things that can happen in the

meantime.” Lindsay wants to break free from her experiences of primarily helping her

students with issues like, “My computer is frozen,” and instead actually work with

technology for literacy learning.

“They are kind of missing what is happening in the world around them”.

Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay primarily see technology as a distraction from what their

students should be learning. Sophie thinks her students would see technology as more of

a tool if an academic purpose for the technology was established from the very

beginning. Sophie wonders, though, if her students are distracted by the technology

because they just are not able to use it responsibly:

The struggle is technology etiquette. Kids don’t have it. They don’t. They are

addicted to it. They struggle when it’s not time to use the iPads, to put them

down, or they just need to look at one more thing.

Sophie thinks this can be attributed to the fact that her students have a “hard time

understanding when [they can’t use it]…because it’s all they’ve known since they were

younger…” while she recognizes most of the technology is new to her. She’s worried that

her students take advantage of the technology and its ability to flip back and forth

between so many different programs and applications. Sophie firmly believes that if she

is “working with a group of students, I believe there are students in my classroom who

are doing something they are not supposed to be doing with that technology that they

have.” She cannot monitor all the students technology all the time and hopes her school

creates rules for monitoring the iPads better.

Lilly has had similar issues in her classroom. She sees her students using their

iPads for games “almost like an obsession,” and “they play games more than they read.”

While her students are supposed to be working, “sometimes the kids are trying to go to

different apps and it almost seems like they are distractible because of their attention span

doesn’t stay because they are flipping around.” Lilly is not sure whether or not “this is an

age thing” as she teaches only 6th grade, and wonders if her students just do not have the

self-control to handle themselves appropriately with their iPads. Lindsay worries that her

students’ skills of “looking someone in the eye for an interview to get a job or be a

professional” are lacking because her students “are more concerned about their Twitter

accounts and updating things on Facebook and sending pictures and sharing things that

they are kind of missing what is happening in the world around them.” She views her

students as being ‘really good at finding times to waste time right now with technology, if

I am being completely honest.” Lindsay would rather find tangible ways for technology

to engage her students than distract them. Despite these negative views of technology’s

affect on literacy learning, Sophie, Lindsay, and Lilly do see technology having some

positive effects on student learning.

“They amaze me”. Sophie’s main positive viewpoint focuses on how technology

provides more student choice in her classroom: “I can give a project and the objectives

and the rubrics of the project and they can complete it any way they want to, whether it’s

paper or pencil, whether it’s a poster, or whether it’s an iMovie or Explain Everything.”

She continues:

When a student doesn’t think that they can be successful on paper and pencil, but

they thrive in technology, then they are apt to put more time and effort into a

project. That has really been a positive thing in my classroom as far as those

students that struggle with writing, as they are more apt to give me more effort

and turn in a better final project when they use technology.

Sophie thinks technology makes her students “more comfortable” as they engage in

different types of literacy learning.

Lindsay provided a limited viewpoint on how technology can positively affect

students’ literacy learning. She described it more as literacy “conveniences”: “I like that

they can type up their essays and I like that they have research and things at their

fingertips that they can go to.” Using technology as a resource, she is amazed “with the

types of information that they find and the way they are able to put it together and just

figure it out.” She thinks technology helps her students if they get “stuck” when they are

writing as they can “click on and find some different words…and it’s handy.” Her

students are better able to research any topic, find examples, and then utilize the

technology for better presentations: “When the kids do presentations, they put these

things together with the technology. The things they can do are amazing because of all

the different [technological capabilities].” When her students find their information,

organize it, and put it into some kind of presentation, “the visual, the auditory, and the

written compounded together is going to [help them] remember more.” Sophie and

Lindsay know their views on technology’s influence on student learning have shifted

over time as students enter into their classrooms with less developed skills they feel are

important for literacy learning. This decline may be attributed to technology serving as a

crutch in the development of these skills or as a distraction from learning these skills.

Views of technology and literacy teaching

This shift in their viewpoint has also impacted their views on technology’s role in

literacy teaching as discussed. While Lilly holds more positive than negative views on

technology’s role in literacy learning, the next section of findings will highlight how she,

Sophie, and Lindsay divorce these positive views from their English teaching.

“It’s a double-edged sword”. Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay all recognize

technology is here to stay whether or not they are prepared for it, use it, and feel like it is

important to their teaching practice. When questioned about technology and literacy in

her teaching, Lindsay admitted that she stumbled with answering the questions because “I

don’t have a huge place for [technology] in my classroom right now. I just don’t. I don’t

have a need for it because I’ve been teaching for nine years really without it.” While

technology doesn’t have a large place in her classroom, Lindsay recognizes its

importance in teaching, but she feels like “when you talk about pulling that teacher out

and putting technology in, I just don’t think that’s a good step. I don’t think that’s a good

way of looking at it.” Therefore, she is mainly left with questions surrounding how

technology can be used for teaching until she sees “what [technology] can do for

literacy.” She doesn’t want to lose the content or have her lessons “watered down

because I am just trying to put technology into play.” Lindsay feels so strongly about her

ideas that she senses a personal clash between technology and education and literacy.

She does not want teachers to be replaced by technology and when it comes specifically

to reading and writing, she is not comfortable if writing “becomes something that

[students] can just create or illustrate without ever placing a word on a page.” Literacy

will always be closely associated with communication, reading, and writing and putting

some sort of technological device into the hands of her students does not “convey the

importance of learning to read and write. Until my students can head off to college and

never have to write another essay again, I will not ease up on certain standards in my

classroom concerning literacy.”

Similarly, Sophie views technology as “a double-edged sword;” she wants to

teach her students how to use the technology, “but it’s very contradictory to what we are

asked, what we are being told to do.” She is not sure if it’s appropriate to let her students

use their iPads, “to tell them their basic mistakes without them having to figure it out on

their own. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Sophie desires to prepare her students for

the future and teach them to use technology, but she questions if she is doing just that.

She thinks teaching literacy with technology “can be tricky and I think we are going to

find that maybe we are not doing it right at this time. Maybe we are making mistakes that

are going to impact these kids in the future.” She is still searching for “whatever is the

right answer” so her students will have the right tools and skills for their future.

Lilly understands that she is going to have to “constantly stay on top of trying to

learn and grow” as a teacher in order to have “the knowledge right now” to help her

students that “were raised on something that wasn’t even created or invented” in her

generation. While she knows she “has to change,” she feels “overwhelmed because I

don’t really know how to use a lot of [technology]. I think it would make me feel a lot

more confident if I did.” She would like to feel more confident because she enjoys

teaching and wants to keep up with the technological advances for her teaching, but

admits that she lacks any real knowledge or information on how to use it effectively in

her teaching practice. This lack of knowledge was evident, as Lilly did not share any

specific examples of using technology in literacy teaching, as discussed in the next

section.

“I kind of use it like the kids: have a fun moment.” Lilly only discusses her

views of literacy and technology teaching in terms of using the technology for content,

having her students learn from technology, and using technology for any decisions “that

are going to expand [my students’] knowledge.” For Lilly, this primarily means viewing

technology in her literacy teaching to explain how to gather information, do research, and

present information. Sophie also mentions limited views of using technology for literacy

teaching. Like Lilly, Sophie views technology as “a great source for [my students] to read

for information.” She also views technology as being good for teaching vocabulary

comprehension strategies as “the iPad allows for you to find the definition to words right

away or you could just highlight it and get the definition.” This strategy helps “quicken

up a lesson,” but her views on other literacy teaching are mixed. Writing is “a tough one”

as “they do a lot of writing on it to type for their final product,” but Sophie thinks the

iPad is not good for editing or rough draft writing.

Lindsay views technology’s influence on her literacy teaching as “mild.” For

Lindsay:

It’s changed how I’ve collected papers or the way I give feedback to the students,

but as far as teaching goes, really only using PowerPoints for my presentations.

It’s more visual than just me lecturing or talking at them. That’s probably been

the biggest change.

Lindsay does see technology helping her presentations, though. She feels like it helps

focus her thoughts during lectures and makes her lessons more interactive. For example,

when teaching her students the novel That was Then, This is Now, Lindsay found stages

of psychology related to the characters in the book. She was “able to go through the

stages and play videos and show them and they were taking notes and they were taking

that and relating that to the book.” Other than viewing technology as a good resource for

her literacy teaching to collect papers or as a presentation tool, however, Lindsay doesn’t

see “a huge lack in my teaching or my classroom without having it or without knowing.”

She is not opposed to learning some other aspects to help her teaching, but she views

technology as having a limited role in her literacy teaching: “Other than that, I kind of

use it just like the kids: have a fun moment.”

“The bottom line is they need to know how to read and write”. Like Lindsay,

Sophie is worried the future is going to be all technology, and she is uncertain of

literacy’s place. She focuses on telling her students that technology “does not fix

everything. There, their, and they’re it doesn’t know.” Similarly, Sophie grows frustrated

at her students’ learning process when they want technology to quickly answer questions.

This subsequently impacts her teaching practice:

Looking at their resources that they are surrounded with all the time to try and

help solve their answers is something that I do. I bring it back to me. “What do

you think I did when I was your age and I didn’t know the answer? How did I

figure it out without my iPad?” They will be like, “Well…” I said, “We had to go

through a lot of different ways to try to get the answer without having that iPad

there.”

She is not sure what is expected of technology in teaching because “the fact of the matter

is we do need to teach how to spell and we do need to teach how to write and we do need

to teach how to capitalize words because that is still the expectation.” Until she sees

otherwise, Sophie thinks there “is a place for [these skills] and I think it’s just finding

what that place is” regardless of whether or not there is technology in her teaching

practice.

Lindsay has similar questions about understanding technology’s place in her

literacy teaching. She doesn’t have a “full on answer” because “it’s hard to fit

[technology] in the curriculum when you don’t know what it has to offer for your

curriculum.” Lindsay would like to know what technology can do for her literacy

teaching, “but what does it look like? Does it look like a vocab game? Does it look like a

poetry unit can be on there?” However, for Lindsay,

the bottom line is that they need to know how to read and write and how to

analyze. I really focus on writing because this is a great time when they are

forming habits where you can get them into a structure, so I don’t want to lose

that.

What Lindsay has seen with technology and literacy teaching is “not changing my

perspective that much. I’m just really big on putting words on paper and getting feedback

that way.”

Lilly’s views are similar in that when she teaches “novels and that sort of thing; I

like to get away from the technology.” Lilly would rather have her students discussing

and bringing out their ideas and thinking rather than having technology interfering or

having her students rely on it. She doesn’t

even use [technology] when we get to literature. It’s pretty much we are going to

read, we are going to talk about vocabulary, and we are going to talk about all

these things going on. That’s fine. The students are fine with that.

Lilly would rather have her teaching focus on “the learning and what [my students’]

thought processes are than we are going to use this technology.” Lilly does know the

world “is rapidly changing and we are never going to go back to old school paper and

pencil,” but Lilly vows to continue using books or other non-technology literacy tools in

her teaching.

“There is not that connection.” Sophie and Lindsay speak to professional

development and training issues that contribute to their views on technology and literacy

teaching. Specifically, the training has forced them to recognize technology’s increasing

role in their classroom without the training really connecting to literacy teaching and

learning. For Sophie, this training became unhelpful “within months, I suppose you could

say, because technology changed so fast.” What she brought from her training to her

classroom grew outdated quickly and therefore unusable. As time went by, she became

discouraged and went back to “if it’s not going to work I’m not going to do it.” To help,

Sophie thinks her school needs “someone who is proficient and can answer all our

questions and show us the best way to implement [the technology].” Sophie sees time as

a major factor holding back her learning with all her other teaching commitments and

would like to have better training focusing specifically on “making us better teachers and

make our students better learners.”

