Supporting online learning for diverse elementary students: A community of inquiry approach to collaborative multimodal composing—processes, products, and perspectives

Abstract

When the pandemic forced schools online, teachers quickly adapted to meet their students' needs. Despite these efforts, U.S. educational disruptions deepened achievement disparities for students of color and low-income backgrounds. Although many schools have returned to in-person learning, online learning is expanding rapidly, highlighting the need to design it inclusively, especially for elementary-aged students—a group less understood in this context. Guided by a Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, we first outline how a teacher-researcher partnership purposefully planned and implemented an online writing workshop to support culturally, linguistically and socio-economically diverse third-grade students to develop as a community of engaged learners. Then, we focus on the kinds of learning and interactions that occurred between students during a computer-mediated collaborative multimodal composing (MMC) project as well as their perspectives on their collaborations, learning, and final multimodal products. Findings indicate that MMC with digital tools, when implemented with instruction through a CoI framework that centers teacher, social, cognitive, and learner presence, enables students from all backgrounds to foster essential literacy and 21st-century skills. These findings establish a foundational understanding for teachers and researchers working with young, diverse learners in computer-mediated and online contexts.