I was invited to be a panelist on a symposium about digital literacies research sponsored by the Alpha Upsilon Alpha Honor Society at the University of Georgia. The other panelists include:

(left to right) Dr. Peggy Albers, Georgia State University; Dr. Tisha Y. Lewis, Georgia State University; and Dr. Patrick Tiedemann, Georgia Gwinnett College

Just a quick recap of a great evening spent with smart colleagues.

Peggy discussed the approach to visual discourse analysis she has developed across projects. I first learned about her approach at the few meetings of the Discourse Analysis conference, held by Ohio State and Indiana University, that I was invited to as a grad student. Peggy shared short videos constructed by adolescents and pre-service teachers to demonstrate critical issues around her notion of ‘double exposure.’ I recommend reading her article on this topic:

Albers, P. (2011). Double exposure: A critical study of preservice teachers’ multimodal public service announcements. Multimodal Communication, 1(1), 47-63.

Patrick discussed critical aesthetics and multimodal design drawing from a new literacies project with pre-service teachers, in which he uses a think-aloud protocol to help teachers understand how they develop digital literacy practices themselves before planning on supporting the same practices for their students through unit design and classroom teaching.

Tisha discussed family literacy practices, drawing from data collected during her dissertation research. In her talk, Family Literacy and Digital Literacies: A Redefined Approach to Examining Social Practices of an African-American Family, she presented an ethnographic case study that used the ‘mother board’ as a central metaphor for conceptualizing the multiple ways a mother and son enacted digital literacies in their home.

I discussed a series of questions about digital literacies that were originally drafted in collaboration with George Newell and David Bloome for an AERA paper. I used data and heuristics from my dissertation research to discuss how I attempted to address the questions in order to think more broadly about how the field of literacy studies is working with the issues and tensions named. Here is a link to the slides I used that include the questions.

I’m very appreciative to Angelyne Collins and Lisa Hall, Co-Presidents of Alpha Upsilon Alpha Honor Society, for extending the invitation, assembling the panel, and hosting a great evening of sharing ideas and fellowship.