Video Production in Elementary Teacher Education as a Critical Digital Literacy Practice

Abstract

This article reports on a two-year, funded, qualitative inquiry into the challenges and possibilities of integrating video production into pre-service teacher education as a critical digital literacy practice. This includes the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that lead to ability to critique and create digital texts that interrogate the self, the other, and the world (Ávila & Zacher Pandya, 2013). Video making holds out enormous potential given our increasingly diverse classrooms and the growing need to have students connect and collaborate within their own communities and globally (Dwyer, 2016; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015, 2016; Spires, Paul, Himes, & Yuan, 2018; Watt, 2017, 2018; Watt, Abdulqadir, Siyad, & Hujaleh, 2019). Video is especially significant in light of the fact that it is replacing print text as a dominant mode of communication (Manjou, 2018). Multimodal composing such as video production is, in fact, considered by some to be the essential 21st century literacy (Miller & McVee, 2012), but much remains to be done to bring digital technologies as literacy into the elementary classroom. Qualitative data includes a focus group, questionnaires, observations, and content analysis of teacher candidate videos and instructional plans. This study considers how video production can be integrated into teacher education programs to engage cross-curricular expectations and critical digital literacy perspectives. It responds to the pressing question of how to do teacher education differently in the digital age.

Young people confronting the challenge of reading and interpreting a digital world

“…A short bibliographical review reveals that research on critical digital literacy has addressed some of the problems that education faces today, such as the power of hegemonic discourses (De Los Ríos, 2018;Golden, 2017), post-truth and fake news (Das & Pavlíčková, 2013;Sulzer, 2018), social vigilance politics (Hutchinson & Novotny, 2017;Vang, 2013), radicalization and the production of counter-narratives (Arroyo et al, 2018;García-Ruiz & Zorrilla, 2019;Izquierdo, 2019;McNicol, 2016), democratic participation (Yue et al, 2019), or social transformation (San-Millán & Mazzucchelli, 2016;Watt, 2019). It is no coincidence that these topics coincide with the challenges that citizenship is facing in present times.…”

Deterring cheating using a complex assessment design: A case study

“…Moreover, the assessment design has also enabled students to develop their digital literacy competencies as none of the students in this pilot course had previously used self-produced videos for educational purposes. Researchers have noted that video production can be considered a critical digital literacy practice that should be incorporated into preservice teacher education (Watt, 2019). The oral feedback given by students after the assessment indicates that the experience was useful for their further practice as teachers: as some of the students were already working as in-service MTT teachers in primary schools in Sweden, several had to engage in ERT right after their assessment.…”

Pre-service EFL teachers’ perception on educational video production technology: A needs analysis

“…Hence, this presents a Int J Eval & Res Educ ISSN: 2252-8822  particular challenge to explore how the previous works of literature investigate the topic of teachers' video production for their own teaching and learning practice. However, there are only a small number of studies which explore the importance of developing future teachers' digital competence through video production [10], [13], [23]- [25]. In fact, this field of research can be a powerful source for developing pre-service teachers' competence in producing video materials for their digital students.…”

“…The finding of this study suggests that experiencing in designing the educational video developed the experts' understanding of being a producer of videos for instructional learning. Furthermore, teachers can benefit from video production to immerse themselves in pedagogical considerations for designing learning [25]. That said, video production in teacher education plays a part in improving future teacher development.…”