The Designing Workshop: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies in a Third Grade Classroom

This research conducted with third graders examined a teacher and her students as they transformed their traditional writing workshop to a designing workshop. Using the New London Group's (1996) pedagogy of multiliteracies and Katie Wood Ray's (2006) units of study as frameworks, students participated in a unit of study on informational texts. After immersing themselves in a study of both traditional print-bound informational books and interactive electronic informational books, the students designed multimodal digital compositions using iBooks Author. The study focused on the teacher's transformation, the students' design process, and students' final compositions. Preliminary results demonstrated that students designed using a cyclical process, transforming to seeing themselves as designers employing a variety of modes. The study has many implications specifically in the areas of students' design process, students' multimodal compositions, and teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge.