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Teaching English with digital technology has exacerbated the process of teaching and learning. In youth leisure, computers are more than information devices: they convey stories, images, identities, and fantasies through providing imaginative opportunities for play, and as cultural and ideological forms. In this paper, I report on a project conducted with teacher education students at a university in Johannesburg, South Africa. The focus of the project is to examine how students construct their identities digitally through the multimodal narratives they create in the English classroom. To do this I report on two narratives, as well as a recurring theme, decolonisation. The latter theme is significant because it was during the time of this project that South African universities found themselves in the grip of decolonisation and free education protests. I use New Literacy Studies as a framework to theorise literacy practices, and the work of Hall and others to theorise identity. The paper presents further possible implications of digital identity construction for teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I call for an unequivocal legitimisation of the living 'I' in educational research. The paper itself becomes a context that explains this call. It is a report of my action research into my professional learning through working in South Africa, within the context of new policy frameworks for continuing teacher development. The call embeds issues about the need for higher education practitioners to produce their explanatory accounts of practice as they support teachers' enquiries for improving practice and knowledge creation, and to legitimise a free academic press for the dissemination of those accounts. The accounts need to demonstrate epistemological, methodological and scholarly validity, to strengthen practitioners' attempts to influence policy debates about continuing professional development. By clarifying the processes of establishing quality, it becomes possible to show the links between continuing professional education and the active contributions of practitioners to economic and social wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]