Lindsay sees the problem with the professional development and training as “just

not having a conversation.” She would like to have had conversations about what she is

specifically doing in her classroom, her particular curriculum, and her specific teaching

needs. She struggles with not having a connection between “what the iPad can do and

what I’m doing in the classroom…we need to kind of mesh those two ideas.” Lindsay

thinks “proper leadership” would help in addressing this issue to have more buy in from

the faculty and know that “technology is good for our students.” This might help with

Lindsay’s wish to have more personalized conversations where someone “could sit down

and say, ‘Okay, here is where I’m thinking this would merge into your classroom

alongside what your ideas are,’ instead of just saying, ‘Use it.’” Lindsay does not want to

remain ignorant herself while waiting for the school to step up and provide the type of

training she desires, but she’s hoping the school will help the teachers find the “middle

man” rather than technology not connecting to what the teachers are doing in their

classrooms and teaching practice.

Lilly’s, Lindsay’s, and Sophie’s views on technology and literacy teaching are

similar to their views on technology and literacy learning as the views emphasize more

traditional literacy teaching: reading books, writing papers, and discussing in the

classroom – all without the use of technology. While there are some instances where

technology does aid in their teaching, such as pointing their students to specific tools for

vocabulary learning, for the most part, technology’s role in their teaching is linked to

presentations of notes, directions or background information.

Enacting literacy views in teaching

This section explores how Lilly, Sophie, and Lindsay do and do not use

technology to enact their understanding of literacy in their teaching practice. This third

research question provides more insight into the teaching practice of Lilly, Sophie, and

Lindsay.

Lilly. In keeping with her understanding of literacy as a source of information and

for different purposes in reading and writing, Lilly spends much of her classroom

instruction helping students understand these important ideas. Lilly and her students have

many discussions surrounding the different types of reading and thinking her students

might encounter in different subjects and to be aware of these differences: “We have the

content and something they are learning from it. [There are] decisions that they are

making that are going to expand their knowledge.” Lilly helps her students learn how to

gather information by “having a guideline of exactly what it is we are looking for…My

students have to have a plan. Otherwise they get on technology and they are all over the

place.” Lilly also frequently tells her students they have “endless amounts of

information” on any given subject and to not stop at any single website or location on the

Internet to find the answer.

For example, during the Holocaust unit, Lilly had her students research an actual

person from the time period. Her students “have to go on the Internet and find this

person…and find out where they went during the Holocaust and if they died or where

they are now.” In another example, Lilly had her students create presentations on

mythological characters for a Greek mythology unit. Lilly first had her students conduct

research on their characters and provided questions to help in this process. Once the

students have gathered enough information, the students create some sort of presentation

over the character, such as creating a skit or paper poster, choosing to either use

technology to aid in this process or not. Lilly thinks this process helps “to not just jump

into technology” but rather have a guideline to help her students find exactly what they

need. Most of the time Lilly lets her students use their iPads to take notes during this

process.

Lilly limits her students’ use of technology for reading and writing. Lilly likes

that in creative writing when she wants students to expand their vocabulary and be more

descriptive, they are “able to click on their iPads and find some different words. They

have their thesaurus and I encourage them to do that. It’s handy.” Her students can also

type on the iPads for writing, but everything must be printed and turned in for a grade. As

Lilly “doesn’t ever want some piece of technology to replace the love of reading,” she

does not let her students use their iPads or any other form of technology when reading

novels. She thinks “there is a temptation to get on something else. I want them to get

engrossed in their books, and they have. They love it.” Therefore Lilly makes sure to give

her students ample time to read and class time for her students to personally respond to

their books. In general, Lilly uses technology sparingly or in limited capacities in her

teaching practice, which is in congruence with her traditional views of literacy.

Lindsay. Lindsay has tried to remember not to get caught up in the appeal and

shininess of technology:

I hear and I agree that we have to make our students first in the classroom and

that’s why we are there. I totally agree. But I feel like sometimes we are replacing

the word first with fun sometimes too often… So there might be some things

where you would look at and say, well that’s not the student first because they are

not all laughing and having fun and engaging with one another and everything,

but that’s not good for them.

Therefore, Lindsay feels it is important for her students to learn content and not just

produce something with technology. She spends a lot of time on traditional reading and

writing devoid of technology where she “really just takes what [my students] are reading

and writing and learning about it and then putting that on paper and analyzing. We do a

lot of essays that way as well.” Lindsay also spends a lot of time talking about the

different types of writing and thinks her students learn mainly from “the feedback they

get, the work they produce, and then what I’m telling them and how to either fix up or

change the way they are communicating within their written work.”

Much of Lindsay’s teaching of reading focuses on “how to be an effective reader

and how to paraphrase and how to take what you are reading and then portray it by

relating it to your life or to a bigger picture.” She tries to find a balance between open-

ended and comprehension questions about the reading because her students “are in the

middle ground” of learning the content and relating the content to their lives. Lindsay has

also found herself integrating more and more grammar back into her instruction and is

unsure if it is because her students constantly have technology fix their mistakes. This

grammar includes diagramming sentences. Lindsay hopes “to make it fun. I’m going to

try find a little game to level off of each other and fit it in that way. So I just feel like

vocab, grammar, and reading, and, you know, writing formally is where I try to focus.”

The only aspect of literacy Lindsay feels she is lacking at this point is running out of time

to explore broader themes and bigger picture ideas of what they are reading and writing.

Lindsay uses technology in limited capacities in her teacher-dominated teaching

practice. One area technology is used is in improving her lectures as she “makes them

more interactive” so students are able to make stronger connections to the information

Lindsay presents. For example, as students began work on research papers, Lindsay

provided minilessons about how to look for good online sources to get past Wikipedia,

and to slow down and analyze the sites they would be using. Discussions centered around

website publishing, credential checking, and the differences between analyzing and

proving in writing. Lindsay also created a presentation on movie trailers in preparation

for having her students create movie trailers over their class novel, The Giver. After

teaching minilessons on the purpose of a movie trailer, plot structure, scene development

and constructing a storyboard, Lindsay set her students free to create their trailers. She

thinks the project is “kind of fun and allowed them to work together,” but isn’t sure if the

project was “directly related to literacy, necessarily.” She recognizes that “my students

like it, but other than that, I don’t know. I guess I just don’t see a huge lack in my

teaching or my classroom without having or knowing it.”

Sophie. Sophie thinks student choice makes the difference in her classroom. For

those students who struggle with reading and writing, choice is “a gift for them because

they can use Dragon Dictation or they can have audio books read to them.” Student

choice allows all of her students to play to their strengths, especially when completing

classroom projects. For example, after finishing a class novel, Sophie wanted her students

to create a project that demonstrated their understanding of the characters and the main

conflict. Some students wrote scripts and put on puppet shows, others made stop

animation videos, and still others wrote children’s books complete with hand drawn

pictures. Sophie loves these types of projects “because you kind of get to see what they

choose to do and where their creativity comes from.” For a unit on the Holocaust, Sophie

had her students follow an actual person from the Holocaust memorial website. After

giving a rubric, Sophie let her students choose how to present what they learned. Some

students wrote papers, others created scrapbooks, while others chose technology to

present their findings. In examples like these, Sophie thinks her students are more apt to

put more time and effort into a project with a better product. Even with these successes

and the ability to help struggling students, Sophie does not want her students to take

advantage of any particular resource and use “it as a crutch or as an easy way out.”

Instead, Sophie also focuses on problem solving as central to her literacy instruction and

teaching practice.

Sophie notes “one thing that I notice with kids nowadays is they want the answer

and they want it now.” Even when Sophie takes the time to teach concepts or provide a

way for students to find the answers on their own, “they just want the answer then and

there…and they’ve become very lazy.” Sophie thinks this is particularly true as her

students usually have information right at their fingertips: “My struggle is because the

answer is right there for them, their problem-solving skills and their ability to think

logically is diminishing with each year I teach because they don’t have to work to find

answers.” To combat this issue and increase the ways in which her students can make

meaning, Sophie provides multiple pathways by which they can access and learn

information, something key to her literacy instruction. When introducing the idea of

personification in poetry, Sophie used a video to help her students focus on what they

were doing, shared examples on the whiteboard, provided a handout for her students to

demonstrate their knowledge by writing personification, and then assigned homework for

her students to create and illustrate their own personification. Sophie wanted

to try and give them as many ways to understand it, not just me writing it on the

board. I wanted them to see it through video, through definition, through my

examples on the board, and then through examples that they gave me. So I was

clear that they knew what it was.

In a teacher-dominated fashion, Sophie often serves as a pathway by which her students

can make meaning, but she also wants her students to problem solve and learn on their

own.

Since the majority of Sophie’s literacy teaching is focused on traditional reading

and writing, she puts the emphasis on these processes before even considering

technology. For example, at the beginning of the school year, Sophie wanted her students

to understand the basic plot structure of stories. She had them create a plot plan on paper

and pencil first from a story she read aloud in class. After completing this traditional

method, Sophie then gave her students “their own stories where they had to create a plot

plan on their iPads in iMovie where they dressed up as their characters and showed each

part of the plot.” While Sophie thinks her students may get more excited by using

technology, she isn’t sure if using the technology is any different than how she

introduced it. In effect, Sophie recognized that “they all got it. I don’t know if it was the

before teaching, their own project, or if it was a combination of both.” Therefore, Sophie

continues to use iPads and other technology as good resources but is careful not to allow

her students to become over-reliant on technology and let it do the learning for them. For

example, she still expects her students to do their own synthesizing of information from

websites, their own revising and editing on a writing assignment, and finding their own

solutions to problems that cannot be answered by searching on the Internet.

Lilly, Lindsay, and Sophie all use technology in ways that support traditional

reading and writing. Technology is used in limited roles such as information gathering,

presenting information, or word processing. To them, there is no extension beyond these

limited roles, but Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay have no other use for technology, as their

definitions and understanding of literacy do not extend beyond traditional conceptions of

reading and writing.

Emerging Conceptions of Literacy

Maggie

Each day, Maggie starts off each period by placing her 7th grade students’

vocabulary notebooks at new desks so students will have a fresh perspective of the

classroom. Most teachers might want a seating chart to better remember students’

names, but not Maggie. Not only does she know everyone’s names no matter where they

are seated in the classroom, she also knows their Greek names they’ve picked for the

Greek mythology unit, their gang names they pick when they read The Outsiders. Two

words sum up Maggie as a teacher: high energy. This energy can be seen how Maggie

talks to her students about anything and everything before the bell rings, how she

excitedly rewards intelligent student answers with candy, and how she constantly refers

to her students as her “little giblets” to keep them paying attention in class.

Maggie’s classes are jam-packed with little time for her students’ to lose interest.

This may be attributed to Maggie herself. She’s not afraid to make a fool of herself when

something isn’t quite working like it should. She’ll jokingly say things like, “We’ll be

ready to go if I can get this computer to work. You know how good I am with

technology.” When students answer questions incorrectly, she’ll reassure them by saying,

“That isn’t correct, but I love you anyway.” Maggie also quickly transitions between

tasks and uses the full 90 minutes of each block. On any given day, you might witness her

students making mini-presentations over a homework assignment, participating in an on-

the-spot reader’s theatre over a short class reading, learning a new introductory style for

essay writing, and taking notes as Maggie dictates from the whiteboard.

Maggie also exudes energy in her passion for English. She successfully engages

her students in whatever they are learning by constantly making connections. She’ll

connect a Greek myth to fairy tales, to popular young adult literature, to advertisements

on television, and to themes in TV shows and movies her students might watch. Maggie

takes special care to guide her students’ thinking in whatever they read in class. She

might help them remember what they should be looking for when they read, how a

selected reading relates to a unit’s overarching theme, or important information for an

upcoming quiz or test. If you sat in her classroom, you would never question what you

were doing or how it related to the bigger picture of English learning.

What is literacy for Maggie?

Maggie’s understanding of literacy specifically points to an evolution that

includes reading, writing, speaking, listening, as well as basic thinking. Maggie’s

definition and understanding “as with most things, has changed and evolved over time.”

