UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL COMPOSING PROCESSES OF PRE-SERVICE LANGUAGE ARTS AND LITERACY TEACHERS

This research project employed qualitative research methods to elicit the perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and experiences of pre-service literacy teachers arising out of their immersion in composing multimodal, multimedia texts. Voluntary participation was sought from fifty (50) pre-service literacy education teachers enrolled in the after degree teacher education program at a Canadian university. An attempt was made to invite participants from a diversity of places including urban, suburban, and rural. Aboriginal students and students of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds were sought to garner their unique perspectives on the relationship of pre-service teacher education students and digital technologies broadly understood, including cultural and linguistic dimensions. Composition theorists have long advocated the immersion of student writers in the work of writing facilitated by daily opportunities to create personally, relevant, meaningful texts in a supportive community of writers. The workshop approach and its variants have dominated writing pedagogy for nearly three decades (Murray, 1982; 1993; Graves, 1993; 1994; Romano, 1987; Atwell, 1993; Soven, 1999; Kittle, 2008). This research project immersed pre-service literacy education students in the creation of multimodal, multimedia texts (LaMonde and Rogers, 2007) as part of a digital composing workshop approach to facilitate the integration of multimedia technology into the composing process in order to foster to help forge critical new understandings. The objectives of this research project were: to immerse pre-service literacy education students in multimodal and digital multimedia technologies to create texts to effectively engage an audience to understand the composing processes required by teachers to help students learn to employ interactive digital technologies to create effective texts to inquire into the experiences, attitudes and beliefs of pre-service literacy education students as they engage with multimodal digital communication to critically inquire into possible tensions and obstacles that result from the engagement with digital composing processes to describe powerful classroom practices in the use of multimodal, multimedia technologies to foster constructivist, inquiry based learning related to the composing of digital texts. The inquiry relied on four primary sources of data; digital journal and diary records of participants' direct experience of the composing processes, face-to-face interviews, questionnaires and experiential material derived from close ethnographic and phenomenological observations. Thematic analysis of the journal entries, interviews, questionnaires and observations were conducted for phenomenological insights of pedagogical value (van Manen, 1997). As part of the data collection, classroom activities were designed to stimulate student reflection and were based on the acceptance that reflection on experience potentially results in deeper awareness of taken for granted assumptions as it interrupts norms and routines. Research data consists of: detailed field notes; transcribed interviews with participants; the digital texts created by participants; the digital diaries and discussions of participants; and audio recordings of selected learning/authoring sessions.