Collage became one avenue of several we tinkered with for doing and reflecting on our work in this context. We want our students who are teaching in schools to see a graduate degree as a way to feel sustained and empowered in their work with children. Our literacy program is part of an interdisciplinary department that mostly awards graduate degrees and offers some undergraduate service courses. Thus, it is critical for our state to improve literacy instruction, but given our context, the work is also challenging. Graduation rates, although they are improving, are low. Teachers in our state are among the lowest paid nationwide making turnover an issue. In our state, there are large populations of English learners with Hispanic/Latino and/or Native American/American Indian heritage who need intensive language and literacy support. The purpose of this study was to examine our uses of collage as a multimodal method of supporting graduate student teachers and to reflect on and improve our practice as teacher educators (LaBoskey, 2004). Among the strategies we came to use with our students is collage (combining images, words, and other symbols and icons purposely on a page). Even images themselves are multimodal (Duncum, 2014), specifically taking mode of color and spatiality into account (Jewitt and Kress Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). By multimodal, we mean that we were utilizing multiple modes, including image, print text, or spatial arrangement (Jewitt & Kress, 2003) across our work.

We determined that we would benefit from a multimodal method for supporting our thinking together with our teachers, together with each other, and separately. As such, one of our major goals is to bring together our research interests in New Literacies (New London Group, 1996) into our work as mentors and advisors. Most of our responsibilities lie with mentoring and advising graduate students who are practicing teachers in local schools. We are junior, tenure-line faculty at a research-intensive institution in the Southwestern United States.

Creating stylized characters pdf