Maggie’s definition originally adhered to the classical notion of “simply the ability to

read and to write.” Through her college and early teaching experiences, Maggie

broadened this definition to include “thoughts to be examined, ingested, interpreted,

argued over, understood, and written about.” This broad definition of literacy “begins

with the basic block of comprehension, and without that foundation, nothing more can

get built.” Therefore, Maggie’s understanding of literacy is multilayered, with a strong

foundation as the starting point. Basic comprehension, related to the lowest level of

Bloom’s taxonomy, is where it all begins for Maggie for if “we forget that if you don’t

have that bottom...I think you are missing a lot.” Without comprehension, Maggie argues

there is no way to build in the problem solving and critical thinking skills necessary for

success:

If you’ve got all those building blocks, if you can read, if you can express it, if

you can problem solve, which I would put under thinking, if you got somewhere

and someone said to you, “You are going to use this and I need you to do that,”

you are going to figure it out.

This strong foundation than leads into higher levels of thinking where Maggie “put[s] it

together and make[s] sure what I have is valid.”

Maggie’s understanding of literacy continues to change “as technology invades

every aspect of daily life, even my classroom.” She is “concerned what we consider to be

literate: tweets. Everything is getting smaller and shorter and faster and that’s where the

kids are. Why say it in 10 words that sound cool if I can just say it in three?” Maggie

doesn’t necessarily think this type of literacy is valuable in a classroom setting despite

how technology has shaped what constitutes literacy in today’s world. On the other hand,

Maggie recognizes her students are much more visual than the ones she had 27 years ago

and tries to tap into they way learn “to become literate in other ways, ” recognizing the

importance of understanding how to read and understand images. Still, Maggie is reticent

to change her understanding of literacy. She will not give up her books, “for to open the

pages of a book, to read it and to interpret it and to write about it and to discuss it – that’s

literacy.”

Views of technology and literacy learning and teaching

Maggie primarily holds traditional views of technology and literacy learning and

teaching and is firm in her views, but has also sought to find new ways to use technology

meaningfully in her English classroom. In this way, she demonstrates more progressive

views of technology and literacy learning and teaching.

“We are getting there slow but sure”. Maggie’s main focus when she thinks of

technology and literacy learning is “finding valid ways to use technology where [my

students] are actually learning…To me that’s the big part and we are getting there slow

but sure.” For Maggie, valid is when the technology “reinforces learning…If it engages

them but at the same time teaches them a skill that will be necessary for the future

learning, I think that’s valid.” The difficulty with technology and literacy learning is

Maggie thinks her students see technology as “a toy first. It’s not an educational tool…

So they are Facebooking and they are trying to get on other websites. Absolutely

disengaged.” Maggie thinks this disengagement prevents students from learning skills of

“researching and thinking and then putting it together.” This research includes

recognizing while the “Internet is a great place, how do we find valid places to do our

research when there are perfectly good books in the library?” Although Maggie does

struggle with valid learning opportunities with literacy and technology, she does not think

her students are missing anything if she does not always use technology in the classroom.

She thinks students will use technology regardless and learn from it anyway. In that

respect, Maggie thinks students may be “digital natives. They will go on there and they

will figure it all out and they will do all of that.” Therefore, Maggie focuses on finding

valid uses for technology to enhance her literacy teaching, which is discussed in the next

section.

“You have to try technology”. Maggie remains firm in her views on technology

and literacy teaching, especially when dealing with particular aspects of literacy. She

“hates” writing on the iPads:

It doesn’t give them the freedom to take a pen and go… “I want that sentence to

go up here. That’s dumb, I want to cross that out.” By the time they’ve tapped on

it and gotten it there, “Oh darn, I didn’t mean to highlight the whole sentence, I

just want that one word. What was I going to do again?” I’ve watched them stand

in front of me and try to take a word out and respell. It’s so hard to edit on the

iPad, and to me that is a frustration.

Maggie has tried to use the iPads for reading purposes, but she has run into roadblocks as

“you can’t highlight or underline PDF’s of stories off the Internet.” She thinks “a literate

reader in my opinion is active,” and therefore underlining, circling, taking notes, and

asking questions in texts as they read. Even with apps that do allow such navigation,

Maggie thinks “it takes time…and if you don’t touch it just right or your highlighter is

wrong, it comes out ugly so nobody uses it.” Maggie continues to adhere to traditional

views of writing because “they haven’t shown me anything that is better than what I’ve

been doing. If I am successful at teaching writing, and I have been successful doing it for

27 years, why would I change that?” Maggie also thinks that perhaps “English teachers

are the most reticent to change. We like our books...We all read Fahrenheit 451 so we are

scared. We don’t want our children to be that way. I mean that.”

Maggie also struggles with validity in integrating technology into literacy

teaching. For example, Maggie questions the research integrity of integrating technology

into the classroom in the first place:

I want some evidence that what we are doing isn’t a flash in the pan, or we are

caught up the hype. If you are holding technology are you instantly more

intelligent? I want to know. Are we doing what is good for our kids? Do we have

some test scores to back that up?

For Maggie, this research would include statistical significance of a 1:1 environment that

cannot be attributed to any other extraneous factors such as student demographics,

teacher training, or other factors out of teachers’ control. Maggie is more concerned with

iPads and technology seen as a fad than necessarily concerned with die-hard research

studies, but she still desires some sort of information that would help her understand how

the school is using them “that is really really good” versus having iPads because “they

are cool.” Maggie would also like to see what other teachers in different content areas are

doing with technology to match up to the English classroom. She has seen numerous

examples, “but there was really nothing that I looked at and went, that’s it! This is what

I’m going to do in English.”

Maggie, though, recognizes that “technology is here to stay, so I take that as a

challenge to make sure that when we use it, it is valuable and valid.” Therefore, Maggie

has experimented with a variety of technological programs to help her literacy teaching.

She has tried apps on the iPad like iBooks to create student reading materials, a PDF

annotating app to teach her students how to be active readers, and numerous versions of

Shakespeare to help with translating and note taking. Maggie has found these

experiments “frustrating” because they often take more time than expected or don’t quite

accomplish what Maggie wishes they would. Still, Maggie thinks “you have to try

technology” and “will keep working and striving to find better things to do.” She has

thought

I could have [my students] write one essay and then do one where there is a little

bit more creativity involved there. I would adapt that to fit where I would want

that to go. I think slowly if I can find things that I think would be good like that I

want to incorporate more technology. I do.

This transition into feeling comfortable with technology and literacy teaching will be for

Maggie “a three to five year transition, easily, because I want it to be good.”

Maggie has held on to her traditional views of literacy teaching because she has

yet to find how technology can do anything better than how she currently teaches and

how her students learn. However, Maggie attributes these views to wanting to take the

time to use technology for valid reasons, which cannot happen overnight. Therefore,

rather than outright rejection of technology in literacy teaching and learning, Maggie is

slowly integrating technology into her classroom where she feels it will enhance her

students’ learning and they will find value in using it to increase their understandings of

English. These ideas are evident in the ways Maggie uses technology to enact her

understandings of literacy, as discussed in the next section.

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Enacting literacy views in teaching

Maggie’s teaching practice is filled with examples of students reading, writing,

speaking, listening, and thinking, which is an expansion on traditional views of literacy.

She uses technology to achieve these purposes in ways she deems valid and also adheres

to traditional forms of reading and writing.

“It’s just this beautiful combo”. Maggie likes the fact that she has added to her

understanding of literacy to extend beyond reading and writing to include thinking and

verbal expression. She recognizes her students are different than the type of students she

had 27 years ago in that “they are much more visual and I think we have to understand

that as well. Then tap into that to become literate in other ways.” One way Maggie

supports this visual aspect of literacy is to have her students create visual vocabulary

podcasts to learn vocabulary terms that accompany different units of study. She tells her

students that the pictures that accompany the words and definitions “will make everyone

in the class remember better.” She is sure to help them “make it engaging and not make it

boring” by reviewing how to effectively add slide transitions, animations, and voiceovers

to create what she deems valid vocabulary podcasts. This project is just one way Maggie

is thoughtful and deliberate in the ways she incorporates technology into her curriculum.

For the most part, though, Maggie’s teaching focuses on teaching her students the

necessary foundational literacy skills before she considers taking the time to

meaningfully integrate technology.

For example, when reading Phantom of the Opera, Maggie introduces the story of

Faust in order for her students to understand why Gaston LaRouix uses Faust all the way

through the novel. Maggie thinks “it’s just beautiful” how her students are then able to

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“really start thinking about it and they are looking for those deeper connections.” She

believes this will help them for the future as, “if you can get them doing that in 7th grade,

high school is going to be so much easier.” Similarly, Maggie layers in level of meaning

and instruction when teaching her students about Greek mythology. After reading the

myth of Daedalus and Icarus, Maggie has her students look at Bruegel’s Icarus to make a

connection:

Well if you’ve never seen this painting, Icarus is this little tiny leg sticking out of

the ocean in the far right corner as you are looking at it. Everything else is going

on, but he named his entire painting Icarus. Now if they don’t know the story, the

basic comprehension, just the foundation of who Icarus is, that painting means

nothing to them.

She then takes it a step further and introduces Auden’s poem about the painting referring

to suffering in life. She thinks “it’s just great as you watch these kids see [the

connection], but if you don’t know who Icarus is, none of that stuff means anything to

you.” These ideas are then all compounded in her students’ writing where she has them

start with very basic paragraphs before moving to simple essays to finally adding in-text

citations to support their writing.

Once her students have engaged in these foundational literacy skills through

reading, writing, thinking and speaking, Maggie then finds ways to integrate her

understanding of the visual aspect of literacy into her teaching. When looking at the

different art surrounding the Greek myths, Maggie and her students “just sat and we

talked about what we saw and why we saw it” making references to symbolism and use

of color and other aspects of visual literacy. Maggie also helps her students realize Greek

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mythology crops up all over, whether it is an Orpheus chamber music center or a

Narcissus hair salon, and then finds valid ways to integrate technology into her teaching.

Maggie had her students create an ad for a Greek mythology business or product on their

iPads; then she had them present in front of the class. To Maggie “it’s just this beautiful

combo…It gives them art, gets them up in front talking and they have to write.”

Similarly, when beginning to write an essay analyzing poetry, Maggie first spent time in

class “summarizing them together, analyzing, and then they listened and we

discussed…That was really cool. It was so much more fun to listen to them talk about it.”

After using this discussion to help write their essays, she had them create movie essays

that incorporated pictures and recorded voices to add another layer of learning. Maggie

wants to make sure the technology engages her students as well as teaches them skills

necessary for their future learning, and she is getting there on her own time and in her

own way.

Therefore, Maggie uses technology to enact her understanding of literacy in ways

that she deems important and useful. Maggie makes sure, though, to begin with a basic

level of understanding before incorporating technology so her students will have a strong

foundation of knowledge before she integrates technology to support this process.

New Conceptions of Literacy

Rick

Rick expects his students to be in their seats when the bell rings, otherwise they

are considered tardy. Rick doesn’t want to waste any time, as there is usually too much to

do in his advanced 8th grade English classes. You’ll hear phrases like, “We have a lot to

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do to be ready for next class,” or “Everyone eyes on me, pens down,” or “Who’s going

to help me remember to pass out papers,” as Rick’s classes quickly move from one topic

to the next. Although Rick adheres to the strict schedule written on the board and expects

his students to do the same, he still takes the time to joke with his students or make clever

allusions to pop culture. When reviewing a unique scene from Shakespeare that contains

three different types of ironies, Rick ends the discussion with “It’s like Superman and

Clark Kent. You never see them together.”

Rick also makes sure to constantly involve his students. He will have students take

notes and give their opinions when other students make presentations or speeches; He

will call on students who don’t raise their hands or seem unengaged in the discussion;

and He will always engage in a round of peer editing before essays are due. Rick is

comfortable in many roles as a teacher, whether it’s “the sage on the stage or the guide

on the side,” when considering what is best for his students and what will help them with

whatever they are learning. He also expects, though, that his students will be listening

when he lectures, provides notes, or introduces important information and is sure to

bring his students back to focusing on the task at hand if they get off track.

