When in Doubt, Map it Out: Teachers’ Digital Storytelling Researched through Documentation

Abstract

This article considers how documentation enriches literacies learning in higher education, specifically in a graduate course designed for language teachers. Building on a one-year research study with graduate students at a university in the Atlantic region of Canada, the authors demonstrate how participant-generated documentation, including cartography, presents relational understandings impacting literacies. Specifically, the authors look at a case study of two teachers enrolled in a graduate literacy course who crafted and designed digital stories using Scratch and used multimodal dimensions from music to animation and movement. Teachers’ documentation challenges the idea that making is solely a question of doing, and considers instead long-lasting processes that influence teacher practice and development.

Keywords

• Making
• teacher education
• MakerMap
• storytelling
• cartography
• multimodality