Amir Michalovich

University of Manitoba | UMN · Curriculum Teaching and Learning

This multi-year, ethnographic, qualitative case study in English Language Learning classrooms contributes a unique analysis of nine adolescent newcomer students' investment in a digital multimodal composing (DMC) project as a social drama. Using reflexive thematic analysis, it explores the following possibilities afforded by in-school, dramaturgica...

This ethnographic, qualitative case study empirically explores how six youth from refugee backgrounds positioned their identities through design choices in producing reaction videos—a popular YouTube genre—at school in their settlement context. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three ways in which youth took ownership of how they w...

This qualitative case study methodically explores ethical tensions that arose in the Research-based Theatre (RbT) project, Alone in the Ring (AitR), as a case. We borrowed Elliot Eisner’s set of tensions in Arts-Based Research (ABR), exploring the extent to which they manifested as ethical tensions in AitR. Following analysis of in-depth interviews...

This study addresses the urgent need to develop innovative pedagogies that build upon and enhance the digital literacies and representational practices of culturally and linguistically diverse youth from refugee backgrounds. In Canadian high schools, this population of students enter school with varying levels of literacy in their first language(s)...

This case study explores how two 16-year-old newcomer youth in a Canadian secondary school navigated the digital multimodal composition process through role-play in their first digital video production at school. Employing a qualitative, case-study design, the study shows how the youth playfully accentuated collaborative over coercive power relatio...

Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) is becoming increasingly prevalent in the social and health sciences and an expected skill for many researchers. CAQDAS is much less structured than the use of quantitative analysis software. However, actual CAQDAS practices and challenges have been insufficiently studied, especially among gradua...

Reviews of research have provided insights into the digital media production practices of youth in and out of school. Although such practices hold promise for the language and literacy education of refugee-background youth, no review has yet integrated findings across studies and different digital media production practices to explore this promise....

Israel's Education Ministry invited proposals for the development of a new multilingual policy for the country's education system. We submitted a proposal for an ‘engaged language policy’ approach, which helps schools to conceptualize and develop a policy that best fits them ideologically and demographically. This study aimed to map teachers’ and s...

This randomized controlled experiment (N = 707) is the first to examine the role of video, source and user attributes in credibility assessment of online science news videos, and the impact of web-search on this role. We created a science news YouTube video in 12 versions (3 × 2 × 2 for source, quality and popularity). Each participant was randomly...

This article examines how eliciting metaphors from multimodal commercials can facilitate a critical interpretation of advertising media, which is ubiquitous in the LL and highly manipulative. Adolescent students, a population which is particularly vulnerable to advertising’s influence, utilized the analytic tool of metaphor elicitation to abstract...

This paper analyzes teachers' use of the Hebrew tag-naxon?, which is a discourse marker (e.g. you know, yeah, okay, right) roughly equivalent to the English tag-right?. The study indicates that the use of tag-naxon? by teachers relates to the heart of what classroom talk is all about: understanding. By inviting topic expansion, tag-naxon? at the op...