What is Text Deconstruction

This chapter explores the ways two educators and their academic partners engaged young learners with digital literacy practices. In an educational environment dominated by print-based texts, the need to work with learners as both consumers and producers of digital text becomes integral. Drawing on theories of new literacies and multimodalities, the authors designed teaching and learning experiences to highlight the structure of digital text, and the complexity of the interrelationships between the language modes through deconstruction of live texts. The learners then demonstrated their understandings of these elements through their collaborative production of digital text. While this research was conducted with young learners, in this chapter the authors present important pedagogical considerations that can guide educators in their support of learners at all ages as they examine digital literacy practices for both text consumption and production.