Rick constantly tries to improve his teaching. Rick is halfway through his master’s

degree in technology curriculum and instruction and thinks his thought process towards

English teaching has begun to change. He didn’t expect to be doing as much with

technology in English in the classroom as he does, but freely admits that he “is no

expert.” That lack of expertise doesn’t stop Rick from changing up his Shakespeare unit

by having the students conduct a virtual tour of the Globe Theatre to aid in their

comprehension of staging, or by creating family webs using online graphic organizers to

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better understand character relationships. Rick doesn’t think his English teaching has

changed much yet, but sees the possibilities with technology as he finishes his degree.

What is literacy for Rick?

Rick recognizes his past experiences as being firmly grounded in reading and

writing, but now his focus has turned to how to make meaning from a variety of sources

and mediums. When thinking about his early understandings of literacy, Rick feels “for

the most part my education has dealt mostly with people who thought literacy consisted

of reading a text and answering questions or writing an essay.” Today, Rick thinks

literacy means “the ability to take information, interpret and understand it, in order to

make new meaning [and] information out of it.” Meaning can be found in “different types

of media and…the literacy that goes with it: text literacy, technology literacy, visual

literacy, audio literacy, video literacy, etc.” These different types of literacy have

impacted Rick’s understanding of literacy as

We are always going to need to know how to read and write, but we also need to

know how do we incorporate these different medias and create something to now

only show our understanding but it gives understanding to others and maybe is a

thinking point for someone else to go off of.

For example, Rick believes it is important to understand how to make meaning from a

picture and to recognize all the different feelings and emotions inherent in one image.

Similarly, the creation of a podcast that incorporates media, music, and voice to create a

new form of communication is a way to take “ information from different sources and

understand it and digest it and make new meaning.”

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Prior to starting his master’s in technology, Rick felt his education dealt primarily

with people who thought literacy consisted of print-based mediums. This, in turn, carried

over into his early teaching career:

I think that one of the main reasons I focus primarily on text literacy is because

this is what people have taught me my entire life. I think that I need to try harder

to break this habit in order to reach a wider variety of learners.

Therefore, Rick has started to think of literacy having old goals and new goals. For

example, old goals include reading a book, understanding it, and writing about it. New

goals would be to take the same book, read it, understand it, write about it, “but

communicate it to others. Show that you are literate by creating something new to

demonstrate [your understanding].” Rick feels it is important for him as a teacher and for

his students to be able to access all the different literacies and make meaning from them

in order to be successful for the future.

Views of literacy and technology learning and teaching

Taking the time to access these different literacies is evident in how Rick views

literacy and technology learning and teaching. By accessing different literacies, Rick

demonstrates his new conceptions and understanding of literacy.

“My students will kind of surprise me”. Rick believes that technology is

changing the way kids show they have learned:

Instead of writing an essay, [students] are creating a video now. [Students] are

still giving me the information that they would have put in their essay, but now

it’s in a video. Or I could have a class discussion about what they learned, or I

will just have my students post about it in this forum.

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Rick thinks students are better at “creating something to display that they have

understood what they’ve learned” because not all of his students are necessarily good at

traditional forms of literacy learning. However, his students “can put together a good

PowerPoint, which is just taking writing and putting it in a different format. I think there

are some kids that succeed a lot more if there is an element of technology.”

Rick has rethought his views on student learning when considering what his

students may pay attention to in his classroom, especially related to the multimodality.

For example, when learning about Shakespeare, Rick’s students may learn more from a

virtual fieldtrip of the Globe Theater rather than just talking about it in class:

It was a cartoon kind of thing, but it walks you through and you hear from

different characters and there are a lot of images. Students can see that even

though it’s a drawing of what the Globe would have looked like, they can see it

and think, “Okay, now maybe I can have a better understanding of that [idea].”

Additionally, Rick uses these ideas when incorporating research into his classroom. He

has his students make meaning from traditional books, Internet websites, podcasts,

pictures, and videos.

This idea of enhancing learning through multimodality has been evident for Rick

as his students “kind of surprise me” with the learning they are able to demonstrate.

Oftentimes his students extend their learning beyond just answering questions for class

“because they are finding these different resources from different websites that I had

given them, and the information they are presenting to me is more than just answering the

question.” Rick views this type of learning important for his students’ future job

prospects as “a lot of jobs are going to incorporate using that technology to take that

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writing and take that research and create something new.” In order to prepare his students

for this type of future where literacy and technology meaningfully interact, Rick’s views

on technology and literacy learning have changed to use technology “transformationally”

where it aids in literacy and helps his student gain new understanding.

“A lot of this is still new for me”. When considering his views on technology

and literacy teaching, Rick thinks of himself as the “old me and the new me.” The old

Rick viewed literacy teaching as “write this essay, turn it in for a grade, take it home and

put it in a folder or throw it away.” Rick still thinks it is important for his students to

know how to read and write, but the new Rick thinks

there are different types of literacy and it’s important to be able to use all of those

and be successful. Let’s say that you are a newscaster. You are going to pick

specific pictures for people. You are not going to just write the story and put it up

there. You are going to incorporate these different medias to communicate your

message.

This idea is coupled with Rick’s other new views that “everyone is going to use

technology in some way to create something and share their ideas and their feelings with

others, which I think is really important.” Rick feels these views of literacy and

technology teaching “take the focus off of me and make [my students] take control of

what they are learning.” Most of his students are self-directed and take ownership of their

work while Rick views his role as teacher to be on the side helping his students and learn

from them.

Still, Rick is not sure if technology has changed his changed his teaching. By

starting his master’s in teaching, Rick is frequently reminded “that I haven’t really

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changed things yet, and part of that is because maybe I am nervous or resistant, but at the

same time I don’t really feel supported in changing the way I teach.” Rick doesn’t feel a

push from his administration or colleagues “to teach differently and be okay if it is not

successful.” For example, the administration at College Prep Academy expect technology

to be used to support traditional ways of literacy teaching and learning while Rick uses

technology to support his new conceptions of literacy. Therefore, Rick is confused about

what views to enact in his teaching. Even if he does embrace his new views on

technology and literacy teaching, Rick does not feel that his colleagues will join him. He

is afraid that if he tries new things and fail, his colleagues will pepper him with questions

like: “What were you thinking? Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do it the way

you’ve been doing it?” While Rick desires to continue to learn and grow, he feels

there is not really anyone at school that is going to make me want to become a

better teacher, and I think that kind of shows with some of the teachers that we

have at our school who probably have been doing the same thing for 10 years.

Rick admits he is “not a pro or anything like that a lot of this is still new for me,” but his

ultimate desire for his teaching is to continue to help his students.

Rick has seen the benefits of multimodality in his students’ learning as they may

gain new insight into ideas or concepts. For Rick, multimodality extends beyond what

Rick considers old literacy teaching and learning such as reading a book, answering

questions, and writing a paper. Rather, Rick tries to help his students make meaning from

different modes as well as using these different modes to help others extend their

understanding. Rick continues to grow into his new views of technology and literacy

learning and teaching and freely admits he is “not an expert and I don’t do things

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perfectly.” In this regard, Rick would like continued encouragement from his

administration and colleagues as well as more colleagues willing to try new forms of

literacy teaching.

Enacting views of literacy in teaching

Rick takes into account his understanding of literacy as meaning making in his

teaching practice. His students engage in the meaning making process by creating

different projects, and Rick uses technology to support reading and writing.

“A valuable use of my students’ time”. Admittedly, Rick says before his new

understanding of literacy was shaped by his master’s degree, literacy “maybe would be

some lecture and then read and discuss and then take a quiz or a test.” His master’s

degree has helped him “reevaluate and…be more aware of how I am instructing in a

classroom and how I am teaching.” While Rick still feels there is a place for reading and

discussing, he now spends much of his instruction and teaching practice finding

meaningful ways to integrate technology for students to make new meaning from what

they are learning. For example, while reading Animal Farm, Rick first started with a

video on the Russian revolution and Stalin for character and conflict comparison as well

as background for the book. Rather than a final essay over the novel, Rick’s students had

many video project options for their final assessment. These options included making a

propaganda film from the perspective of the animals, a newscast explaining how people

in town might feel about the farm, a talk show with characters from the book, or a

podcast that included music and pictures and talking, also dealing with characterization.

The purpose was to look more in-depth at the characterization and conflict and as a way

to cover ideas that students may not have learned from the book. In projects like this,

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Rick readily admits his students often go beyond what is required and do a “good job of

passing along new information and more information than I asked for…and it’s relevant

information.”

Rick has also incorporated technology to support literacy learning by changing

lessons from previous years. When discussing the characters in Much Ado About Nothing,

last year, Rick spent a class period telling his students about every single character by

asking “if you were going to cast a movie, who would you pick for these characters and

why. I think that was okay, but I don’t think that was the most valuable.” This year, Rick

had his students first start by researching the different characters on Spark Notes, and

then using a word processing tool to have them create a family tree “showing how all the

different characters are related to one another and show those connections and physically

draw connections.” Rick had trouble grading for Rick didn’t know how the assignment

was going to turn out or what exactly he was looking for, but he thought “it was just as

effective or more effective than me lecturing for 45 minutes about the different

characters.”

Examples such as these address the skills Rick feels he need for new meaning

making and the future:

I think when you talk about literacy, yes, you can read a book and you can

understand it and that’s great. But I feel, and I’m starting to feel more, that there

are different types of literacy and it’s important to be able to use all of those and

be successful.

These important skills are combined and taken one step further because of the

technology, and “a lot of jobs are going to incorporate using that technology, to take that

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writing and take that research and create something new.” The teaching and learning of

these different literacies is accomplished in the way Rick views the roles of the teacher

and student in the classroom.

For the most part, incorporating the different technologies and literacies in the

classroom takes much of the focus off Rick and puts the control in the hands of the

students. Rick, then, often finds himself working and learning alongside of his students:

I like to give them time to work on it, and if it is something like that, maybe have

them work together to teach each other, but I am also always there to kind of help

them and a lot of times I am learning something new while I am working with

them.

Although Rick sometimes doesn’t know what he’s looking for or what to expect from his

students, he still feels he has control and can get everyone’s attention if needed.

However, “if the kids are self-directed and they are working and they are accomplishing

the class, that is fine with me.” Rick tries to make every literacy teaching and learning

opportunity he does in class a “valuable use of [my students] time.”

Rick has sought ways to change his teaching practice to break out of the

traditional methods of reading and writing by integrating different technology projects to

support not only multiple literacies but also meaning making. These projects are

primarily student-centered in nature and Rick thinks they are more valuable to his

students’ learning than simply reading a book, taking a quiz, and writing an essay.

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Findings Summary

Sophie, Lilly, Lindsay, Maggie, and Rick all have distinct definitions of literacy,

views of technology, literacy learning and teaching, and ways in which they enact their

understandings in their teaching practice. These definitions, views, and enactments of

understanding fall along a continuum of traditional conceptions of literacy to new

conceptions of literacy. Sophie, Lilly and Lindsay all discussed literacy as primarily

reading and writing. Sophie and Lindsay, in particular, view technology as harmful to

literacy learning and have not seen the importance of technology to their literacy

teaching. Additionally, Lindsay, Sophie, and Lilly use technology in limited capacities in

their teaching and only to support their definition of literacy as reading and writing.

Maggie’s definition of literacy, views of technology and literacy learning, and teaching

fall more in the middle of the continuum. She adds listening, speaking, and thinking to

reading and writing in her definition and thinks technology can help with literacy

learning and teaching in ways she decides are valid. Therefore, Maggie’s enactment of

her understanding of literacy includes technology that supports student learning while

primarily focusing on reading and writing. Finally, Rick can be categorized in the new

conceptions of literacy end of the continuum as his definition breaks free from the

traditional notion of reading and writing to include meaning making. He feels that

technology aids in the meaning making process and therefore uses technology

predominately in his teaching practice to enact his understanding of literacy.

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CHAPTER 5 – DISCUSSION

“In every era, what it means to be literate evolves and changes” (NCTE, 2014, para. 1)

The lived experiences of the five teachers in this study have greatly contributed to

their understandings of literacy, their views of technology and literacy teaching and

learning, and how they enact these understandings and views in their teaching practice.

