Materias 33 Dictadas En El Colegio La Merced: 1974 –

Digital literacy practices such as modding, fan fiction, digital storytelling, vlogging and machinima are quintessentially multimodal literacies that require orchestration of visual, aural, kinetic, and verbal modes and allow fans to take on new, more active roles in the creation and distribution of culture (Jones & Hafner 2012, p. 135). Encouragingly, then they become active designers of meaning by engaging in these practices (New London Group 2000).

Thus, engagement with such practices in formal educational settings could transform what goes on in schools (Miller 2010, p. 275). A large body of literature indicates that when students are involved in multimodal digital literacy practices in the classroom, such as digital video making, for instance, their motivation,

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participation and collaboration are increased. These types of projects support student-centred, authentic learning experiences, promote student voice and develop a sense of agency (Miller 2010, p. 263). One of the teachers in a study carried out by Miller remarked that her students ‘flourished in their new roles of cinematographers, planners and directors (Miller 2007, p. 75). Additionally, one of the greatest affordances of digital literacy practices is that they have the potential to blur the boundaries between the classroom and the real world thus, altering the limitation of the classroom being such a different space from the real world (Jones 2014, p. 5) and, therefore, connecting students with their out-of- school interests (Hofer & Swan 2005; Masats et al. 2009; Miller 2007; 2008; 2010; Nikitina 2011). Also, many of today’s students feel at ease when confronted with texts which cannot be processed sequentially. Their world is increasingly digital, multimedia and online. Jenkins reports that ‘over half of all American teens, and 57% of those who use the Internet are media creators, having published some form of multimedia such as blogs, webpages or videos’ (2006). Yet, these multimodal practices that so many students participate in are not a routine component of the formal curriculum (Knobel & Lankshear 2006).

Inevitably, these changes have had a tremendous impact on educational environments where students are reportedly becoming increasingly disengaged. Miller reports that more and more students arrive at school more competent in the new literacies than their teachers (2007; 2008; 2010). It has been argued that the problem is that educators are basically outsiders who have grown up and worked in a print-based world, while students are insiders who have grown up in a digital world of new literacies. Miller’s studies confirm this as she reports that many of her in-service teachers in the classes ‘were caught in the traditional notion of

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reading and writing printed text as the only legitimate form of school literacy, the form that had brought them success in school’ (Miller 2007, p. 68).

Miller stresses that it is important for teachers to have these experiences themselves in their teacher education programmes (Miller 2007, p. 74). The first step is for teachers ‘to develop performance knowledge through design themselves and, thereby, develop an understanding of the wired world of the digital age, where knowledge is multimodal, co-constructed, and performed or represented, not absorbed’ (Miller 2008, pp. 6-7).

The practice of machinima has been chosen for:

its democratic promise as a medium available to most people with a reasonably fast computer who can now make films with any number of scenes which would have been far more difficult to animate or film in real life (car explosions, alien armies, and epic battles are all relatively easy with machinima); machines give us visions of performance that are not just beautiful or even graceful but that are also, and just as importantly, not available to human performers. Human beings are restricted physically by the limits of our bodies and hindered by the constraints of consciousness and self-awareness (Ng 2013, p.xiv ).

3.4 Conclusion

Living in a highly wired world has transformed the way in which literacy is conceptualised. In response, teacher education programmes must prepare teachers (and teachers must prepare their students) for the 21st workplace. Digital literacies scholars and researchers agree that students urgently need opportunities in schools to develop these new literacies and the multitude of elements they comprise. To this end, teacher education needs to be highlighted as part of the digital literacies school reform agenda. Teachers in general and language teachers in particular

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need to be provided with opportunities to reflect critically on the affordances of digital tools for transformation of practices of communication, interaction and enactment of various identities in order to be prepared for teaching students in the 21st century classrooms.

Furthermore, teachers need ongoing professional development activities to help them transform their beliefs about the purposes for schooling, learning, and literacy. The fundamental multimodality of machinima might provide an entry point for developing new multimodal literacy practices for teachers and their students. There are many reasons for focusing on machinima to make films, however, one is extremely important. Machinima, similarly to digital video composing, could provide a potential solution to the signaled under-using of resources of new multimodal literacies in educational contexts as it requires integration of many modes which makes it difficult for teachers to stay in the comfort zone of print-only texts. Therefore, professional development aimed at preparing language teachers to use digital literacy practice such as machinima for their students is needed.

In this chapter, research on machinima was reviewed. Various existing definitions of machinima were discussed and the context within which machinima emerged was presented. A discussion of machinima alongside other various digital literacy practices characterised by use of digital tools and techniques in conjunction with a distinctive ethos was provided next. The different techniques and platforms used to make machinima videos were overviewed and the ones employed in this study were highlighted. A comparison between machinima, filmmaking and conventional animation was then made and similarities and differences between

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these practices were identified. Finally, section 3.4 looked at the use of machinima in educational settings.

This thesis proposes that a contemporary language educator needs to be concerned not only with developing students’ proficiency in reading, writing and use of technologies but also with developing literacies in the multimodal designs enabled by various technological tools such as machinima. This chapter described machinima as a digital literacy practice that many students engage with in their lifeworlds and offered a rationale for using this particular tool which is quintessentially multimodal and collaborative to be used to investigate teachers’ TPACK. Teachers are often identified as outsiders when it comes to new literacy practices so this study investigates their cognition in relation to digital literacies with the use of machinima. Making machinima might induce changes in teachers’ views of the impact of digital technologies affordances on our ways of making meaning, doing things and enacting identities. As a solution to the problems outlined above, this study proposes machinima production experiences to closely examine teachers’ TPACK as well as to enable them to begin to broaden their notions of school literacy from only reading and writing print to also composing multimodal ensembles for authentic purposes.

Chapter 4 will provide a detailed description of the TPACK framework and the domains of knowledge that have been adapted for this study.

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CHAPTER 4 TPACK AND METHODOLOGICAL