The Teachers They Are Becoming: Multiple Literacies in Teacher Pre-Service

1.1 Literacy and Technology

We are preparing teacher candidates to teach in a digital age; accordingly, our language and literacy course goes beyond the traditional notions of reading and writing print text. Teacher candidates engage with new digital media regularly in their out-of-school lives and we want them to be familiar with the out-of-school digital practices of their future students. We are aware that because of gaming, MSN, blogs, Face book, and the like, our teacher candidates possess skills that up to this time have been largely untapped in the classroom context. We work from an “asset model” that assumes that using new technologies can work as a benefit to literacy instead of as a deficit (Mackey, 2002). We realize also that multimedia technologies require new teacher skills and competencies if education is to remain relevant (Kellner & Share, 2007).

Garrety and Schmidt (2008) outline emergent and distinct genres of digital storytelling and see that each genre addresses a different function and purpose. They identify reflective practice digital stories as a genre that encourages Pre-service teachers to apply higher-order thinking such as meta-cognition in order to grasp and synthesize more difficult concepts. We consider also that digital technology has transformative possibilities – it has the potential to assist teachers and students to make positive changes to their world. Cummins (2000) proposes that the usefulness of technology in education should be judged not only by the degree to which knowledge is transmitted and skills are built but also by the “social purposes to which these skills and information will be applied” (p. 536). He sees that some educators are “uncritical” in embracing technology in education, while others take the opposite stance and are dismissive of technology in education. His stance is a middle position which he explains as, “IT [Information Technology] can and should be employed to develop insight among students about human relationships at both individual and societal levels and to increase students’ linguistic and intellectual power to effect positive changes in these human relationships” (p. 536). Because we agree that technology in education has this transformative potential, our Language Arts methods course begins with a focus on digital media and multiple literacies and the possibilities that they present for teaching about social justice.