Although making digital media involves movements of bodies, materials, and, often, mobile technologies, most literacy research on adolescents experiences with digital media relies on screened and sedentary perspectives rooted in representation and multimodalityperspectives that elide or distort the role of embodiment. This dissertation critiques the overemphasis on screens, texts, and representation in literacy studies across three empirical papers. Each paper addresses unique questions around literacy as an affective experience of human bodies through ethnographic and micro-ethnographic investigations in (1) a public school, (2) a southeastern community, and (3) a childrens hospital school. Paper 1 illustrates how adolescents physical mobilities and affective histories connect to their agency and development as producers of digital texts in urban schools. Paper 2 describes how the feeling of meaning-making with digital devices involves historically, culturally, and affectively developed sensibilities that emerge as bodies make sense of people, places and things as semiotic material. Paper 3 builds a theory of literacy moments, or the feeling of being in something while engaged in social, textual production. In its attempts at coming to know affective dimensions of social life, this dissertation also develops tension around what it means to know and warrant claims about moving, feeling bodies other than our own.

This dissertation examines the ways in which six second grade African American males engaged in critical conversations. This qualitative study addresses three primary research questions: 1) What is the nature of small group literature discussions focused on issues of power and privilege?; 2) How are students working to collectively build critical knowledge in a small group literature discussion focused on issues of power and privilege?; and 3) In what ways do issues of racial identity emerge among a small group of African American males participating in a discussion about race, power, and privilege? In order to address these three research questions, data was collected using the following methods: interviews, audio and video recordings, and field notes. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data, and results suggested that students who participated in the small group discussion sessions: 1) primarily discussed major themes the text inspired; 2) used an argumentation framework as a way of discussing critical topics and building knowledge; and 3) leveraged their own cultural histories and racial identities as tools for interpreting a major historical event.

This dissertation reports on a retrospective analysis of a design study conducted in partnership between researchers and the leaders of a large U.S. urban district to investigate and support the development of professional development (PD) facilitators. The intent of the study was to examine what PD facilitators need to know and be able to do in order to design and implement high-quality professional development (HQPD), and to test and improve a design for supporting the development of this expertise. HQPD refers to PD that has the potential to support teachers in significantly reorganizing their current practice in order to develop inquiry-oriented teaching practices that support all students engagement in rigorous disciplinary activity. This design study is a case of supporting the development of district capacity to provide HQPD for teachers by supporting the development of content specific PD facilitation practices. In reporting on this design study, I describe the work of developing, testing, and revising conjectures about both the PD facilitators learning process and effective means of supporting that learning. In reporting this work, I contribute to developing theories about how to support PD facilitators learning more generally. My analysis provides a rationale for proposed revisions to the design for PD facilitators learning that can be examined in future research.

This dissertation describes the design of an informal, a media-rich learning space for youth in a public library. It details how youth transformedor madethat space into a place for themselves. As such, this dissertation illustrates youth place-making for learning, or the ways in which youth negotiated and subsequently transformed this place of learning for their own enrichment. Youth place-making emerged withinand beyondan author-led program called Metro: Building Blocks (MBB). The program challenged teen participants to build authentic neighborhoods in the city of Metro within the familiar video game Minecraft. Data for this dissertationincluding audio, video, photographs, and fields noteswas collected throughout the duration of MBB, which ran from January through June of 2014.Thirteen teenaged participants took part in MBB activities, five of whom are featured in-depth. MBB was a deliberate attempt to both adopt and challenge the principles of connected learning guiding youth programming in informal learning settings, such as libraries and museums. Thus this dissertation is particularly concerned with the ways in which learning moves and circulates withinand beyonddiscrete settings. It asks questions about 1) interest, approaching interest-development less as a linear progression, and more as a fluid, emergent production. It also asks questions 2) about the topography of these settings, including the (socio-affective) rhythms coursing through them. Finally, it asks questions about 3) the forms of civic engagement that these settings can foster, following the spatiotemporal contours of participants engaged citizenship. This dissertation draws on theories of place, mobility, and affect to understand youth place-making. In doing so, this study challenges the imagined geographies of learning, or entrenched beliefs of whereand whenlearning takes place. Following the movement and circulation of experiences, ideas, and bodies necessitated a suite of mobile methods. Thus, this dissertation contributes mobile methods such as ethnographic community and temporal circling, while honing in analytically on refrains and felt focal moments Mobile analyses reveal 1) How youth interests move and circulate through passengering, mutability, and residue; 2) How learning topographies become amplified, and then propagate, including rhythmic oscillations; and 3) How civic engagement moves and circulates across space, time, and scale, or what this study refers to as civic geographies. These findings point toward implications for pedagogy and mentoring in informal, media-rich settings, as well as the design of those settings themselves, with an emphasis on place-making for learning.