Sophie, Lilly, Maggie, Lindsay, and Rick all speak to their knowledge-in-practice

(Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) or their personal practical knowledge (Connelly,

Clandinin & He, 1997) when discussing how their different histories, interactions with

others, and teaching actions have influenced how they have come to understand literacy

in their lives, their professions, and the world. This study has helped draw out their

knowledge-in-practice by providing them opportunities to “to enhance, make explicit,

and articulate the tacit knowledge embedded in experience and in the wise action of very

competent professionals” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, pp. 262-263). Knowledge-in-

practice is just one small piece of the larger knowledge base for teaching; as these

teachers rely heavily on their experiences versus integrating their personal knowledge

with formal knowledge, there are missed opportunities by all the teachers that could have

enriched their own literacy teaching and learning and, subsequently, their students’

learning.

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Defining Literacy

Maggie, Lindsay, Sophie, Lilly and Rick all expressed a sincere desire to prepare

their students for high school and, subsequently, college. This fits within the ideals of

College Prep Academy as the majority of students enter college upon graduation. For

Lindsay, Sophie, Lilly and Maggie in particular, to prepare students for success in college

means teaching them to have a strong grasp of the principles of reading and writing and

other traditional “academic” conceptions of literacy. These include literacies limited to

the school setting where students demonstrate deep understanding of reading and writing

with a focus on functional and problem-solving literacy with the goal to organize

information, expand knowledge, interact with various texts, and other limited actions

(Perry, 2010). For example, Lindsay commented on how her main focus in the classroom

is “vocabulary and then I split my time with writing, giving feedback, putting together

tips, practice examples, and peer editing. Then we have our time to read and discuss

literature.” As such, Lindsay, Lilly, Sophie, and Maggie’s knowledge and understanding

of literacy according to their definitions is sufficient and successful for their teaching

practice in their respective classroom settings.

In 6th grade, the starting grade at the 6-12 College Prep Academy, Sophie and

Lilly are successful in introducing their students to the types of academic literacies they

can expect in both middle school and high school through traditional reading and writing.

Sophie and Lilly devote their time to introducing foundational information in literature,

such as a basic plot structure, characterization, making personal connections to texts, and

identifying strong themes. In writing, Sophie and Lilly break different genres of writing

into micro units. For example, in the 6th grade poetry unit, students learn poetry terms

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such as onomatopoeia, metaphor, simile, and personification by writing different poems

that specifically feature these different terms. Through extra practice in identifying

different writing elements in all genres, Sophie and Lilly believe their students emerge

ready to tackle the next grade level.

Similarly, in 8th grade, Lindsay crafts units around a novel to include elements

such as pertinent background information regarding the time period, essential character

descriptions, and important themes. Basic comprehension strategies and checks are

incorporated while reading the novel. Built around the unit are opportunities for journal

writing, vocabulary terms and definitions, comprehension assessments, and a culminating

essay that features some sort of summarization and analysis. Students in Lindsay’s class

also take part in the writing process that features brainstorming, drafting, revising, and

editing. Lindsay makes sure her students know what to do to write an essay “when Mr.

Elliot [the 9th grade teacher] says, ‘Write a 3-page essay,’ without any direction or help.”

Maggie may be the most successful in her teaching practice in adhering to her

definition of literacy as reading, writing, speaking, and thinking. For example, in any

given 7th grade class, Maggie might start by introducing or reviewing vocabulary words

that are directly related to the particular lesson or unit the students are studying. She may

have students read a short story or short passage of a novel that will connect to a poem

she will later include in the class period so students can enrich their understanding of a

particular theme or idea. Maggie will then explicitly connect these short stories, passages,

and poems to the overarching theme that she introduced at the beginning of the unit while

also connecting all the ideas discussed to the essays her students will write at the end of

the unit. Besides the connections permeating throughout a specific unit, Maggie also

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connects universal themes and concepts to pervious units, future units, and popular

culture.

Rick is the only teacher to express something different in terms of his

understanding of literacy: “Literacy is taking information from different sources and

understanding it and digesting it and making new meaning.” He further explains his

definition in terms of old and new goals and skills for literacy. He wants his students to

have the old skills of “read this book, understand it, and be able to write about,” but he

also wants his students to be able to have new skills such as “read it, understand it, write

something new, but communicate it to others. Show that you are literate by creating

something to demonstrate that.” Rick also connects his definition of literacy to the formal

knowledge he has gained about literacy in his technology curriculum and instruction

master’s degree. Rick would also be considered successful in adhering to his definition of

literacy in his teaching practice. His students still read books, demonstrate they

understand what they are reading, and write papers accordingly. Rick, though, also has

his students take what they’ve learned and create new meanings through podcasts, visual

presentations, and other projects that are shared with others.

With the exception of Rick, the difficulty inherent in Lilly, Sophie, Lindsay, and

Maggie’s understanding of literacy is that, over time, literacy in their classrooms has

become stagnant, creating almost a vacuum where traditional academic literacies of

reading and writing become the sole focus of teaching and learning.

The first step for Maggie, Lilly, Lindsay, and Sophie and a reminder for Rick is to

recognize that literacy is always in motion (Cole & Pullen, 2010). To continue thinking

of English and literacy in terms of just reading and writing is problematic (Jewitt, 2002).

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Rather, English and literacy forms and is formed by shifts of culture, capital, and

emergent technologies (Luke, 2004). The complexity of English teaching and learning

requires constantly evolving knowledge surrounding literacy. A more expansive view of

literacy calls for English teachers – and in this case Sophie, Lilly, Maggie, and Lindsay –

to constantly redefine what it means to be literate (Cervetti, Damico, & Pearson, 2006), in

order to respond to their students’ responsibilities in the rapidly changing world.

An Expanded Definition

When considering my own definition of literacy in comparison to the five

teachers in this study, expanding my understanding began with encountering Nancie

Atwell (1998) and her reading and writing workshop through my master’s degree. Atwell

sought to integrate authentic reading and writing into her curriculum through “dinner

table” conversations with students about books they read rather than typical book reports

or mandated readings. Atwell engaged her students in writing they interacted with on a

daily basis, whether this consisted of writing they encountered in newspapers, textbooks,

class assignments, poetry or letters, as well as writing for authentic purposes, not just to

complete a class assignment. For me, the idea of reading and writing for authentic

purposes meant I had to consider how reading and writing extended beyond the four

classroom walls so my middle school students would find value and be motivated to learn

the different skills and strategies I was trying to impart in my instruction.

With technology and multimodality evolving and shaping literacy (NCTE 2008,

2013; IRA, 2009), I recognized that my middle school students were doing much more

than just reading and writing. New skills and knowledge were needed for both my

students and myself in order to maintain the idea of literacy for authentic purposes

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(NCTE, 2008, 2013): “There are increased cognitive demands on the audience to

interpret the intertextuality of communication events that include combinations of print,

speech, images, sounds, movement, music and animation. Products may blur traditional

lines of genre, author/audience, and linear sequence” (NCTE, 2008, n.p.). Therefore

through doctoral study that offered more formal knowledge while contrasting it to my

experience, literacy expanded to multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996). I needed a

different sort of pedagogy to help my pre-service teachers understand how technology

and multimodality could help shape their literate practices and their future students’

literate practices.

This pedagogy, which includes the updated notions of the multiliteracies

pedagogy of experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying (Cope & Kalantzis,

2009), can help Maggie, Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay break free from their stagnant

understandings of literacy and help Rick continue to grow his understanding. For

example, Maggie, Sophie, Lilly, Lindsay, and Rick can maintain their college preparatory

and academic focus as they conceptualize and dissect reading and writing for academics

purposes. They can equip their students with the knowledge and skills needed to be

successful in the academic setting while also engaging their students in discussions by

analyzing how different literacies interact with one another. These other out-of-school

literacies need to be interrogated as equally as academic literacies to understand how they

interact and continually shape one another.

Most important to this expanded definition of literacy is that shaping literacies is

more important than acquiring them (Bloome & Encisco, 2006). The shaping of literacies

occurs in socially constructed practices (Myers, 2006) by placing the student at the center

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of learning along with all the varied literacies they engage with on a daily basis. The

literacy practices students use in their everyday lives are more “richly varied and

formally complex” (McClenaghan & Doecke, 2010, p. 225) than those in school. As

students are knowledge producers versus knowledge consumers in these literate practices

(Alvermann, 2008), there is a missed opportunity in Sophie, Rick, Lilly, Lindsay, and

Maggie’s teaching to help their students become more knowledgeable and aware of “the

potential and value of their cultural practices as meaning-making pursuits”

(McClenaghan & Doecke, 2010, p. 225), especially in diverse technological settings.

A Missed Opportunity

Maggie, Sophie, Lindsay, Lilly, and to some extent, Rick, portray a fairly teacher-

dominated view of literacy to their students. In looking at the four knowledge processes

of multiliteracies of experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying (Cope &

Kalantzis, 2009), the teachers decide which forms of literacy their students will

experience and is dominated by traditional reading and writing. For example, all the

teachers choose what novels the class will be reading together. While students may have

choices during free reading, there is no crossover between what they are reading on their

own to what they discuss in class. Similarly, the students do not get to choose their essay

topics required for class. There is also no recognition of other forms of reading, writing,

or meaning making, especially in technological settings that the students engage with in

their everyday lives.

In the next knowledge process, the five teachers help their students conceptualize

what they are learning by classifying and categorizing, but do not engage their students in

active theory making about what they are learning. For instance, since Maggie chose all

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the readings on Greek mythology and decided what information to share with her

students, she directed note taking in her classroom as the students read, leaving little to

personal interpretation. None of the teachers engaged their students in discussions about

new or unfamiliar literacy practices, such as those influenced by technology and

multimodality, allowing them to conceptualize what they were encountering.

While the teachers try to help their students reach higher levels of Bloom’s

taxonomy, they do not help then critically interrogative diverse perspectives. Lilly,

Lindsay, and Sophie all asked their students to consider the ramifications of hatred

towards others during the course of a Holocaust unit. However, when observing Sophie

lead her students in a discussion of the Holocaust before reading The Devil’s Arithmetic,

ideas like hatred, propaganda, forming opinions based on first impressions, anti-

Semitism, and “going with the crowd” were all discussed in the span of 12 minutes

before students were assigned a worksheet on the history of Jewish oppression. Similarly,

as Lindsay presented on the differences between emigration and immigration during the

Holocaust, one student asked about these concepts in relation to the current Mexican

immigration conflict with the United States. Lindsay responded by emphasizing the

definitions of emigration and immigration rather than addressing the impetus behind the

student’s question which was to understand why people were upset about the

immigration. These missed opportunities greatly affect the last knowledge process of

applying, where students do not get the opportunity to create new learning or apply it in a

different setting to enhance their understanding of critical literacy.

As these examples show, the teachers at College Prep Academy need more formal

knowledge or knowledge-for-practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) to expand their

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definitions of literacy and to find ways to use students’ out-of-school literacies to support

those within the school and institutional setting. The goal is not to find one method, but to

have a flexible repertoire in response to different students (Luke, 2004). A multiliteracies

perspective as well as the knowledge processes inherent in this perspective will help

these teachers break free from the stagnant definitions they currently hold. Additionally,

understanding that “new literacies of today will be replaced by even new literacies

tomorrow as information and communication technology (ICTs) continuously emerge

among a more globalized community of learners” (IRA, 2009, paragraph 6) will help

Maggie, Sophie, Rick, Lindsay, and Lilly recognize that technology plays a role in this

process and they must continue to incorporate it into their teaching practice.

Rethinking Literacy and Technology

When I first started at College Prep Academy, the school was in the throws of

technological change. They were slowly replacing their two or three computer labs with

portable laptop carts and then 1:1 learning. This was in no part because of the teachers

choosing or discovering technology. Instead, the administration mandated that all

teachers and students would be taking part in this transition because of the high price tag

of purchasing all the technology and trying to maintain the school’s innovative edge in

the private school market. Most teachers bristled at the idea since this meant long hours

in training, learning new software and, in some cases, completely changing curriculum.

