Transfer & Video
In both form and content, VanKooten’s e-book goes beyond analyzing multimodal literacies by utilizing them. Publishing exclusively in a digital format affords visual design strategies, videos, and detailed research protocol. VanKooten grounds her empirical research in concepts of learning transfer, investigating how a student can transfer something they learned in one context to another. She describes her data analysis method: “I code and analyze data from student interviews, classroom observations, and documents... Thus through coding and analysis, I pay attention to where and how I can see and hear evidence of students developing knowledge that speaks to the transfer of compositional knowledge across media.” Expounding on her method of analyzing video, VanKooten explains, the “images and sounds [of the videos] provide a continual reminder of the complex interdependence of elements in the research scene and my own positionality as researcher.”
VanKooten's choice to feature video of student interviews and classroom sessions as central to the study invites readers to draw their own conclusions as well as serves as a model for teaching, scaffolding, and assigning videos. Making the research process visible to participants and readers, allows unique opportunity to access, interpret, and hence co-create meaning from her data. VanKooten (2020) “enacts a participatory and interdependent digital research methodology and provides rich representations of students’ video production experiences that include student and teacher voices and reflections, students’ digital compositions, and analysis of interactions that occurred both in the classroom and in the interview room.” As evidenced in the Introduction’s section 0.3 “Meet the Participants,” VanKooten frequently makes student agency and students' own explanations of their learning visible and audible.
VanKooten's choice to feature video of student interviews and classroom sessions as central to the study invites readers to draw their own conclusions as well as serves as a model for teaching, scaffolding, and assigning videos. Making the research process visible to participants and readers, allows unique opportunity to access, interpret, and hence co-create meaning from her data. VanKooten (2020) “enacts a participatory and interdependent digital research methodology and provides rich representations of students’ video production experiences that include student and teacher voices and reflections, students’ digital compositions, and analysis of interactions that occurred both in the classroom and in the interview room.” As evidenced in the Introduction’s section 0.3 “Meet the Participants,” VanKooten frequently makes student agency and students' own explanations of their learning visible and audible.
Chapter 1: Transfer across Media
Chapter 1 surveys conceptions of transfer in Writing Studies, particularly drawing from Rebecca Nowacek’s 2011 Agents of Integration: Transfer as a Rhetorical Act which presents a five-part theory of transfer as recontextualization. VanKooten is cautious to argue causation, describing student experience of transfer as complex and layered, “If I have learned anything through studying transfer with and through digital media, it is that student experiences are complex and layered. I hope that even a part of this complexity may be represented through the words, images, and sounds.”
VanKooten employs the video affordances she advocates for by creating an audio-visual representation of Nowacek’s (2011) five-part theory of transfer as recontextualization. This video exemplifies VanKooten's approach throughout the book: she analyzes theories of transfer but also creates new, multisensory interpretations while modeling digital best practices including citation and accessibility.
VanKooten employs the video affordances she advocates for by creating an audio-visual representation of Nowacek’s (2011) five-part theory of transfer as recontextualization. This video exemplifies VanKooten's approach throughout the book: she analyzes theories of transfer but also creates new, multisensory interpretations while modeling digital best practices including citation and accessibility.
Chapter 2: Looking for Transfer across Assignments
"Connected Water Dot Illustration" by Pixabay is liscensed under CC0
In Chapter 2, we meet the three teachers whose classrooms and
pedagogy become the data: Composition I with Lauren, Composition II
with Katie, and Basic Writing with Julie. We can watch and hear from the instructors as they explain their assignments and pedagogical goals.
VanKooten frames video as a catalyst where “students could apply their knowledge, habits, and strategies from their coursework and work toward adapting this knowledge as they reconstructed ideas in a multimodal space.”
Chapter 2’s teacher and student interviews help support this description as readers can see and hear not only the pedagogical intentions, but also clips of classroom instruction and student created videos accompanied by recorded oral reflections.
pedagogy become the data: Composition I with Lauren, Composition II
with Katie, and Basic Writing with Julie. We can watch and hear from the instructors as they explain their assignments and pedagogical goals.
VanKooten frames video as a catalyst where “students could apply their knowledge, habits, and strategies from their coursework and work toward adapting this knowledge as they reconstructed ideas in a multimodal space.”
Chapter 2’s teacher and student interviews help support this description as readers can see and hear not only the pedagogical intentions, but also clips of classroom instruction and student created videos accompanied by recorded oral reflections.
Chapter 3: Looking for Transfer through Multiliteracies
VanKooten situates her research through the heuristics of critical, functional, and rhetorical literacy presented in Stuart A. Selber’s 2004 Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Selber argues that “students who are not adequately exposed to all three literacy categories will find it difficult to participate fully and meaningfully in technological activities” (p. 24). To lessen technology and access gaps, Selber advocates for helping students to become producers of as opposed to consumers of technology. VanKooten explains the relationships between multiliteracies and transfer:
transfer often occurs recursively and extends in multiple directions, much like the lines in a star, a wheel, or a web. Likewise, multiliteracies are necessary in different combinations, and they cross and overlap as learners use, critique, and produce technologies. If transfer across media is, as I have defined it, a process of considering, (re)using or choosing not to use, applying, and adapting compositional knowledge within surrounding practices and norms, then functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies are a key part of this complex knowledge base that might be reused, applied, and adapted anew. Put another way, Selber’s framework illuminates and widens Nowacek’s pathways toward transfer."
VanKooten's analysis of the interactions between students, teachers, and texts both in the classroom and interview room help readers connect the study's data to scholarly conversations on transfer. In their interviews, students report high levels of engagement, problem-solving skills, and critical thinking. VanKooten argues that some of the student video composition process extends Selber’s framework, explaining that her study reveals “a different kind of critical literacy developed through multimodal production, a literacy that involves composition, reflection, and envisioning possibilities for future transfer across media.”