A Research Metasynthesis on Digital Video Composing in Classrooms

Abstract

Calls for research documenting outcomes of new literacy practices in school (e.g., Moje, 2009) focus on the need for understanding adolescents' experiences, what they learn about content, about literacy practices, and about their identities and positions in the world. This metasynthesis of findings from 27 qualitative studies of digital video (DV) composing in secondary schools involved 97 teachers and 135 students as focal participants in ethnographic, case, and grounded theory studies. The focus was on the body of research completed in a mature DV composing project based in sociocultural learning theories, including New Literacies and social semiotics. Following teachers out of professional development on using DV composing as a curricular learning tool into their classrooms and then analyzing across the studies provided trends in contexts for student learning. Following the analytic processes of extracting, categorizing, and translating outlined by Sandelowski and Barroso (2007), six themes were revealed, the components of DV composing pedagogy that led to student engagement in embodied learning: (a) Teacher change toward a New Literacies stance led to development of (b) classroom social spaces for mediating multimodal composing in which participants (c) co-constructed authentic communicative purpose for representing meaning, in part by (d) opening meaning-making to student lifeworlds and cultural resources, and (e) explicitly attending to multimodal design for representing meaning, leading to students' (f) transmediating or translating in symbolic modes. These components working synergistically in classrooms provide an evidence base for a pedagogical framework for students' embodied learning through multimodal composing. The aim of the present study is to systematically examine findings of ethnographic case studies and grounded theory analyses of teachers and students using digital video (DV) composing in classrooms. In this article, I report on the findings of this metasynthesis to integrate findings of studies for the purpose of developing a robust pedagogical framework for evidence-based practice in teaching and learning from multimodal composing that accounts for teacher and student engagement, mediated activity, and embodied learning. Multimodal Literacy Theory and Research Theoretical LensesThis study is situated in the interdisciplinary theories of New Literacies Studies (NLS; e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000;Gee, 2004) that integrates sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1971(Vygotsky, , 1978 also Kozulin, 1998;Wertsch, 1998), the social semiotic theory of multimodality (e.g., Kress, 2010), and ultimately explained by theories of embodied cognition (e.g., Johnson, 1987Johnson, , 2007Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010;Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Although they are separated here for analytical convenience, these theories clearly overlap and transact as explanations for multimodal composing and literacy.Multimodal tools. In his sociocultural theory, Vygotsky (1971Vygotsky ( , 1978 argued that besid...

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