English teachers were forcefully directed by the administration to change their long

established curriculum to accommodate new projects or tools such as creating iMovies,

Wikis, and other Web 2.0. tools to take advantage of the new technology rather than

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leave it unused in students’ backpacks. The administration required three technology

projects a quarter and checked on teachers to see if they fulfilled the requirement. Rather

than approaching the technology with the means to think about literacy differently,

teachers saw it as something they had to use and lost in the shuffle was literacy, how

literacy and technology connected to student learning, and how literacy has changed due

to technology.

In speaking with the current administration at College Prep Academy about their

views of literacy and technology to aid in better understanding Maggie, Lilly, Sophie,

Rick, and Lindsay’s views on technology and literacy, I discovered that the

administrative push for technology devoid of a literacy focus still remains. The executive

director thinks the mobile devices are “being underutilized…and still using it only as a

research tool.” He thinks a third of the faculty have rejected technology in their

classrooms “because they’ve had tremendous success without it. Why should they

change?” In this regard, “success is a ruthless competitor,” because the teachers

recognize they don’t need technology to accomplish their goals. The middle school

principal thinks the 1:1 implementation has been “quite clumsily” with “very poor

education for the teachers” but that “there’s still a lot to improve upon to really enhance

learning.” The principal attributes most of these problems to “just handing everyone an

iPad” without really having the tough discussions of why the school went 1:1 in the first

place. Therefore teachers have not had a lot of time to collaborate or develop what the

principal thinks of as “a common language” for the teachers to speak about when using

the iPads.

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The administration’s comments match up closely with how Lilly, Sophie,

Lindsay, Maggie view technology’s role in literacy learning and teaching. Lilly, Sophie,

and Lindsay all expressed how technology is a “necessary evil” since their students will

need to know how to use different technology even though it may be negatively

impacting literacy learning. Maggie spoke passionately about the need for established

research that positively supports technology’s place in the classroom since most of her

experiences have led her to view technology as ill suited to what she current teaches in

English class. Rick, on the other hand, was willing to experiment with technology and

saw purpose behind integrating it into his classroom even while he remained less than

confident in his abilities. All the teachers expressed a desire to see how other, more

expert, teachers have used technology effectively in their classrooms no one has shown

them how technology can fit into their curriculum.

These views may be attributed to the extensive iPad training and professional

development all the middle school teachers participated in as part of the 1:1 iPad

implementation process. The teachers discussed how the initial training focused on

features of the iPad: how to turn it on, how to zoom in and out, how to switch in between

applications, and how to use different apps for educational purposes. This first training

was given by employees of Apple and sought to demonstrate the different capabilities

and affordances of the iPad device. The difficulty in this initial training was that the focus

was on the machine and what it could do versus discussing the larger concept of literacy

(Spires, Oliver & Corn, 2011; Holcomb, 2009). Subsequent trainings had teachers at the

school showcasing how they used iPads in their classrooms in different subject areas. As

indicated by the five teachers at College Prep Academy, literacy was not mentioned.

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Maggie, Lilly, Sophie, Lindsay and Rick participated in the training and professional

development to the full extent, even creating different videos and products from the apps,

but as Maggie points out, “I would never ever use this in my classroom.” The teachers

expressed that they never learned to connect what was being demonstrated to English

teaching and learning.

The teachers have had the most success when they are able to be knowledge users

and generators, as shown in the Tuesday morning collaboration time. This collaboration

took on a specific format and expectations. Over the course of a semester, small teacher

groups were supposed to decide which specific skill to focus on, collectively brainstorm

lessons and assignments to demonstrate this, have one teacher actually teach the unit with

an administrator evaluating, and finally have all the teachers in the teacher group evaluate

the teaching process and student outcomes. For the first skill, the English teachers at

College Prep Academy focused on what they considered a valuable literacy skill:

summary versus analysis. The teachers had the students summarize a Greek myth about a

specific god and then analyze what the myth meant. This was accomplished through the

creation of a brochure on the iPad. The teachers created a template with example pictures,

summary, and analysis. Students were then required to access the template, exchange the

teacher created materials with their own, and were subsequently graded on how well they

accomplished this task.

Besides discussing the creation and outcomes of particular assignments relevant

to the English teacher’s classes in the meetings, there was also an opportunity to address

iPad issues, iPad problem solving, and needed or missing information to use the iPads

more effectively during collaboration time. As Maggie expressed about this time:

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It provides a time for us to get together and say, “Okay, I’ve got this lesson

coming up. What do you guys think? Have you done this? Does this work? What

do your kids know?”…We all helped out and all learned in that and our lessons

are great… Now I am moving close to the right balance of literacy and technology

and I am finding validity in what we are doing.

However, this was the only instance and opportunity where the teachers reflected on the

intersection of their formal and personal practical knowledge (Cochran-Smith & Lytle,

1999). This process helped Maggie, Sophie, Lilly, Lindsay, and Rick realize that literacy

and technology are no longer mutually exclusive (Reinking, McKenna, Labbo & Keifer,

1998). Therefore, if the teachers truly desire to prepare their students to think about

literacy in multiple ways, literacy and all its different facets should become the focus of

their instruction. They must also consider technology’s role in helping their students

become multiliterate.

Literacy first, then technology

Recognizing new technologies have changed the ways in which we make

meaning and, as such, require new meaning-making strategies, Maggie, Sophie, Lindsay,

and Lilly must develop an understanding of the interplay between literacy and

technology. The focus, however, is on literacy and multiliteracies and not technology

(Hicks, 2006). Hicks (2006) argues that teachers should instead be focusing on how

literacies are affected by all that technology enables. In fact, “multiliteracies are relevant

to English classrooms because we – students perhaps more importantly than teachers –

have the advanced ICTs that allow multiliteracies to happen” (Grabill & Hicks, 2005, p.

303). Therefore, teachers must have opportunities to “think critically about pedagogical

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concerns…and about the intellectual, social, cultural, political and economic impact of

using [technology]” (Swenson et al, 2005, p. 219) when considering literacy’s role in the

classroom.

How might the teachers at College Prep Academy go about accomplishing this

difficult task? Zeni (1994) argues teachers should examine three different facets of

literacy teaching and learning: considering the tool, the learning environment, and the

wider political and social environment. Rather than simply focusing on the technical

technological aspect of integrating technology into the classroom (such as what types,

how long and validity) – as Maggie, Lilly, Sophie, Rick, and Lindsay experienced during

their training and stand alone professional development – teachers must instead focus on

“building literate communities. We must work toward a progressive discourse of

technology – critical and theoretical as well as practical – even amid pressure to keep

abreast of developments” (p. 84). Luke (2003) agrees this type of understanding of

literacy goes beyond learning skills, effectively using technology or problem-based

learning. Instead, critical information and technology literacy “includes a

metaknowledge, a critical and self-reflective analysis of the sociocultural and political

contexts of ICTs at global and local levels” (p. 399). When given time, as in the Tuesday

morning collaboration, Sophie, Maggie, Lilly, Lindsay, and Rick were able to

purposefully engage in informal reflective thinking (Shoffner, 2008) concerning

technology and literacy. They also need, however, to continue to extend this new

understanding into all facets of their teaching practice.

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A Missed Opportunity

After recognizing how ineffectively the training and stand-alone professional

development influenced their views on technology and literacy, Rick, Maggie, Lindsay,

Lilly, and Sophie need to create more opportunities for themselves that supports the kind

of knowledge generating and mixing of formal and personal practical knowledge present

in their mandated collaboration time. For example, they have access to a wealth of

resources as the school has provided training over the iPad, they have extra technology

that accompany iPads such as Apple TV, and the school will purchase any other

hardware or software they need. Additionally, the teachers create their own curriculum

maps and are not bogged down by a specific mandated curriculum. There is no heavy

testing requirement or test prep built into their curriculum. Despite these advantages, they

haven’t changed their curriculum or teaching since I taught alongside of them.

The teachers expressed wanting someone to come in and show them what could

be revolutionary with technology, because they are failing to do it themselves. Rick has

been so dissatisfied with the training that he believes “the teachers who are successful at

implementing technology into their curriculum are the ones who figure it out for

themselves” rather than waiting for someone else to figure it out for them. Rick would

like to see how these successful teachers go about this process for his own teaching

practice. Why aren’t the teachers at College Prep Academy creating opportunities for

themselves? Rick mentions that he doesn’t feel supported by the administration and his

fellow teachers to drastically change anything. Maggie discusses how until higher

education changes to not focus so much on reading and writing, she will not doing

anything different since she feels so successful at preparing students for college. There is

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no apparent impetus to change from outside sources nor is there a desire to change for

personal reasons. This lack of change can be attributed to teacher agency and the

difficulty in being an agent of change when teachers lack the necessary formal

knowledge and opportunity for this formal knowledge to be funneled through

constructivism (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999).

However, multiliteracies offers opportunity for agency. First, these new

technologies and literacies allow users to co-construct their knowledge and understanding

more than ever before (Cope & Kalantzis, 2010; Kimber & Wyatt-Smith, 2006).

Teachers are no longer isolated individuals who are forced to come together once a week

for collaboration. Instead, there exists more opportunities for co-authoring and tapping

into stored knowledge to develop and shape learning experiences for students with digital

learning and texts (Kimber & Wyatt-Smith, 2006). Rather than complaining about forced

training or collaboration about topics unrelated to what these teachers would rather talk

about, thinking about literacy and technology in light of multiliteracies forces teachers to

be proactive. Multiliteracies is constantly changing, and teachers can be designers and co-

constructors of their own teaching and learning. Rather than waiting for technology to

decide how literacy functions in the classroom, the teachers could instead shape how the

technology promotes different types of literacy learning, dependent on their goals. For

example, they should be instructing technology companies on how apps should work to

support revising and editing in the writing process rather than rejecting technology

altogether. In this regard, teachers are the key agents in their efforts to change what they

would like to see in their classrooms (Young & Bush, 2004). An expanded definition of

literacy and expanded views of literacy and technology will also greatly serve Lilly, Rick,

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Lindsay, Sophie, and Maggie as they consider enacting these views in their teaching

practice.

Redesigning Teaching

As mentioned earlier, each teacher’s definition of literacy is sufficient and

successful for his or her teaching practice. In the same regard, the teachers would also be

considered quite successful in using technology to enact his or her definitions of literacy.

Since Sophie is primarily concerned with reading and writing, technology is used to aid

in these processes. Students in Sophie’s class use their iPads as a resource to look up

information to be used in written reports, as a thesaurus to enhance the word choice in

their writing, and as a word processor to type up writing. In contrast, Sophie does not let

her students use their iPads to read as she thinks it is distracting. As Sophie wants to

prepare her students to be successful readers and writers, she primarily uses technology

as a presentation tool to introduce new concepts and skills her students will then use as

they read and write.

Lindsay and Lilly, also focusing primarily on reading and writing, use technology

in much the same way. Lilly lets her students freely use technology to look up any

information they might need for any form of reading and writing. Lilly also extends the

technology use to student presentations so students can visually display what they have

learned. Lindsay has her students use technology for research purposes as well, but most

of the focus on technology use in Lindsay’s teaching is on writing. She uses the website

turnitin.com to collect her students’ writing and provide feedback. She also uses

technology to present important information on what the students will be doing in class

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related to reading and writing. While Lindsay does use technology for creative purposes,

like creating book trailers, she considers these “fun projects” and “a break from the next

unit” since her students have already completed their written essays.

Maggie’s definition of literacy adds speaking and listening to reading and writing.

One prime example of this extended definition in action is Maggie’s vocabulary podcasts.

Students are assigned a word, learn the definition, write example sentences, and find the

antonyms and synonyms. They then transfer all this information into a computer program

like iMovie where they combine music, pictures, and voiceovers to create a podcast to

share with the class. Similarly, Maggie had her students create Greek mythology

advertisements on their iPads where they combined a visual element with written slogans

and phrases highlighting a product a mythological character would sell in today’s world.

Despite this unique use of technology, Maggie also told her students to “print off your ad

and turn it in,” as Maggie required a paper copy for grading purposes. In the rest of

Maggie’s teaching practice technology is limited to support traditional reading and

writing, much like Lilly, Sophie, and Lindsay.

