Abstract
This paper extends research that looks at the intersection of multimodal composing and maker education. We present findings from a fourth iteration of a multidisciplinary classroom design study in which high school youth made digital comics based on literary novels in an 11th grade language arts classroom in a predominantly Hispanic, low-SES, urban high school. The current study offers a close analysis of students’ processes for making digital comics and how they utilized smartphone-based social media apps and comics tools to construct meaning via transmediation of a traditional literary text. We focused on two (cases) groups of students’ multimodal making. We asked, how do youth leverage their own socio-technical repertoires of practice in multimodal making of digital comics? We used interaction analysis methods to analyze multimodal talk-in-interaction to understand how students used their bodies and technologies across making activities. We found that multimodal making with personal technologies enabled youth to transform and ascribe meaning to school spaces, supported embodied learning across physical and digital spaces, and reinforced agency in school spaces. We discuss implications for expanding maker education into formal non-STEM disciplinary spaces and the importance of grounding learning designs in students’ preferred repertoires of practice and incorporate the tools that are intertwined with their ways of being and knowing if we are to support making practices among culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse learners both in and out of schools.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alley, W. (2018). Making english speakers: Makerspaces as constructivist language environments. MEXTESOL Journal, 42(4).
Axelrod, D. (2020). Bi/multilingual students’ literary analyses via transmediation into digital comics. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Miami).
Barthes, R. (1977). Image-music-text. Macmillan.
Bezemer, J., & Kress, G. (2010). Changing text: A social semiotic analysis of textbooks. Designs for Learning, 3(1–2), 10–29.
Blikstein, P. (2018). Maker movement in education: History and prospects. Handbook of Technology Education, 419, 437.
Bullock, S. M., & Sator, A. (2018). Developing a pedagogy of making through collaborative self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 14(1), 56–70.
Calabrese Barton, A., & Tan, E. (2019). Designing for rightful presence in STEM: The role of making present practices. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 28(4–5), 616–658.
Cobb, P., Confrey, J., DiSessa, A., Lehrer, R., & Schauble, L. (2003). Design experiments in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 9–13.
Dalton, B. (2020). Bringing together multimodal composition and maker education in K–8 classrooms. Language Arts, 97(3), 159–171.
Ehret, C., & Hollett, T. (2013). Re) placing school: Middle school students’ countermobilities while composing with iPods. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57(2), 110–119.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.
Gee, J. (2012). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (4th ed.). Routledge.
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional Vision American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633.
Goodwin, C. (2013). The co-operative, transformative organization of human action and knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics, 46(1), 8–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.09.003.
Greeno, J. G. (1994). Gibson’s affordances. Psychological Review, 101(2), 336–342.
Gutiérrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 19–25.
Halverson, E. R., & Sheridan, K. (2014). The maker movement in education. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 495–504.
Howes, A. J. (2020). To be young, gifted, and black: Making the great gatsby relevant to black, indigenous, and students of color. The F Scott Fitzgerald Review, 18(1), 231–245.
Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.
Jewitt, C. E. (2011). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J., & O’Halloran, K. (2016). Introducing multimodality. Routledge.
Jiang, S., Shen, J., & Smith, B. E. (2019). Designing discipline-specific roles for interdisciplinary learning: Two comparative cases in an afterschool STEM + L program. International Journal of Science Education, 41(6), 803–826.
Jiang, S., Shen, J., Smith, B. E., & Kibler, K. W. (2020). Science identity development: How multimodal composition mediates student role-taking as scientist in a media-rich learning environment. Educational Technology Research and Development, 68(6), 3187–3212.
Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(1), 39–103.
Kafai, Y. B., & Burke, Q. (2015). Constructionist gaming: Understanding the benefits of making games for learning. Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 313–334.
Kahn, J., Axelrod, D., Radojcic, S., & Deroo, M. (2022). Stories from Islita Libre: Digital spatial storytelling as an expression of transnational and immigrant identities. Occasional Paper Series, 48, 96.
Keune, A., & Peppler, K. (2019). Materials-to‐develop‐with: The making of a makerspace. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(1), 280–293.
Knibbe, J., Grossman, T., & Fitzmaurice, G. (2015, November). Smart makerspace: An immersive instructional space for physical tasks. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Interactive Tabletops & Surfaces, Portugal, 83–92. https://doi.org/10.1145/2817721.2817741.
