Digital Storytelling and Teachers' Disciplinary Multiliteracies

Abstract

This chapter reports on a multidisciplinary research collaboration which aims to explore how digital stories may be used to support pre-service teachers across disciplinary boundaries of English, science, and health education. Digital stories play a distinct role in enacting disciplinary practices within each of these curriculum areas and provide a valuable context for expanding students' semiotic repertoire. By integrating digital storytelling in initial teacher education (ITE), the authors provide a pathway for teachers to develop pedagogic knowledge of genres that are distinctly disciplinary in their purpose but which draw on semiotic affordances and pedagogic practices from across boundaries of traditional literacy education. Drawing on digital stories produced for a range of purposes, they report on the metalanguage we have developed in our collaborative work to inform a coherent multiliteracies framework to build on and extend pre-service teachers' semiotic repertoire for functional, critical, and creative disciplinary practice.

Key Terms in this Chapter

Multimodal Discourse Analysis: An approach to discourse which focuses on how meaning is made through the use of multiple modes of communication as opposed to just language.

Initial Teacher Education: Entry-level qualification that is completed prior to entering service as a teacher.

Multiliteracies Pedagogy: Practices that encourage the use of a range of modes and resources in diverse classrooms.

Metalanguage: A language to talk about language and its use in context.

Health Literacy: Ability to obtain, read, understand, and use healthcare information in order to make healthcare decisions.

Digital Stories: Multimedia movies that combine photographs, video, animation, sound, music, text, and often a narrative voice.

Social semiotics: A branch of the field of semiotics that investigates meaning making as a social practice, e.g. Systemic Functional Linguistics.