Rick uses technology to support traditional reading and writing, as well as in a

variety of different ways to enact his understanding of literacy as meaning making.

Various projects include web quests over different topics and ideas his students will

explore in novel-based units, virtual tours of places and settings mentioned in novels,

podcasts that combine words and pictures and music, technology-based graphic

organizers to show non-linear relationships, and websites to house different blogs,

podcasts, hyperlinks, and other important information needed for a unit or a lesson. By

using technology in these different formats and for different purposes, Rick helps his

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students become meaning makers and not just passive recipients of information. Rick

attributes much of this change in his teaching practice to the knowledge he has gained

about technology and its connection to literacy through his master’s program. While

technology can be used quite successfully to help in traditional reading and writing

learning, as Sophie, Maggie, Lilly, and Lindsay all show, new technologies are making

new learning possible (Cope & Kalantzis, 2010) and students are no longer seen as

consumers of knowledge dictated by the teacher. Now, both students and teachers are

seen as designers and knowledge producers.

Missed Opportunities

The New London Group (1996) connects the notion of designing to “the sort of

creative intelligence the best practitioners need in order to be able to continually redesign

their activities in the very act of practice” (p. 20). In the design process, students take

available designs such as essays, textbooks, videos, Internet websites, and other literacy

artifacts and analyze, critique, and critically consider their goals and purposes. The

design process occurs frequently in technological settings as advanced technology has the

capabilities to support the process (Grabill & Hicks, 2005). It is through the process of

designing where students and teachers are able to become knowledge producers to make

“new use of old materials” (p. 22). In this way, students are seen as remakers and

transformers rather than users (Kress, 2000). Maggie’s students became designers and

knowledge producers as they created their vocabulary podcasts to share with their fellow

classmates, and Maggie should be applauded for this excellent addition to her classroom.

However, this was the only example I observed, and Maggie shared, where students

engaged in this type of process

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The other teachers demonstrated varying degrees of enactment of design

pedagogy (New London Group, 1996). For example, Lindsay had her students create

book trailers on The Giver to address central themes, characters, and capture the look and

feel of a movie trailer. Lindsay had her students create a storyboard that highlighted how

the book trailers would be organized, utilized the available technology to capture video

and edit it, and gave the students ownership over the materials they created. Rather than

seeing this designing process as integral to her students’ learning, Lindsay instead

thought the project “was a fun moment” and not connected to literacy. In contrast, Rick

viewed his students creating podcasts based on the story Flowers for Algernon about

individuals with disabilities as integral to his students’ learning as “everyone is going to

use technology in some way to create something and share their ideas and their feelings

with others, which I think is really important.”

For her students’ personification poem in their poetry portfolio, Sophie wanted

her students to not only understand personification, but also connect what they were

writing to some sort of illustration. To introduce this concept, Sophie first played a short

video explaining personification. The video included a song that provided the definition

of personification and example personification phrases as well as illustrations that

connected to the personification examples on each screen. This multimodal

representation of personification set the stage for what could have been an interesting

way for Sophie’s students to engage in the design process. Instead, after watching the

video, Sophie’s only questioned her students to “explain to me what personification is in

your own words” before having her students write out a poem on a piece of paper and

draw a picture to accompany what they wrote. Sophie could have had her students create

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their own multimodal representation of personification poetry to demonstrate their

learning while engaging in the design process, thereby gaining more literacy skills in the

process. This missed opportunity is another example of how more formal knowledge of

how literacy and technology interact with each other could produce new meaning and

meaning making opportunities.

Summary

Much of the knowledge of literacy expressed by Sophie, Maggie, Lilly, Lindsay,

and Rick is centered on the personal practical knowledge of their own experiences. For

Sophie, Lilly and Lindsay, in particular, they maintain stagnant understandings of literacy

built exclusively around reading and writing. Literacy, though, is shaped by technology,

and as technology continues to evolve and interact with literacy in a variety of ways, new

understanding is needed to expand literacy to literacies. These literacies must become the

focus of teaching and learning in the classroom. English teaching needs to consider how

technology contributes to the formation of these literacies and rethink how they can

meaningfully be integrated into the English curriculum. Meaningfully and purposefully

integrating technology into the English curriculum and English teaching will inevitably

change the way Maggie, Sophie, Rick, Lindsay, and Lilly come to know literacy and

teach their students to be literate in the 21st century.

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CHAPTER 6 – IMPLICATIONS & CONCLUSION

As I reach the end of my graduate school experience, I recognize that the formal

knowledge I have gained in the process has helped me make sense of my teaching

experiences both in the K-12 and undergraduate setting, my research experiences with

practicing teachers in my beginning teacher study and this study, and the other personal

practical knowledge I’ve gained through my educational experiences. This formal

knowledge has also greatly expanded my understanding of literacy. One implication from

this study is more formal knowledge is needed for both pre-service and practicing

teachers to extend their understandings of literacy. This formal knowledge is also

necessary for the second implication: extending the pedagogical repertoires of pre-service

and practicing teachers. Finally, my knowledge-for-practice and knowledge-in-practice

were further refined through Cochran-Smith & Lytle’s (1999) last knowledge framework,

knowledge-of-practice, as this study generated knowledge for my own and other’s

practice and is the third implication to help pre-service and practicing teachers add to

their knowledge base of teaching.

Extending Literacy

For Sophie, Lindsay, and Lilly, literacy was confined to the roles of reading and

writing. Out of the two other teachers, Maggie extended literacy to include speaking and

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listening on top of reading and writing, while Rick firmly described literacy as meaning

making. Sophie, Maggie, Lindsay, and Lilly did not connect their understanding of

literacy to anything besides their teaching experiences. As Rick described literacy as

meaning making and connects this idea strongly to his master’s degree study, clearly

connecting literacy to more formal knowledge is needed to help pre-service and

practicing teachers extend their understandings of literacy. This research supports the

benefit of advanced study for teachers, such as a master’s degree or continuing education,

as crucial for their continued literacy understanding. This advanced study is necessary as

technology continues to shape literacy (Bruce, 1997; NCTE 2013; IRA 2009), and a new

understanding of literacy is needed to allow for more flexibility and innovativeness

(Luke, 2003).

To begin with, literacy is no longer linear (Luke 2003). Literacy is not limited to

the information found in print-based texts, which must be read from left to right to make

connections. Rather, technology allows information to be linked in a non-linear fashion.

Embedded in websites are hyperlinks that provide additional information on specific

concepts or ideas not exclusively described or defined. Understanding relationships

among these ideas are as important as literacy activities of mastery, reproduction and

recombination. The process and problem aspect of literacy (Iyer, 2007), where

individuals must make meaning from information or a visual representation, is not the

only skill needed to be literate in today’s world. Teachers need competency in a variety

of literacy areas: cultural, digital, environmental, social, and emotional (Roasean &

Terpstra, 2012) in order to equip their students to be competent in these literacies as well.

These competencies include recognizing literacies found in places other than school

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settings. Roasen & Terpstra (2012) articulate this idea, as they believe “the ways we

work, play, communicate, and represent ourselves to others are all part of our developing

literacies” (p. 36). There is no map to follow; to achieve an extended understanding of

literacy, alternative starting points for learning, forms of engagement, divergent learning

orientations, and different modalities in meaning making (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009) are

crucial to the process. Multimodality, in particular, offers potential diverse pathways for

both instruction and student learning and is another aspect important to expanding the

notion of literacy.

Multimodality

Multimodality recognizes the written, visual, oral, audio, tactile, and gestural

representations of meaning making (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). As multimodal literacy is

inherent in individuals’ 21st century literacy practices (Walsh, 2010), it is crucial to

understand the relationship between traditional and multimodal texts in schools (McLean

& Rowsell, 2013). Multimodality requires different thinking to move seamlessly across

different modes and requires the ability to think across associations, different links and

paths, and old and new media genres (Luke, 2003). This type of thinking, “is the very

cognitive, socially situated repertoire we use to navigate everyday life and are core

requirements for hypertext navigation” (Luke, 2003, p. 401). Multimodality draws

literacy experiences closer to everyday life, a crucial component to engage students in

literacy learning.

The teachers in this study used multimodality for a variety of purposes, often with

the intent for literacy learning. Sophie, Lilly, and Lindsay used multimodality primarily

as a presentation tools and hooks into their lessons. Rick used it to deepen his students’

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understandings of characters in Shakespeare. Maggie had her students use their iPads to

create modern day Greek myth ads as replicas of what they see in the real world.

However, much more is needed to help engage their students in more multimodal

responses (McClenaghan & Doecke, 2010). For example, rather than simply having

students write out answers for different assignments, teachers could have students use

technology to create a visualization of their learning, record their spoken answers for

those who have trouble articulating their thoughts on paper or need practice articulating

their thoughts in speech, or combine words and pictures to emphasize non-linear

connections of information. Sophie stumbled upon this idea inadvertently when a girl

with a broken arm couldn’t write out her answers to a short formative assessment over

poetry terms. Instead, Sophie had her record her spoken answers to the questions, a task

she could have had all her students do, as well.

Pre-service and practicing teachers should also learn how to use mode shifting, or

synesthesia, as a deliberate pedagogical device (Cope & Kalantzis, 2010), rather than

something fun for the students to do. For example, Maggie shifted modes with one of the

earlier essay requirements in her class. She wanted her students to first discuss their ideas

over what they read to get them thinking. She recorded this discussion and told her

students they could use the discussion to help them write their essays. After writing their

essays, Maggie had her students take their ideas and create iMovie summaries of their

essays to connect their thoughts to pictures or animations. While this is an excellent

example of mode shifting as a pedagogical device, Maggie primarily viewed this

assignment as fun rather then helping her students make connections, understand how

their thinking shifted across the different modes, and understand what this shift in

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thinking means for their knowledge of literacy. Digital technologies aid in expanding the

multimodal nature of literacy (Walsh, 2010) and pre-service and practicing teachers will

need to continually extend their pedagogical repertoires (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009) in

order to not only extend their own understandings of literacy, but also their students’.

Extending Pedagogical Repertoires

In order to effectively bring extended notions of literacy into the classroom,

teachers will need to be equipped with new skills and understanding of how to best go

about this process. Teachers engaging in advanced study of the teaching practice, through

ongoing professional development or advanced degrees, will help in this process. This

process includes helping teachers recognize TPACK as just the beginning of

multiliteracies, embracing a Pedagogy of Design, and focusing more on the critical nature

of literacy.

TPACK as just the beginning

In the TPACK model, the goal is for teachers to gain technological pedagogical

content knowledge (Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Koehler & Mishra 2009). Much of the

attention in TPACK is on matching technology with curricular goals (Blanchard, 1994)

and learning the different techniques and skills to meaningfully integrate technology. In

the TPACK model, technology is not considered a static entity. Rather, teachers need

proper techniques and skills to meaningfully integrate technology with both informal and

formal knowledge. While recognizing the affordances and constraints of technological

devices as geared towards content areas, Hicks (2006) contends the focus should be less

on technology and more on what it means for students and teachers to be multiliterate.

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Hicks argues “we want the conversation to be about more than adaptation and use; we

want it to be about sound teaching and critical literacy practices that incorporate

technology” (Hicks, 2006, p. 47). With TPACK, the focus is on design and literacy first

and technology second, as teachers need to consider why different technologies matter to

English teaching, what it means to be a producer and consumer of traditional and digital

texts, and how different literacies and technologies relate to the larger picture of literacy

learning (Hicks, 2006; Swenson et al., 2006). Developing TPACK in pre-service and

practicing teachers requires much more than creating a product with technology. Explicit

connections between technology and literacy learning (Hutchison & Wang, 2012; Boling,

2008) are needed to move beyond just using technology in a basic way in English

teaching and learning.