Kress, G. (2009). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.
Márquez, I., Lanzeni, D., & Masanet, M. J. (2022). Teenagers as curators: Digitally mediated curation of the self on Instagram. Journal of Youth Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2022.2053670
McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding comics: The invisible art. Harper Perennial.
McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT press.
Mills, K. A. (2010). A review of the digital turn in the new literacy studies. Review of Educational Research, 80(2), 246–271.
Nichols, T. P., & Johnston, K. (2020). Rethinking availability in multimodal composing: Frictions in digital design. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(3), 259–270.
Pacheco, M. B., Smith, B. E., Deig, A., & Amgott, N. A. (2021). Scaffolding multimodal composition with emergent bilingual students. Journal of Literacy Research, 53(2), 149–173.
Price, S., Jewitt, C., & Sakr, M. (2016). Embodied experiences of place: A study of history learning with mobile technologies. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 32(4), 345–359.
Price-Dennis, D., Holmes, K. A., & Smith, E. (2015). Exploring digital literacy practices in an inclusive classroom. The Reading Teacher, 69(2), 195–205.
Ross, G. R. (2017). Culturally relevant curriculum versus culturally irrelevant curriculum. In K. Waldrop, T. Amatullah, & T. S. Poetter (Eds.), Curriculum windows: What curriculum theorists of the 1990s can teach us about schools and society today (pp. 173–179). Information Age Publishing.
Rouse, R., & Rouse, A. G. (2022). Taking the maker movement to school: A systematic review of preK-12 school-based makerspace research. Educational Research Review, 35, 100413.
Rowe, D. W., & Miller, M. E. (2016). Designing for diverse classrooms: Using iPads and digital cameras to compose eBooks with emergent bilingual/biliterate four-year-olds. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 16(4), 425–472.
Scollon, R. (1998). Reading as social interaction: The empirical grounding of reading. Semiotica, 118(3–4), 281–294. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1998.118.3-4.281.
Semali, L. M., & Fueyo, J. (2002). Transmediation as a metaphor for new literacies in multimedia classrooms. Reading Online, 5(5), 2001–2002.
Smith, B. E. (2018). Composing for affect, audience, and identity: Toward a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ multimodal composing goals and designs. Written Communication, 35(2), 182–214.
Smith, B. E. (2019). Collaborative multimodal composing: Tracing the unique partnerships of three pairs of adolescents composing across three digital projects. Literacy, 53(1), 14–21.
Smith, B. E., Amgott, N., & Malova, I. (2022). It made me think in a different way: Bilingual students’ perspectives on Multimodal Composing in the English Language Arts Classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 56(2), 525–551.
Stemler, S. (2000). An overview of content analysis. Practical Assessment Research and Evaluation, 7(1), 17.
Suhor, C. (1984). Towards a semiotics-based curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 16(3), 247–257.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2022). Multimodality and identity. Routledge.
Van Leeuwen, T., & Djonov, E. (2015). Notes towards a semiotics of kinetic typography. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 244–253.
Wargo, J. M. (2018). Writing with wearables? Young children’s intra-active authoring and the sounds of emplaced invention. Journal of Literacy Research, 50, 502–523.
Wargo, J. M., Morales, M., & Corbitt, A. (2022). Fabricating response: Preservice elementary teachers remediating response to The Circuit through 3D printing and design. Curriculum Inquiry, 52, 1–27.
Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. Oxford UP.
Wohlwend, K. E., Scott, J. A., Yi, J. H., Deliman, A., & Kargin, T. (2018). Hacking toys and remixing media: Integrating maker literacies into early childhood teacher education. In S. Danby, M. Fleer, C. Davidson, & M. Hatzigianni (Eds.), Digital childhoods: Technologies in children’s everyday lives (pp. 147–162). Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethical Approval
The authors have no potential conflicts of interest regarding this study and no funding was received for this project. Informed consent with human subjects was obtained in compliance with all ethical standards determined by the Internal Review Boards of participating institutions.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Axelrod, D., Kahn, J. “Then You go to Snap”: Multimodal Making of Digital Comics in a Language Arts High School Classroom. Education Tech Research Dev 72, 41–57 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10285-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10285-2