Margaret Early

ICTs as placed resources in a rural Kenyan secondary school journalism club

In this study, we draw on three interrelated concepts, i.e. placed resources, multiliteracies and the carnivalesque, to understand how information and communication technology (ICT) resources are taken up within the context of a print-based journalism club. Our research participants attend an under-resourced girls’ residential secondary school in rural Kenya. We used ethnographic methods to document how the 32 club members (aged 14–18 years) used digital cameras, voice recorders and laptops with connectivity to research, conduct interviews, photograph and create texts. Key findings include shifts in identity performance, journalistic competence, and hierarchical distinctions and societal power; growing writer activism and audiences; and the emergence of imagined identities and transformative social futures. Our research challenges current skills-based approaches to introducing new literacies and highlights how the introduction of new ICT resources, when situated within collaborative practices (both research and pedagogical), can result in enhanced literacy learning and text production. These changes have not been without tensions and dilemmas, including the extent to which such practices could only occur outside the formalized classroom with its traditional practices, structures and emphasis on exam results. In addition, some of these tensions raise new questions about the role of ICTs as pedagogical tools and the tendency to ‘romanticize’ their potential.

Designing multimodal texts in a girls’ afterschool journalism club in rural Kenya

Abstract Characteristic of the twenty-first century are new literacy practices that require users and producers to be fluent with the affordances of multiple modes across print and digital media. In under-resourced contexts such as East Africa, these complex new multimodal practices have not been well documented. In this paper, we explore the context of an afterschool journalism club in rural Kenya as an informal learning space for 32 adolescent girls to realize multimodal text design following our donation of a laptop, digital camera and voice recorder. Using ethnographic methods that positioned the girls as researchers of their own practices, we collaboratively documented the girls’ changing social practices as they produced and designed videos in the context of their community and journalism club. As we proceeded through our analysis, we drew inspiration from Luke and Freebody’s Four Resources Model for reading print texts and Serafini’s reconceptualization of the Four Resources required for reading visual and multimodal texts, taking up their call to critique and reformulate the model within the rapidly changing context of twenty-first century literacy practices. Our study identifies the emergent and dynamic nested social practices of: (1) explorer, (2) participant-user, (3) performer, and (4) activist as integral to the design of videos.

Knowledge Mobilization and Innovation in the Development of a PBL Cohort for Teaching English Language Learners: Successes, Challenges, and Possibilities

Professors Margaret Early and Steven Talmy are specialists in teaching English language learners at the University of British Columbia, where they established and coordinated the teaching English language learners (TELL) preservice teacher education cohort. In this chapter, they discuss results of a study they conducted that investigated the merging of TELL with an existing problem-based learning (PBL) cohort. The newly merged teaching English language learners through problem-based learning (TELL/PBL) cohort would adopt a PBL approach in preparing teacher candidates (TCs) to work successfully with elementary school students for whom English is an additional language. The chapter reports on the results of the first year of the merger to provide an account of knowledge mobilization that occurred as cohort coordinators, faculty advisors, and instructors collaborated to design, plan, and implement TELL/PBL curriculum and pedagogy, as well as important challenges that arose when specialists in TELL worked to integrate a PBL orientation and, conversely, when specialists in PBL worked to integrate a TELL orientation. The chapter is aimed at providing an empirical base to inform next steps the TELL/PBL cohort can take.

Youth Literacies in Kenya and Canada: Lessons Learned from a Global Learning Network Project

Synonymous with the 21st Century are new literacy practices that require the ability to “read” and “write” complex multimodal texts comprised of images, gestures, movements, music, speech, and writing across print and digital media (Kress 2000, 2003; Street 2012). With these new literacies come an increased recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic modalities (Kress 2000, 2003; New London Group 2000; Stein 2008), and that these modalities are combined in complex ways to make meaning (Jewitt and Kress 2003; Snyder 2001). These new practices have also expanded conceptions of literacy and what it means to be literate (Gregory 1994; 1998 Heath 1983; Lankshear and Knobel 2003; Street 1984). Consequently, there is considerable interest in establishing global learning networks that will enhance learners’ engagement with new literacies (Cummins, Brown and Sayers 2006; Lotherington 2007; Prinsloo 2005). In this chapter, we explore how multimodal/multilingual resources enable English Language Learners to develop digital literacy for the 21st Century; draw innovatively on their available resources; enrich connection with local and global communities; and enhance their range of identities for the future. Learnable lessons are drawn from two “telling examples” from Kenya and Canada.