So much of the focus for the teachers in this study was on the technology. They

were curious as to how iPads could help in their classrooms, what apps and programs

other people were using to be successful, and how to use technology in valid and reliable

ways. They were not sure if they were using the technology in the optimal way but as a

substitution tool for pencil and paper. For example, Lindsay often had questions about

what technology should look like for her curriculum. Was it supposed to be some sort of

game that helped with vocabulary learning? Was it supposed to help her students

understand how to organize information by providing a confusing paragraph where

students would have to reorder the sentences to help it make sense? Was the technology

supposed to aid in the writing process by providing a revolutionary way to revise and edit

on the iPad without having to print out paper copies? Maggie, Sophie, Lilly, Lindsay, and

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Rick were all left wondering when the technological revolution would take hold and what

that was supposed to look like in their teaching practice.

Connecting TPACK to literacy is a difficult concept that different researchers

have linked to teacher education in successful ways. Rosaen & Terpstra (2012) had their

pre-service teachers take part in a New Literacies project that examined eight different

literacies through a wiki with online activities and articles, videos and classroom

examples, and written reflections. After the pre-service teachers taught each other about

the different literacies, they wrote a final reflective analysis of their learning and created

a new literacies lesson plan for their future students. Similarly Graham & Benson (2010)

started with small projects, analyzing TV shows and creating non-print based activities,

in order to foster awareness, critical thinking, and recognizing multiple modes to create

meaning. These inquiry-based approaches to integrating technology in literacy practices

(Hicks, 2013) can be flexible, collaborative, and allow pre-service teachers to think

rhetorically about the issues of technology in teaching. Understanding the relationships

between traditional and digital texts, while capitalizing on their unique potentials

(Swenson et al., 2006), can create opportunities to “increase [pre-service teachers’]

competence and attitudes toward technology, thus increasing their use of technology to

promote digital literacy in their future classrooms” (Hutchison & Wang, 2012, p. 264).

Modla & Wake (2007) created more active learning, open-ended environments for their

pre-service teachers. They provided different resources, tools, and scaffolds to

experiment with multimodality for meaning making “to imagine disparate and foreign

points of view while allowing them to see, know, strengthen, refine, enlarge, and reshape

their previously held conceptions, ideas, and beliefs” (Modla & Wake, 2007, p. 126).

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Besides the creation and design of texts, pre-service teachers also need to discuss the

effects of participating in the design process (Miller, 2007) in order to gain a better

understanding of how they themselves become more multiliterate (Hicks, 2006) and, in

turn, help their students become more multiliterate as well. A Pedagogy of Design

provides a rich platform to understand the design process.

Pedagogy of Design

A Pedagogy of Design emphasizes the process over the product (McLean &

Rowsell, 2013). Teachers and students first examine available designs and their features

to then move into the designing phase where available and appropriate technologies are

utilized in the designing process. The goal is the redesigned where students have engaged

in a critical process and created a new design. Additionally, a shift of teacher and student

roles occurs, as the teacher is now seen as facilitator and co-constructor with students

also as co-constructors (Iyer, 2007). The design process is the focus of instruction and

provides the most opportunity to model, scaffold, and provide exemplars as a way to

teach multiliterate ideas (Iyer, 2007). A Pedagogy of Design is particularly appropriate

for teachers and teacher education as it provides teachers and their students “with a tool

kit of relevant knowledge, critical skills, and multiple processes through which to shape

the world in which they live” (Williams, 2009, p. 250).

All the teachers in this study somewhat described their teaching instruction in this

way. They first provided models of what they wanted their students to create, felt like

facilitators when their students were creating projects or presentations for class, and

finally collected the new student work at the end of the lesson or unit. For example,

Lindsay’s book trailer assignment had students engage in the design process to create a

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book trailer. Although Lindsay spent some instruction time emphasizing the structure of a

movie trailer for the creation of book trailers, there was no interrogation of the structure

of a movie trailer and what messages it conveys for watchers. This interrogation may

have helped her students produce better final products and think of the assignment as

more than something fun to do in English class. Similarly, Sophie’s students engaged in

the design process when writing personification poems. They first read examples of

personification, discussed the definition of personification to gain understanding of how

to personify objects, and finally wrote their own poems. However, Sophie first introduced

personification with a multimodal representation that combined visuals, music, and

writing. This multimodal representation served as an excellent example to aid in the

learning process. If Sophie had her students create their own personification multimodal

representations, it would have been a much more powerful way her students could have

engaged in the design process.

As indicated in these examples, much more formal knowledge is needed for

teachers to understand this different type of pedagogy. Teachers cannot just provide

students with example designs, help them understand how they were created, and then let

students work on their own in the designing process. Instead, much scaffolding and

critical examination is needed to make the designing process more meaningful. For

example, Walsh (2009) had her students first conduct a discourse analysis of print-based

school texts to uncover silences and gaps in history textbooks about Chinese immigrants,

a large percentage of her student body. Students then engaged in the designing process to

create redesigns of school texts by creating multimodal representations that were critical

of the dominant views of Chinese immigrants. These new redesigns reflected a different

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multimodal nature of student learning and thinking as “it enfranchises a community of

learners through critique and social analysis alongside the production of more traditional

print-based literacy practices” (Walsh, 2009, p. 135). Thus, not only was the design

process helpful to think of literacy differently, technology was also used to accomplish

this goal. This example shows technology as an important role in the designing process

(Williams, 2009), but it is not the sole focus. Teacher education programs should position

pre-service teachers to think of themselves as reflexive learners to bring about new ways

of thinking, believing, and engaging (McVee, Bailey & Shanahan, 2008).

Pre-service teachers should interrogate and critically examine what they are

thinking and learning in the designing process in order to better articulate how this

process contributes to their understanding of literacy and teaching. Skerrett (2011)

accomplished this new way of thinking, believing, and engaging in her Young Adult

literature teacher education course through the design process. After reading articles and

discussing reconceptualizing reading and writing as multimodal, her students created

multi-genre projects over the books they read. The pre-service teachers engaged in

critical framing when considering the different modalities they used in their redesigned

projects. McLean & Rowsell (2013) developed both a metalanguage and template for the

design process in their teacher education courses. The metalanguage included the

concepts of spin, or “the process of fleshing out and organizing the frame of the story for

a text” (p. 3), remix, the “ability to bring together different modes and technology” (p. 3),

and convergence: “combining texts and/or technologies and making them into something

else” (p. 3). The steps in the process of developing this metalanguage occurred in

collaborative settings to learn key terms and tenets of multimodality, use the terms,

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tenets, and concepts to inform the design of a multimodal pedagogic text, and write daily

reflections of the process. The goal was to help teachers to “express themselves, frame

their processes, and validate their pedagogical stance” (McLean & Rowsell, 2013, p. 5).

A Pedagogy of Design can help pre-service teachers extend their pedagogical

repertoires by shifting their thinking to see literacy as a process of shared problem-

solving and distributed learning, recognize how multimodality aids in the redesign of

texts, and see literacy and technology as a transactional process, not dichotomous

(McVee, Bailey Shanahan, 2008). Scaffolding is needed to accomplish this task

(McLean & Rowsell, 2013; Iyer, 2007; McVee, Bailey, & Shanahan, 2008) and teacher

educators should also consider incorporating critical literacies in the process.

Turning to the critical

By adopting a multiliteracies perspective in teaching and learning with a

deliberate focus on how technology allows multiliteracies to happen in the classroom

(Grabill & Hicks, 2005), teachers and teacher education need to consider how these

technologies and diverse literacies affect teachers and students (Hagood, 2003). Teachers

and students need to be able to make personalized informed decisions concerning the

messages they receive from technologies and need to call upon new skills of assessing,

categorizing, consciously analyzing and synthesizing this abstract information

(Rosenburg, 2010). Zeni (1994) argues one way to accomplish this difficult task is rather

than simply focusing on the technical technological aspect of integrating technology into

the classroom, teacher education must focus on “building literate communities. We must

work toward a progressive discourse of technology – critical and theoretical as well as

practical – even amid pressure to keep abreast of developments” (p. 84). There was very

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limited or no consideration of the critical aspect of literacy from the teachers in this study

and quite a few missed opportunities. Rick, for example, created a lesson for his

journalism students to think about what kind of information qualifies as “newsworthy”

for consideration in local, state, national, and international news. This was a prime

opportunity to consider, for example, what kinds of portrayals of people, countries, and

different ideas people are subject to from news stations and how diversifying source

outlets can provide new awareness or thinking. Instead, the goal of the lesson was to

come up with three “newsworthy” topics to include in the school newspaper. This

example is not to criticize Rick’s thought process or teaching practice, but rather to

emphasize how English education needs to prepare teachers to integrate critical literacy

into all facets of instruction, not just a separate unit or component in their teaching

practice.

Teacher education should help pre-service teachers think and rethink their own

teaching-learning process (Rosenburg, 2010) while also considering how critical media

literacy can enhance multiliteracies teaching and learning (Share, 2006). Teacher

educators should help pre-service teachers understand what it means to be literate in the

social spaces of information and communicative technologies by not only incorporating

the critical, rhetorical and functional literacies in their classes, but also engaging pre-

service teachers in the same types of critical and rhetorical types of technology-rich

literacy activities with which they should engage their future students (Grabill & Hicks,

2005). This process should help connect literacy teaching and learning closer to students’

lives while establishing a stronger classroom community (Rowsell, Kosnik & Beck,

2008) with which to explore critical literacy’s difficult and challenging topics and ideas.

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Extending the knowledge base

Although formal and informal knowledge is crucial to better understanding

English teaching and learning, Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1999) also advocate for teachers

to gain knowledge-for-practice. Knowledge-for-practice is context-based, connected to

knower, and relevant to immediate situations. Teachers need this type of knowledge to

better understand their own teaching contexts as well as how this local knowledge

connects to larger social and political issues. Examining the teaching practice of Maggie,

Sophie, Lilly, Lindsay, and Rick as caused me to re-evaluate my own teaching practice

and treat the knowledge and theory produced by these teachers and the researchers cited

in this study as a baseline by which to interrogate and interpret my own practice

(Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). I’ve had to consider what the important issues are in

light of my current role as supervising student teachers as well as how my current

experiences will then connect to my future role as a teacher educator.

I saw how the teachers in this study missed opportunities to extend their own and

their students’ understanding of literacy. I saw how Maggie, Lilly, Rick, Lindsay, and

Sophie failed to extend their pedagogical repertories to feel more confident with

technology in their teaching practice and connect technology to literacy. As I reflect on

how these teachers failed to extend their knowledge base, I have become cognizant of

taking the knowledge I’ve gained from this study into my interactions with my student

teachers. I must help them to tap into their formal knowledge of English teaching when

they are bombarded with the everyday demands of teaching. I must help them recognize

and communicate the personal practical knowledge they are gaining during student

teaching that they can carry forward into their first years of teaching. I must help them

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see that personal knowledge and formal knowledge should be interwoven so they can

become knowledge users and generators and not just passive recipients. Finally, I must

help them adopt inquiry as stance to form and reform their understanding of practice

(Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). This research process has extended my knowledge base.

and every pre-service and practicing teacher should be afforded the opportunity to

conduct their own action-research to support and develop their understanding of the

complicated nature of literacy teaching and learning.

Conclusion

This study has shown that as new technologies take hold in the English classroom,

teachers will need to be equipped with new understandings of literacy as well as new

methods to enact these understandings. English education can no longer be limited to the

traditional literacies of reading and writing. Instead, teachers will need to help students

think of literacy differently and as permeating into all areas of their lives. The teachers in

this study were very much into the replication process of teaching and learning: The

students read a book, gained some new insight into what they read, and wrote essays or

created presentations on what they learned. There is merit in these processes as they can

help students develop close reading skills, develop academic writing skills, and develop

their vocabulary and exposure to literature. The replication process, however, does not

always allow for critical conversations or connecting literacy to students’ out of school

literacies.

Instead, to help students become more multiliterate into today’s world, teachers

will need to model and scaffold student learning to help make explicit connections

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between what students are learning in school to literacy acts they engage in on a regular

basis. The teachers in this study provided glimmers of new thinking and instructional

practices to support these ideas, but also presented missed opportunities to extend their

own thinking and learning as well as their students. English education, as a field, can no

longer let these opportunities pass by. Therefore, we must equip pre-service and

practicing teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills to engage in this important

intellectual work.

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