With the emergence of digital composing tools and daily immersion in social media, email, and other forms of digital writing, today's teachers must be prepared to teach writing with multimodality. Thus, it is important that teacher educators create experiences that allow candidates to compose digitally and reflect on the implications for K-12 instruction. One promising practice, digital storytelling, is a pedagogical practice for K-12 and teacher education that supports writing development, writer identity, and digital literacies. This chapter discusses research examining the ways that integration of a digital storytelling project invited teacher candidates to experience the multimodal, digital composing process as a way to develop their own writing with technology and consider the implications for teaching writing.
TopIntroduction
Teacher educators have long been charged with an ill-defined challenge – how to prepare teacher candidates with the knowledge and skills they need to teach writing. One ongoing problem of practice is how to prepare candidates to teach writing using available digital technologies including multimodal composing tools and apps. Digital tools for educational and personal use are ubiquitous, but to use them effectively in writing classrooms, teachers must have the knowledge and skills to compose using 21st century tools. This is particularly important given the multimodal, semiotic nature of digital composing tools and the multimodality of the texts students are exposed to, in and out of school. Thus, it is essential that teacher candidates are prepared to leverage the affordances of multimodality (Farías & Véliz, 2019).
It is important to note that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought greater awareness to the need to prepare teachers to use digital technologies to support learning across modalities, including remote, hybrid, and face-to-face teaching. These include web-based tools such as learning management systems and digital composing tools as well as content creation digital apps. Even before the pandemic forced a rapid pivot to distance learning, technological innovations and nearly universal access to computers in the classroom transformed literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Castek, & Henry, 2018). In the writing classroom, digital composing tools have allowed developing writers to easily plan, compose, and revise (Dalton, 2012; Karchmer-Klein, 2019) as they compose and publish multimodal texts for real audiences. It is essential, then, that teachers can re-imagine writing instruction in ways that ensure students are prepared for a fully digital world. Consequently, teacher educators must create opportunities for candidates to become writers who are able to leverage the affordances of multimodality and digital tools to create their own compositions.
One way to ensure that novice teachers are prepared to integrate technology into writing instruction is to create authentic opportunities for them to design and compose digital, multimodal texts (Oakley, 2020). Digital storytelling is one innovative pedagogical approach that can be effectively modeled and taught in the teacher education classroom (Çetin, 2021; Hillaire, Larke, & Reich, 2020; Robin, 2016; Shelton, Archambault, & Hale, 2017). In digital storytelling, writers compose narratives that include images, linguistic modes, videos, audio, and interactive features by leveraging the affordances and capabilities of multimodal composing tools (Balaman, 2018). Embedding a digital storytelling project into teacher preparation coursework allows candidates to experience composing processes, become proficient with digital tools, grapple with the challenges, and reflect on possible implementations to enhance their K-12 students writing in different content areas (Çetin, 2021). This is critical in that teachers’ perceptions of technology affect how they perceive the importance of digital tools in the writing classroom (Hutchison & Reinking, 2011).
In this chapter, the authors share research examining how a teacher education course was designed to introduce candidates to digital storytelling as an innovative approach to writing instruction and interdisciplinary teaching. The aim was to examine teacher candidates’ experiences with composing digital stories and their perceptions of digital storytelling, both as writers and as future teachers. This study was guided by the following research question:
Top21St Century Teachers As Digital Writers
Writing is a complex skill, and, for most of us, one that must be taught through explicit instruction (Graham, 2019; Williams & Beam, 2019). Some argue that for teachers to be effective teachers of writing, it is helpful for them to view themselves as writers (Bifuh-Ambe, 2013; Tracy, Scales, & Luke, 2014). In fact, a “teacher as writer” identity appears to have many benefits (Premont, Kerkhoff, & Alsup, 2020) – they have many experiences and examples from their own writing to draw on and a deep understanding of the writing process. To develop a writerly stance, teacher candidates may benefit from experiences that help them reflect on and embrace their writer identities and write across genres using an array of tools and techniques, including digital composing.