Jessica Zacher Pandya

California State University, Dominguez Hills | CSUDH · School of Education

The theorization of multimodality in academic scholarship is disconnected from how it is conceptualized by children. To bridge this gap, we analyzed 75 interviews with children about their digital video making. Analysis of their responses demonstrates children's socially-embedded, age-specific understandings of how modes operate, as well as when an...

In this manuscript, we explore sites of struggle in the inclusion of critical digital literacies (CDL) in teacher preparation programs. Our worked examples explore two authors’ teacher-preparation classrooms and the ways in which each attempts to teach about CDL, in the scope of each class, across varying scales. Through a scalar approach, we explo...

Resurgent social, political, cultural, and economic tensions, in part facilitated by emerging information and communication technologies, underscore the need to cultivate new forms of critical literacy in our digital age. These critical digital literacy (CDL) practices share a specific focus on navigating, interrogating, critiquing, and shaping tex...

In this special issue we take an interdisciplinary and international approach to ‘digital writing’. There is no single or simple definition of this term that is widely accepted. We use it to encompass all forms of communication, expression and creativity taking place through, on or with digital technologies and digital platforms. It may include tra...

In this essay I view writing as a communicative practice, and ask how and in what ways teachers and students define the role of writing in relation to digital video composition. While there is much research on the importance of multimodal composition, and teachers are being encouraged to incorporate more digital making into their curricula, we need...

In this article, we examine how children ages 8 to 10 characterized the audiences of digital videos they made in school. Children's perceptions of their viewers reflected, and in many cases complicated, current theorizing about the vast potential audiences of digital texts. Our analysis of videos and interview data surfaces several findings pertain...

This panel investigates the pedagogic dimension of digital platforms thus drawing on older theoretical traditions that use pedagogy as a way of describing and explaining the relationships between individual and society, agency and structure (paper 1). We want to explore what it means to conceive of the relationship between people and their platform...

In this article, we examine how children ages 8 to 10 characterized the audiences of digital videos they made in school. Children’s perceptions of their viewers reflected, and in many cases complicated, current theorizing about the vast potential audiences of digital texts. Our analysis of videos and interview data surfaces several findings pertain...

While humour and laughter create conditions that are conducive for learning, different forms of children’s humour have been given little attention in research on digital media, literacy learning, and multimodal design. Applying a Bakhtinian lens, we analyse carnivalesque videos created by elementary students as part of the formal curriculum. We arg...

In this article we highlight analyses conducted in two qualitative literacy studies to discuss various implications of a blended, or hybrid, approach to multimodal analysis. By investigating several prominent frameworks commonly used together for the purpose of analyzing multimodal data, and describing our own experiences blending these frameworks,...

In this essay, I discuss Allan Luke’s influence on my own critical digital literacy research, beginning with the influence of his monograph “The Social Construction of Literacy in the Primary School” (1994/2018b) and continuing to the present day. I address some of his most admirable qualities: his way of talking about theory and practice with teac...

This article revisits questions on the utility of identity in literacy studies. Following a review of the range of conceptions of identity and framings of its uses, we argue that identity-as-position is needed as a pragmatic tool in the field of literacy studies, and grounds responsive critical literacy practices. Drawing on a narrative analysis ca...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine, through an intersectional lens, how digital video composing can be an act of redistributive social justice for students with learning disabilities. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on two years’ worth of observation, interview, survey and digital video data to present a case study of J...

In this book, I examine the everyday videomaking practices of students in a dual language, under-resourced school in order to explore the ways children interrogate their worlds, the kinds of identities they craft, and the language and literacy learning practices that emerge from digital video production. Focusing on vulnerable populations who are o...

At the forefront of current digital literacy studies in education, this Handbook uniquely systematizes emerging interdisciplinary themes, new knowledge, and insightful theoretical contributions to the field. The chapter topics-identified through academic conference networks, rigorous analysis, and database searches of trending themes-are organized...

In this chapter, we define writing, literacies, and education in digital cultures as a Bourdieusian field, fundamentally a field of struggles, and explore some of the ideological and practical ramifications of viewing the field as a “field.” Such an undertaking requires understanding the power dynamics that allow only some of us to define fields, c...