Although a large body of research has examined the processes of writing, much less is known about how adolescents compose with multiple modes in digital environments. This qualitative study explores how students collaboratively composed across three different digital multimodal projectsa website, hypertext analysis, and podcastthat responded to and analyzed a work of literature. Multimodality and multiliteracies theoretical frameworks were integrated to better understand students use of modes (e.g., text, sound, images, video, animation) within the broader sociocultural context. Comparative case study methods were employed to glean a fine-grained and nuanced understanding of how three pairs of students composed during a scaffolded 7-week multimodal workshop in an urban 12th grade English classroom. Data sources included screen capture and video observations for each workshop session, student retrospective design interviews and written reflections for each project, as well as field notes, process work, and final multimodal products. Findings revealed that composing with multiple modes in response to literature was a complex, dynamic, and varied process mediated by the interaction of multiple factors, including students modal preferences and skills, composing tools, and multimodal assignments. There were three types of collaborative styles, with division of labor based on composers technical experience, content knowledge, and personal interests. Students exhibited modal preferences when working with open and flexible compositional toolsoften entering into each project in a similar way, spending a majority of workshop time working with that particular mode, and relying on it to carry the communicative weight of their projects. Multimodal composing timescapes revealed that students increasingly traversed across modes as they worked on their compositions. Students also expressed composing goals focused on affective response, entertaining their audience, and expressing themselves as composers. They also worked intentionally to create modally cohesive designs in response to literature. These findings contribute to the fields developing conception of multimodal composition processes within the context of a high school scaffolded digital writers workshop. The development of the multimodal composing timescape contributes to multimodal methods of data analysis and representation.

This research examines a teachers design of a classroom system of multimedia composition, in the form of collaborative video essays, and students responses to the teachers design. The teacher designed a project in which students in his 11th grade AP English Language and Composition classes composed both print essays and video essays based on novels they read for the class. One teacher and 49 students from a public high school near a major metropolitan city in the Midwestern United States participated in this study between October 2010 and February 2011. Qualitative analysis of the data allowed for description of the teachers design of this system and students responses to the teachers design. Salient elements of the teachers design of the system fell into three categories: design of time, design of the composition process, and design of publication and distribution practices. Student responses to each of these areas of design varied, with students at times adhering to the teachers design and at other times pushing back against his design and even redesigning aspects of the system themselves. The teachers expectations of the system, including his goals for the assignment and the ways that he valued the video essays, impacted his design of the system. Students own goals, as well as their understandings of the teachers goals, impacted the ways that they engaged in the system and their composition processes. Implications for classroom practice and future research were identified as part of the discussion of the data.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin, School of Nursing. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

