“Thanks for the Assignment!”: Digital Stories as a Form of Reflective Practice

In this article we examine pre-service teachers ’ digital literacy stories and post-assignment reflections for evidence of transformative pedagogy. The language arts course design employs both a new literacies approach (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) and a multiliteracies pedagogical framework (New London Group, 1996). These frameworks are also applied to help us examine the pre-service teachers ’ digital stories and reflections. The data consist of approximately 150 digital stories and written student reflections collected over three years. We are encouraged by the finding that the multimedia nature of the assignment appears to help pre-service teachers construct new understandings of literacies, particularly when the digital stories are shared as part of the adult classroom experience. We conclude that digital stories hold potential to encourage pre-service teachers to think critically about how they were taught relative to the teachers they wish to become