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Technology Integration in the Form of Digital Storytelling: Mapping the Concerns of Four Malaysian ESL Instructors

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"Listen to My Story and You Will Know Me": Digital Stories as Student-Centered Collaborative Projects

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“The process of digital story production also brings a pedagogy of multiliteracies into the ESL curriculum. This pedagogical approach, developed by the New London Group (1996, 2000), goes beyond the development of multiliteracy skills. Although it stresses the importance of the understanding of multimodal meaning making, it emphasizes the presence of students’ life worlds and out of-class communities in the learning process while developing students’ critical understanding of cultural, social, and historical contexts. Moreover, students learn how culturally rich information can be designed, composed, transmitted, and interpreted using multimodal means. This pedagogical approach also encourages the use of materials and assignments that allow students to take charge of their learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996, 2000)” (Vinogradova, Linville, Bickel, 2011, p. 181).

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“The process of digital story production also brings a pedagogy of multiliteracies into the ESL curriculum. This pedagogical approach, developed by the New London Group (1996, 2000), goes beyond the development of multiliteracy skills. Although it stresses the importance of the understanding of multimodal meaning making, it emphasizes the presence of students’ life worlds and out of-class communities in the learning process while developing students’ critical understanding of cultural, social, and historical contexts. Moreover, students learn how culturally rich information can be designed, composed, transmitted, and interpreted using multimodal means. This pedagogical approach also encourages the use of materials and assignments that allow students to take charge of their learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996, 2000)” (Vinogradova, Linville, Bickel, 2011, p. 181).

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What I appreciate about this article is how it highlights the importance of developing multiple literacies within the classroom. More specifically, it draws attention to how it’s possible to develop these literacies simultaneously, integrated within one another. A very important aspect of this learning process is to draw in student’s lives outside the classroom, to allow them the space to make connections between their lives and the academic content they’re being asked to engage and develop. As has been touched on in previous weeks, by me and other classmates, students need to be equipped with both digital literacy that will enable them to be responsible digital citizens who can participate in the real world outside the classroom—for both personal and professional reasons—and an understanding that they are ambassadors of their personal and cultural experiences. I think that embedding this in the curriculum used around digital storytelling allows students to become aware, as the article states, of how culturally rich materials can be. This in turn makes them more aware and critical of materials and curriculum that fails to incorporate a certain level of diversity. Students should expect to see themselves in the materials they’re exposed to, on some level or another (seeing someone who looks like you or speaks like you or lives as you do, identity is made up of so many different facets that students should expect to be able to identify with what they see).

I think that at this point there’s no denying the important role digital storytelling can play in a classroom. Teachers react positively too it but there remain as many barriers between teachers and the ability to implement digital storytelling in their classrooms as there might be between digital storytelling and ELLs.  “In a study to investigate the implementation of DST in the classroom after a training workshop, Dogan (2007) discovered that the teachers generally had positive reactions towards DST. However, disappointingly, almost half of the teachers did not actually use DST in their classrooms attributing that to several barriers: unconducive school environment, lack of access to technology and necessary software, and incompatibility of the computers’ operating system. Despite the low rate of implementation among these teachers, those who used it and even those who failed to use it were willing to consider using it in the future” (Thang et al., 2014, p. 313). I think moving forward, it is necessary for educators and administrators to work together in order to ensure that teachers have the opportunity for professional development and then the support needed to actually be able to employ that professional development in the classroom. This means creating infrastructure and funding in a world that seems to be cutting both rapidly for educators. As with all things, the question posed to educators is what do our students need and how can we ensure we’re able to provide that to our students in a capacity that actually allows them to learn and grow.

-Ana

References:

Thang, S. M., Lin, L. K., Mahmud, N., Ismail, K., & Zabidi, N. A. (2014). Technology Integration in the Form of Digital Storytelling: Mapping the Concerns of Four Malaysian ESL Instructors. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 27(4), 311-329.

Vinogradova, P., Linville, H. A., & Bickel, B. (2011). "Listen to My Story and You Will Know Me": Digital Stories as Student-Centered Collaborative Projects. TESOL Journal, 2(2), 173-202.

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Dion's Mod 6 Contribution

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I first read the article detailing a study of 8 ESL instructors in Malaysia and the concerns they had with using DST projects in their university classrooms