Bridging intersecting literacy practices in a sixth-grade class using iPads

This article discusses youth’s new literacy practices emerging from their out-of-school experiences (e.g. gaming, blogging, and producing music- and game walkthrough videos), and shows examples of how these practices permeate the classroom walls. Social semiotic multimodal analyses of four students’ planet books and their talks around these will be used to exemplify what happens semiotically in the translation of meanings and designs across modes and across sites. The analyses resulted in the following findings: The students’ knowledge production in school incorporates interest-driven literacy practices. Their use of avatars, emojis and expressive fonts, typically stemming from various affinity spaces (Gee, 2005), serves as resources with which to visually mark their writer-identities, and opens dialogical spaces. The sixth-graders re-create and re-combine multimodal representations mediated by overlapping in- and out-of-school contexts. As such, the students’ texts challenge textbook conventions and the semiotic registers in science. The students also demonstrate digital literacy practices that are embedded across home and school domains. Writing with iPads eases the cross of multimodal representations and digital proficiencies and enables children to bridge intersecting literacy practices.