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A Readerly Eye: Teachers Reading Student Multimodal Texts

Wierszewski, Emily Ann

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2010, PHD, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
This dissertation investigates how eight instructors with varying levels of experience and education teaching in English Departments at three major Midwest universities respond to their students’ multimodal texts. Because response begins with the reading process, concurrent verbal protocols are implemented to capture teachers’ reading practices as they respond to their students’ multimodal work and brief retrospective protocols are conducted afterwards to identify salient and problematic moments in the reading process. Protocols are triangulated with interviews about teachers’ backgrounds and beliefs and with the collection of classroom artifacts, including syllabi and assignment sheets. A grounded theory analysis of concurrent protocols indicates that teachers’ multimodal response practices are guided by their evaluative expectations, are typically implicit and extemporaneous, and are marked by a concern for the form of student work and the tendency to conceive of multimodal texts as static, rule-driven objects. It is argued that teachers’ multimodal response practices reflect de-contextual and form-focused pedagogical models and, as such, undermine the social and creative goals of multimodality. Suggestions are made for better aligning pedagogical practice with the situated tenets of multimodal theory. Teachers’ response practices are also contextualized with a descriptive analysis of interviews and artifacts, which reveals that teachers’ articulated beliefs about multimodality are based in their professional and educational experiences. Those beliefs are compared with teachers’ response practices in protocol data with a focus on the dominant category of expectations. Gaps between belief and action in multimodal teaching are explored, and methods are proposed for achieving continuity between pedagogical beliefs about multimodality and response to student multimodal work.
Raymond Craig, PhD (Committee Chair)
Brian Huot, PhD (Committee Member)
Pamela Takayoshi, PhD (Committee Member)
Albert Ingram, PhD (Committee Member)
266 p.

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Citations

  • Wierszewski, E. A. (2010). A Readerly Eye: Teachers Reading Student Multimodal Texts [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1281183575

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Wierszewski, Emily. A Readerly Eye: Teachers Reading Student Multimodal Texts. 2010. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1281183575.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Wierszewski, Emily. "A Readerly Eye: Teachers Reading Student Multimodal Texts." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1281183575

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)