Importance of Working Collaboratively and Risk-taking with Digital Technologies when Teaching Literacy

As classroom landscapes and digital technologies are constantly changing, this qualitative research study investigated the challenges for elementary educators as they implement and sustain digital-based literacy practices. The perceptions of 15 participating elementary teachers, from rural and urban Ontario, Canada, as they reflected on their own teaching practices and curriculum planning involving literacy and digital tools, were explored through the lens of New Literacies (Coiro et al., 2008). The following research questions guided this study: a) What do teachers who use multimodal practices perceive as their teaching strengths? b) How do teachers describe their understanding of literacy and learning? c) How do teachers utilize digital technologies to support teaching and learning through multimodal methods? d) What types of environments support teachers to address the challenges of teaching with multimodal practices? Primary sources of data for this study were semi-structured interviews and the teachers' educational resources and documents, sourced to plan teaching and learning literacy activities, and collected and analyzed through a grounded theory approach. Findings suggest that the 15 teachers effectively integrate multimodal and digital tools and resources into their literacy curriculum, through supportive environments and peer collaborations. This shift in teaching and learning illustrated challenges with common technological and connectivity issues as well as finding space for professional development with Web 2.0 applications. The teachers experienced tensions when teaching through multimodal means, such as inequity of access to digital resource sharing and daily implementing digital tools in the elementary literacy curriculum. Constantly seeking out new ways to integrate digital technologies, tools and resources, while embracing the tensions of teaching digitally, these pedagogical risk-takers provided opportunities to further understand the importance and challenges of facilitating multimodal practices in the elementary literacy classroom.Ph.D