Methodology of a Qualitative Study of Film

This presentation will focus on an interpretive qualitative study completed as a pilot for the researcher’s forthcoming dissertation work. Film as a literacy tool was examined ethnographically (Spradley, 1979) in three sample interviews with educators in middle school and high school settings, through the theoretical paradigms of multimodality (Bezemer & Kress, 2016) and symbolic interactionism (Denzin, 1992). These educators represented two different content areas in education, namely science and social studies. A broad definition of film formed the basis for the study. These data were transcribed, coded using three methods (Saldaña, 2016), and then drafted in a memo document (Charmaz, 2006). During the course of interpretation, the researcher utilized both poetic interpretation (Lahman et al., 2010) and a mixed media representation to approach the work through creative analytics (Ellingson, 2013). The presentation will focus on these methodological processes, as well as the findings. Tentative findings indicated five thematic categories, gathered from data and collected into tables. These findings represent the pedagogical processes in which participants engaged when planning to use film in their classrooms, as well as the considerations they made for their students throughout this process. This work also draws on theories of New Literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) and visual literacy (Avgerinou, 2011), locating film in a larger stream of conversation regarding media literacies