Monday May 16th, 1:30-3:00 – Group 3b

1:30-3:00

Victoria Carrington (in Room 203, upstairs)

Shelley Peterson
Teaching Writing Using Digital Technologies in Canadian Classrooms: Assumptions and Instructional Practices

New literacies theory was used to examine the assumptions and writing instructional practices of 192 grades 4-8 teachers across Canada. Interview and classroom observation data showed that most participating teachers used computers in their personal lives and professional lives. They had developed varying levels of confidence and competence in using digital technology and believed that it should play a role in classroom writing instruction. Access to computers did influence the frequency and ways in which teachers and their students used computers in writing classes, however assumptions about students’ writing development, about the authority of the teacher in classroom interactions and about the relative authority of print-based writing over digital writing were at least as influential.

Kathie Shoemaker
Colour’s Complex and Varied Roles in Constructing Cohesive Relations Between Images in Multimodal Sequential Visual Narrative Picturebook Texts for Young Children

While it is widely acknowledged that picturebooks contribute to young children’s literacy and literary development this study aims to study the less understood dynamics of how they make that contribution. It aims to articulate those means for the benefit of providing educators and creators with a metalanguage that will promote their metacognition of multimodal forms.  Growing pressure on educators to address the notions of multimodality and multiliteracies makes this study timely. The easily accessible picturebook is ideal in size and scope for most classrooms, making it a fine alternative to other multimodal forms This is important because although there is pressure on public education to bring technology into the classroom and curriculum, neither technology nor the staffing to support it are universally available.  Additionally it is a form once thought of only for young children but over the past ten years picturebooks of interest for young adults and adults are being published in ever increasing numbers. My work serves yet another literacy purpose because its focus is on colour’s contribution to textual cohesion and since understanding textual cohesion is one of the major developmental tasks for very young readers this work aims to increase understanding of how young readers construe cohesion and, more generally, learn the narrative conventions that will support their literacy development.

Anne Burke
Children’s Constructions of Self and Authoring in the Digital Age

This paper looks at how children construct identities in virtual spaces in order to participate in acts of authoring to address social, cultural, and political issues which shape their young lives. This paper will focus on year one of a SSHRC study which explores how students’ engagements in social networking sites such as Facebook, My space, club penguin, Star Doll and Webkinz provide spaces of equity for these children. Student voices and constructed identities will be used to illustrate how they use new literacies to enhance their equity in social spaces and cultural understandings of identity and self.