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Exploring Young Children’S Digital Composing Practices, Megan D. Cross

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the many layers involved in young children’s meaning-making as they digitally compose. Utilizing a multimodal, social semiotics theoretical framework to analyze children’s digital compositions using a composing app, this study was designed around one research question: What is the nature of three and four-year-old children’s multimodal meaning making while using a composing app? The qualitative study involved four focal participants from a three- and four-year-old classroom, who attended an inquiry-based lab school in the southeastern United States.

The data were collected over a period of eight weeks, where the children were invited to tell their stories using …

Intersecting Stories: Cultural Reflexivity, Digital Storytelling, And Personal Narratives In Language Teacher Education, Julie Vivienne Dell-Jones

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This narrative inquiry dissertation explores stories from three students over a two-year trajectory as they develop into language educators in diverse contexts. The study begins in a teacher education course focused on technology for language teaching in English as a second language (ESOL) and foreign language education (FLE) classrooms. As instructor, I implemented a digital storytelling (DS) project with the pedagogical goal of supporting the much-needed practice of reflexivity, and specifically, reflexivity of intercultural competence (IC) and culturally-responsive pedagogy (CRP). The DS, as an autoethnographic multimodal narrative activity, provided a creative outlet for undergraduate and master’s level students to explore …