Exploring iPad video composition: A study of elementary school students’ collaborative digital literacies practices

This qualitative research study engages with sociocultural theory, multimodality and Actor-Network Theory to examine the complexities of iPad video composition with elementary school children. While school videomaking has been investigated in studies focused on the finished product, the processes of videomaking and video editing (composition) on these devices have remained largely unexplored. This study seeks to answer: “How does a group of students engage with the iPad in creating a video?” By investigating how mobile devices dislodge the concept of “literacy” from its time-honored “reading” and “writing” connotations and move towards multimodal representations, the author engages with Actor-Network Theory’s “Obligatory Passage Point” (Callon, 1986) and with Fulwiler and Middleton’s (2012) notions of Compositing and Recursivity. The study details the struggles and successes of collaborative work in a group of Grade 4 students and shows how one student emerges as the lynchpin between the adults’ linear, paper-based video composition strategies and the children’s non-linear, digitally-based video composition proclivities. By focusing on how propositional and performance epistemologies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007) come into play in a classroom previously dominated by paper-based literacy practices, the author hopes to provide practitioners and researchers alike a glimpse into how digital literacies instruction might be taken up in classrooms.