Search

In this article, the authors, two teacher educators and three high school teachers, examine the impact of a professional development seminar held in spring 2017. In that seminar, participants read and composed brief autobiographical sketches in a variety of media and learned a new lexicon for multimodal close reading, composition, and design. Using narrative inquiry, the three coauthoring teachers reflected on the importance and anxiety of being positioned as multimodal writers, and their subsequent interaction with multimodal mentor texts in their classrooms. The authors contend that teachers must move beyond conventional textual autobiography and memoir. Expanding teachers' comfort with multimodal mentor texts is essential for their and their students' literacy development. Building a lexicon for close reading and composing with multimodal texts can inspire students and empower teachers to invite autobiographical writing into their instruction and teach autobiography and memoir as acts of design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an approach to reading like a digital writer to support adolescents' narrative writing in digital formats. By providing digital mentor texts for students to read like digital writers, a more comprehensive and perhaps deeper understanding of digital writing and the memoir genre can emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]