Exploring Critical Digital Literacy Practices: Everyday Video in a Dual Language Context

In this talk, I will introduce myself as a literacy researcher with a brief overview of my past work. I will then address the guiding questions of my current project, part of which is from the book titled Exploring Critical Digital Literacy Practices: Everyday Video in a Dual Language Context. These questions include:  What kinds of literacy practices emerge when students participate in ongoing cycles of everyday digital video composition in language arts, social studies, and science curricula?  And, How, or in what ways, does the process of embedding multimodal, digital composition practices into such curricula reshape them? Finally, I asked, What kinds of narratives do immigrant and English language learning students compose about themselves—in digital videos and more traditional texts in school as well—over time? In what ways do students use digital compositions to narrate their identities, and how does being/becoming—or not being/becoming—American fit into those identities?  I dive deep into the findings from my book as well as related research papers, looking in particular at vulnerable populations— including English language learners, immigrants, and children with special needs—who are often left out of innovative in- and out-of-school digital media projects. My goal in this talk is to show the affordances for transformative social justice of videomaking as part of the ongoing regular curriculum.

Professor Jessica Zacher Pandya

Speaker

Professor Jessica Zacher Pandya is Chair of the Liberal Studies Department and Professor in the Departments of Teacher Education and Liberal Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her early work focused on children’s identity work in diverse urban classrooms. More recently she has investigated the ways English learners make meaning in multiple modes as they create digital videos on iPads.  Pandya was named a Foundation for Child Development New American Children Young Scholar (2012-15) for her research examining the ways English learners compose on iPads. Findings from the longitudinal study have been published in Teachers College Record and the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, among other places. Her forthcoming book, Exploring Critical Digital Literacy Practices: Everyday Video in a Dual Language Context (Routledge, 2018/19), stems from this project.

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