In our own teaching, the value of the DALN
didn’t lie in its most obvious asset—its function as an archive of
literacy narratives—but rather in its ancillary features, which open
up opportunities for conversations about expertise, discrete digital
literacy skills, research and information literacy, and potentially
much more. —Lynn Reid & Nicole Hancock
Hello there, listeners, and welcome to Section One of The
Archive As Classroom. This section focuses on the digital
characteristics of the DALN, and appropriately enough, is titled:
Digital.
Theorists and scholars of digital media such as Lev Manovich,
Janet Murray, Laura Gurak, and others have long touted the unique
affordances of digital media: the increased speed and reach of
dissemination; a markedly participatory character; a high capacity
for storing and serving data; the ability to flexibly manipulate,
move, and transcode original material. The fact that the DALN is
first and foremost a *digital* resource makes it a fairly open
platform for accessing, analyzing, contributing to, and even
remixing its contents.
As we consider the various ways that educators use the DALN in
their classrooms and beyond, we asked contributors of this section
to consider a couple high-level questions in their explorations and
investigations: For one, how does the digital platform of the
DALN contribute to your teaching? Also, what approaches to digital media
prompt students’ examinations of composition and rhetoric?
Well, the authors in this section set about tackling these very
questions, and come away from that scrum with some pretty nifty
observations: In this section, you’ll see how the DALN can be used
to effectively model new literacy skills for basic writers (and
provide a site for those students to contribute their own
compositions). Also, you’ll see how the DALN can be used to support
scholars’ adoption and utilization of social media tools.
Additionally, you’ll see how the DALN can be used as a resource to
help first-year students think about their digital literacy
practices. Finally, you’ll see how the DALN can be used as a
platform to support digital video production as a means of promoting
advocacy, activism, and education among refugee students.
Accompanying this podcast introduction, you’ll see links and short
descriptions of the chapters included below in this section. Now go
and check them out!
[Outro music]
CHAPTERS
Chapter
1Lynn Reid & Nicole Hancock,
“Teaching Basic Writing in the 21st Century: A
Multiliteracies Approach”
This chapter examines how use of the DALN can
potentially disrupt traditional conceptions of Basic
Writing pedagogy through two authors’ distinct
experiences. Both authors have used the DALN in attempts
to address two concerns: the role of multiliteracies in
the Basic Writing classroom and the potential drawbacks of
utilizing primarily professionally-composed models with
students enrolled in Basic Writing courses. Rather than
focusing on the politics of language and literacy that
literacy narrative assignments typically emphasize, the
authors offer alternative directions that allow
instructors to explore 21st century literacies with their
students, using the DALN as a resource and a tool.
Chapter
2Janelle Newman, “Understanding
Others’ Stories to Find Our Own: Helping Linguistically
Diverse Students Analyze, Create, and Evaluate Digital
Literacy Narratives”
This chapter explains a digital literacy narrative
project completed in a first-year bridge program course
for students needing additional support in their English
language development. Within this context, students use
the DALN project to develop a greater awareness of others’
stories in order to more freely share their own, while
expanding their understanding of digital literacy. The
assignment not only asks students to write their own
digital literacy narratives but also includes student
analyses of existing DALN submissions and creation of
their own multiple trait grading rubrics. This chapter
explains the procedure of the assignment in depth
and references sample student texts and responses to
the learning experience. The project combines an
introduction to textual analysis and the production of
multimodal communication in a context where multilingual
learners can explore their own literacy histories and
identities in a way that encourages them to take
responsibility for their own learning.
Chapter
3Mary Helen O’Connor, “Teaching
Refugee Students with the DALN”
This chapter describes an experience teaching digital
storytelling to refugee students in a traditional college
composition course. Using the DALN as a resource for
primary research into the literacy practices of refugees
and immigrants, students learn to critique the politics
and power dynamics of language and literacy. Drawing on
teaching practices of modern compositionists (Hawisher,
Selfe, Norcia, Shipka, Ball, Wysocki, Hocks), this chapter
will chronicle how a digital archive, digital tools, and a
digital assignment offer students in my composition class
a constructivist approach to learning how to communicate
effectively in both print and digital spaces. Teaching
digital and multimodal composition challenges traditional
academic practices limiting student communication to print
assignments. For students new to English, multimodal
composition offers new methods for constructing meaning.
This is especially important for refugee students for whom
these pedagogies offer more a powerful way to control
representations of themselves. The DALN also creates a
space where refugee students are able to publicly share
self-authored narratives of identity and experience—a
public space for refugees to reclaim power. This work
draws on what scholars of New Literacy Studies and, more
recently, scholars of community and everyday literacy have
revealed about students from marginalized groups and
backgrounds. This chapter attempts to provide fellow
compositionists who have access to refugee and immigration
student populations insight into how alternative modes of
composing (i.e., multimodal composition) can increase
student agency, self-efficacy, and overall literacy, as
well as provide sample assignments and best practices for
those seeking to adopt these pedagogical tools in their
own classes.
Chapter
4Jen Michaels, “Social Media, the Classroom,
and Literacy Sponsorship: An Analysis of DALN Narratives
through Positioning Theory”
When teachers introduce new technologies into the
classroom, they face a series of challenges: assessing
possible technologies, selecting technologies that may
support learning, and supporting students as they use
those technologies for scholarly purposes. The Digital
Archive of Literacy Narratives makes it possible to
identify behaviors and attitudes that help some teachers
feel supported and confident in selecting and leveraging
technologies in their teaching. In this article, I model
this identification process by analyzing three narratives
from the DALN, all submitted by teachers of composition
who use social media to support their scholarship. Using
positioning theory (Bamberg, 1998, 2007; Harré & van
Longenhove, 1999) and the metaphor of literacy sponsorship
(Brandt, 1998) as critical lenses, I examine how the
narrators describe human mentorship as a contributor to
their use of social media to support scholarship. Across
these narratives, four shared traits of effective
mentorship emerge: 1) the mentor and mentee share an
intellectual or practical goal; 2) the mentor seems
willing to maintain the mentorship relationship over time;
3) the mentor encourages meaningful choice among multiple
technologies that may suit the task at hand; and 4) the
mentee perceives the mentor as being proficient with the
technology at hand. I demonstrate how these four
mentorship traits manifest in the narratives, then
consider how they might improve teaching practice.
Finally, I explore how positioning theory and literacy
sponsorship might be useful frameworks for classroom
analysis of DALN narratives.
