Puppet Don’t Have Legs! Dinosaurs have digits! Using the dramatic and media arts to deepen knowledge across content areas.

The dramatic and media arts afford opportunities for students to respond to children’s literature in new and innovative ways, encouraging spaces of co-authorship and multimodal texts. Drawing upon the fields of New Literacy Studies, multimodality and democratic authorship, the purpose of this project is to compare how grade four-seven students from two North American countries use the dramatic and media arts to co-author responses to literature (fiction/nonfiction texts), and to explore how these responses affect students’ literary and content area learning.

Technology and secondary English education

U.B.C. as well as many secondary schools in Vancouver have invested in the potential of technology. Research reveals, however, that even when there is sufficient access, far too many English teachers are not effectively using technology as a learning &/ or teaching resource. Perhaps this is because they are not equipped with the necessary skills to effectively use technology in the classroom. This three month study explores how three English teachers at an urban secondary school in Vancouver are presently experiencing the use of technology in their classrooms. Qualitative methods were used to generate, analyze and report data. Data collection included formal and informal discussions, interviews, extensive field notes and the observation of classes. This study discloses the factors which have most significantly facilitated and inhibited the implementation of technology in these teachers' teaching contexts. This research also provides an account of these teachers' perspectives of how the B.Ed, program at U.B.C. can equip pre-service teachers for the challenges and potential of integrating technology into secondary English classrooms.Education, Faculty ofLanguage and Literacy Education (LLED), Department ofGraduat

Exploring literacy pedagogy with digital technologies in teacher education

Despite current emphasis in teacher preparation programs on developing pre-service teachers’ comfort and competence with digital learning technologies (DLT), research suggests that pre-service teachers struggle to transfer innovative applications of technology into their eventual teaching practice. In particular, they resist change from traditional constructs of teaching and learning. In this dissertation, I suggest that disrupting pre-conceived notions of teaching and learning is a requisite step to facilitating change in classroom practice. Neuman (1990) observed that classroom practice is “disrupted” when digital technologies are integrated “in a way that fundamentally alters the instructional environment so that teaching and learning occur differently than before the technology was appropriated” (p. 110). This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter provides the theoretical framework that has informed the study and describes the case study methodology employed to explore the following two research questions: (a) How do pre-service teachers experience DLT in the context of a 12-month elementary teacher education program? (b) How do we disrupt pre-service teachers existing conceptions of literacy pedagogy? Chapters 2-4 are co-authored manuscript chapters. Chapter 2 examines the manner in which a community of learners working collaboratively within a wiki environment establish social hierarchies and negotiate power. Student engagement in this activity revealed much about social negotiation within such settings, and about the affordances of such software for formal education. This paper is included in its published form. Chapter 3 explores the participants’ experiences with “Slowmation” (a form of stop-motion animation). Findings reveal that reluctant uptake of slowmation on practicum by pre-service teachers appeared to be to the result of the weak support structure for the pedagogy and the lack of encouragement from some sponsor teachers. Chapter 4 explores pre-service teachers use of GarageBand™ and an electronic bulletin board in the context of a 3-month curriculum and instruction course in music education. Results reveal that the integration of digital learning technologies facilitates a reconceptualization of music education as well as a sociocultural interpretation of music literacy. In chapter 5, I draw comparisons across each of the manuscript chapters in light of current research in the field.Education, Faculty ofLanguage and Literacy Education (LLED), Department ofGraduat

Additive and disruptive pedagogies: the use of slowmation as an example of digital technology implementation

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of 35 preservice teachers as they were introduced to a new digital technology, “Slowmation” (abbreviated from Slow Animation), as a “disruptive” pedagogy over a period of 12 months. The participants in the study were 35 preservice teachers from an elementary cohort. Primary data sources included field notes and semi-structured interviews. Findings revealed that the preservice teachers enjoyed using slowmation as learners during the on-campus part of their program, yet very few used it as a disruptive pedagogy when teaching during their extended practicum. Our study highlights the challenges inherent in introducing “disruptive” pedagogies in a teacher education program