Alecia Marie Magnifico

Writing in the Wild: Writers’ Motivation in Fan-Based Affinity Spaces

In order to understand the culture of the physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we build on Gees concept of affinity spaces. Drawing on our ethnographic research of adolescent literacies related to The Hunger Games novels, the Neopets online game, and The Sims videogames, this article explores the nature of interest-driven writing in these spaces. We argue that fan-based affinity spaces motivate young adults to write because they offer multiple modes of representation, diverse pathways to participation, and an authentic audience. As scholars and educators, we posit that these out-of-school spaces can offer youth new purposes, modes, and tools for their written work.

New Pedagogies of Motivation: Reconstructing and Repositioning Motivational Constructs in the Design of Learning Technologies.

In this article the authors examine motivational constructs through the lens of new media-supported educational efforts. By examining a range of online, new-media-based learning communities and instructional technologies, they analyze the ways in which motivation is positioned within the field of education, how ecologies of motivation embedded within new media might be understood, how motivation might be organized and represented, and how constructions of motivational elements in designed learning technologies might help us better understand their fit in different educational contexts and with different students.

From Research to Practice: Writing, Technology, and English Teacher Education

Abstract Writers, their practices, and their tools are mediated by the contexts in which they work. In online spaces and classroom environments, today’s writers have increased access to collaborators, readers, and reviewers. Drawing on our experiences as English teacher educators and as researchers of digital literacies and online affinity spaces, this chapter offers examples from three English teacher education programs in the United States and Australia to demonstrate how we link our research in out-of-school spaces to literacy practices in school contexts for our pre-service teachers. To do so, we share an illustrative example from each program and consider how in-class activities and assessment tasks can encourage pre-service teachers to learn about: the importance of clear goals and real-world audiences for writers; the value of self-sponsored, interest-driven writing in the English curriculum; and the role of authentic conversations between readers and writers as part of the writing, revising, and publishing process. The chapter concludes with recommendations for class activities and assessments that could be used within English education programs.

Visualizing Revision: Leveraging Student-Generated Between-Draft Diagramming Data in Support of Academic Writing Development.

Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prioritize what to revise. Yet, this process can be both daunting and difficult. This study looks at how students used a semantic concept mapping tool to re-present the content and organization of their initial draft of an informational text. We examine the processes of students at two different schools as they remediated their own texts and how those processes impacted the development of their rhetorical, conceptual, and communicative capacities. Our analysis suggests that students creating visualizations of their completed first drafts scaffolded self-evaluation. The mapping tool aided visualization by converting compositions into discrete persistent visual data elements that represented concepts and connections. This often led to students’ meta-awareness of what was missing or misaligned in their draft. Our findings have implications for how students approach, educators perceive, and designers support the drafting and revision process.

Book Review: Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms: Representation, Rights and Resources, the Digital Pencil: One-to-One Computing for Children, the Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, the Media and International Communication

Multimodality, which provides us with a new way to see texts, meaning-making and acts of communication in all its forms, has grown into a cutting-edge theoretical tool. Multimodal scholars have expanded the notion of ‘text’; while once it referred solely to static print, now the term ‘text’ can encompass images and layout (Kress, 2003, 2006), pedagogy (Lemke, 1990) and even schooling itself (Schleppegrell, 2004). Moreover, a theory of multimodality has expanded how we see language. Adding an explanation of how different linguistic and non-linguistic communicative forms combine to make meaning to the valuable work of the new literacy studies theorists, it has furthered the much-needed understanding that we can no longer look solely at texts in order to discern meaning (or meanings). Rather, multimodality reminds us that meaning is made by people, and we must examine how people use language with one another in order to understand texts, communication and the broader contexts of learning. Pippa Stein’s Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms: representation, rights and resources pushes this scholarship even further. She takes up ideas and terminologies that have become wellestablished concepts in multimodal studies but then extends them in new, interesting and necessary ways. For instance, ‘meaning potential’, a term from social semiotics, refers to the different ways that language could be used in any given situation – both what is used and what could have been used. Traditionally, the meaning potentials that are taken up by researchers have fallen within certain recognized parameters, namely gender, ethnicity, class and age. These parameters are too tidy, however, and it is this tidiness that Stein disrupts. She complicates what is studied under multimodality and what is seen as possible in student expression. Primarily, it is her focus on children who are often seen as living in desperate conditions of poverty, racism and violence in South Africa that marks a welcome – albeit sobering – departure from other multimodal scholarship. Rather than a focus on children in general (Lemke, 1990), the examples from one’s own children (Kress, 2006) or texts geared towards or about children (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), Stein focuses on the lives lived and the texts created by a very specific group of children: youth suffering poverty and violence in South Africa. She highlights how much meaning-making these children accomplish despite their conditions, which flouts any assumptions that these children are not as scholastically ‘capable’ as children who have more material advantages. Moreover, despite a key tenet of multimodality that meaning is created by people, many extant multimodal analyses nonetheless focus heavily on the products of textual production. Stein includes close analyses of artifacts herself but aims at moving beyond the text to also examine the social context surrounding its creation and reception. Therefore, her focus on the local situation of meaning-making is vital – it adds an in-depth exploration of social context that is often lacking in other multimodal analyses.