Learning theory and educational data analytics can be said to coevolve, that is, to refine and improve each other reciprocally, each aspect providing a necessary element for the growth and advancement of the other. In this three-paper dissertation, I explore this process of coevolution between learning theory and data analytics in the context of digital game-based learning. From the theoretical side, I describe a framework based on a general theory of cognition (the two-system or dual-system model) that can be applied to digital game environments. The main hypothesis in this framework is that certain patterns of action in the game-space indicate the use of certain epistemic stances that have analogues within the two-system model. The proposed Two Stance/Two Model Framework (2SM) provides (a) improved explanatory power regarding intrapersonal variation in learning from games, (b) more complete theory regarding individual needs, goals, and agency, (c) a more extensive account of collaboration and community, and (d) improved perspective on knowledge-rich interactions in online affinity spaces. From the methodological side, I applied techniques of statistical computing (affinity clustering and sequence mining) to detect the stances of the 2SM as they appear in a physics learning game. The 2SM theorized that slow modes of solution would correlate to higher learning gains; students who use mainly fast iterative solution strategies did achieve lower learning gains than students who preferred slow, elaborated solutions. A second finding was that, as play progresses, students generally improve their performance in game areas that highlight physics concepts, but that this improvement is strongly moderated by their prior knowledge of physics. This dissertation further contributes to the existing knowledge of digital game-based learning by demonstrating how an analysis of the collected actions of players can be applied in a reliable and comprehensive fashion to research questions that are otherwise challenging to investigate.

The three papers in this dissertation contribute to research that seeks to characterize the complex and multi-dimensional relation between the physical environment and human learning. The first paper outlines a new approach to describe, represent, and interpret peopleâs interaction as they move within and across physical environments. I call this approach interaction geography. It encompasses Mondrian Transcription, a method to map peopleâs movement and conversation over space and time, and the Interaction Geography Slicer (IGS), a dynamic visualization tool that supports new forms of interaction and multi-modal analysis. The second paper extends this work to provide a conceptual framework to expand interaction geography in studies of learning. I show how interaction geography offers resources to integrate four historically separate research perspectives in order to study how peopleâs interaction, movement, and responses to, and actions on, the physical environment lead people to learn. The third paper adapts and uses the IGS to visualize and discuss data about New York Cityâs Stop-And-Frisk Program. I show how the IGS provides new ways to view, interact with, and query large-scale data sets of stop-and-frisk and crime data over space and through time to support analyses of and public discussion about a controversial social and political issue.

Though researchers and policymakers have called for an increase in text complexity in reading instruction, little research exists on whether scaffolding can support students reading complex texts, and almost no research has evaluated reading interventions for late high school students. In addition, research has experimentally verified scaffoldingâs effectiveness in supporting comprehension and described possible mechanisms, but has not determined the effectiveness of different types of scaffolding. To address these gaps, the present study randomly assigned eleventh-grade students to either an eight-session intervention in which small groups of students (n=82) read complex texts with tutors or a comparison condition in which students (n=71) learned individually with computerized ACT preparation software. In addition, for intervention groups, tutorsâ interactional scaffolding adaptations to support their studentsâ comprehension was tracked, and multilevel regression analyses were used to investigate possible associations between types of scaffolding and student comprehension. Results showed that the intervention groupâs growth on a standardized measure of passage-based comprehension was statistically significant (p<0.03) and practically meaningful (d=0.17) for students who attended at least six sessions. Regression models examining links between types of scaffolding and outcomes found that scaffolds helping students determine the structure of the passage and scaffolds helping students unpack complex syntax were positively associated with comprehension outcomes, while scaffolds that involved rereading the text and understanding academic-register vocabulary words were negatively associated. The experimental results offer a causal argument to show that scaffolding can support readers of complex texts, and present a possible scaffolding-based model for comprehension interventions for late high school students. The correlational evidence linking scaffolds and outcomes suggests that the kinds of scaffolding matter for student outcomes, and that scaffolding which supports students in unraveling the syntactic and structural complexities of text may be helpful, while scaffolding that encourages rereading of text or prompting for knowledge of rare vocabulary commonly used in academic texts may be less helpful. Implications for research are presented. Overall, the study presents evidence for how scaffolding can support high school students reading complex texts.