This essay presents the results of a review of research published in the last 10 years on the uses of what we term ‘productive’ digital technologies in special education contexts. There is little overlap between research on productive technologies such as digital storytelling in mainstream contexts and research on technology use to support literacy...

In this article, we examine the multimodal, digital autobiography of Cindy, an eight-year-old student with autism. We first describe the process we went through with Cindy to make her video in an inclusive, general education classroom setting. Then we examine the different modes through which Cindy made meaning in her video, focusing on the ways sh...

Background/Context Prior research on multimodal, digital composition has highlighted the need for educators to bring such practices into classrooms, yet little research has been done to show what kinds of products children create and what those products can tell us as researchers about how children articulate their life experiences. We draw on rece...

In this paper we share the results of an analysis of a set of multimodal, digital videos created by nine-year old children in a critical digital literacies project. These digital compositions, made in honour of Cesar Chavez Day, were meant to be about a day in the life of a worker and were meant to allow children to use school and home community me...

In this paper we share the results of an analysis of a set of multimodal, digital videos created by nine-year old children in a critical digital literacies project. These digital compositions, made in honour of Cesar Chavez Day, were meant to be about a day in the life of a worker and were meant to allow children to use school and home community me...

In this column, we map some of the ways technology has been interpreted and emphasized in the implementation of the Common Core State Standards thus far, and suggest potential areas for research. To create our map, we applied Luke & Freebody’s four resources model to the interpretations of technology in the CCSS. The model suggests that literate pe...

This article poses and re-examines common answers to three interwoved questions: a) what counts as discourse? b) What counts as academic discourse? c) What counts as fruitful discourse? Each question, the authors argue, has too often been answered in a narrow way that limits available visions for literacy instruction, both for educators and for pol...

In this commentary I unpack the Pandora's Box of issues related to the assessment of English language learners’ literacy skill development in multimodal classrooms. I ask how we might quantify the benefits of multimodal composing, for k-12 as well as college students, given the existing complexity of assessing ELLs’ traditional literacy skills. I u...

In this essay I argue that the effects of federal policy can be examined through a scale analysis that helps deconstruct the effect of the current widespread accountability movement in the US educational system. I first discuss the concept of scale, including its thus-far limited use in educational research. I define scales not only as hierarchical...

In this article, I critique a component of the highly structured Open Court Reading curriculum designed to teach elementary children “inquiry and higher-order thinking” skills. The intended outcome of this component is, I argue, the production of critically literate and informed consumers of information. However, both the critical thinking skills t...

This article describes Year 2 of a three-year study on improving reading comprehension instruction in six United States elementary schools that was conducted during a state takeover of a school district. The authors, using a qualitative approach, focus on the effects of implementation of a mandated language arts curriculum, including an obligatory...

This article focuses on the ways that one individual child, Christina, experienced urban life in and outside of a diversely populated elementary school with a multicultural curriculum. Labeled by the school and her parents as white, Christina identified as Latina, and used specific spaces in the city to support this claim. Drawing on data from a ye...

In this column, the author reviews four books about literacy and learning, three with a distinctly Vygotskian bent. First is an edited collection, “The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky” (Daniels, Cole, & Wertsch, 2007), which includes well-written essays about Vygotsky’s theories.

In this article I use a double theoretical lens of Bourdieuian (1985, 1991) and Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) perspectives on social space and the dialogism of everyday literacy events to analyze and discuss a classroom literacy event. In this event, which takes place in a diversely populated classroom with a social justice language arts curriculum, four...

In this article, we explore “identity enactment” within the context of a job training program that pushed its adult students to adopt certain work-related identities. Drawing on analyses of long-term participant observations, longitudinal interviews, and written artifacts, we reveal the tensions, adjustments, and reorientations that occurred when a...

Today's visual age demands a broadened view of literacy that encompasses understanding and using new technologies. After-school programs can provide venues where young people can develop this form of literacy and express their newly created identities.

This article examines goals for students? language growth in school, beginning with the State of California?s definition of ?standard American English? and other conceptions of ?academic English? and ?codes of power?. The final argument, based on socio-cultural and dialogic perspectives, offers an updated framework for exploring the teaching of ?st...