Making iPad Animations as Multimodal Literacy
Submitted by:
Kathy A. Mills
Abstract:
In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teaching adolescents how to communicate emotions multimodally. The Web 2.0 affordances of the Internet—the social Web that allows user-generated content, connectivity, and crowdsourcing—have reduced barriers to participation in youths' online multimodal production in a participatory culture. The widespread production and increased circulation of multimodal texts in online communications environments requires the capability to interpret and represent emotions multimodally.
Emotions are also steadily becoming a major focus of adolescent language and literacy research worldwide. Teaching the language of emotions is critical because students' ability to express their own emotions through speech, writing, and other modes has been associated with sustained academic and social achievement.
This paper presentation draws on appraisal theory and original classroom research to illustrate the power of digital animation for multimodal literacy learning. It highlights why the multimodal language of emotions matters in 21st-century literacy practices. It outlines a systematic framework for talking about the grammar of emotions, including ways to invoke and inscribe different levels of emotional intensity. Students' digital animations are analysed by extending appraisal theory—originally designed to analyse discourse—to include multimodal features of texts. It illustrates key principles for developing students' language of emotions with digital technologies, with practical examples from educational research for teachers.
Students from a culturally diverse cohort were taught over a series of lessons how to interpret emotions in animated films and produced 2-D cartoon animations using drawings with an iPad application and stylus. Animation creation is fundamentally multimodal, inviting frame-by-frame construction of nonverbal language sequences and images to tell a story. Animation creation become a springboard for students to gain richer understandings of the interpersonal metafunction of written and spoken texts.
The findings show that impassioned multimodal communication is enhanced by knowledge of how feelings produce different facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and physiological changes in characters that are often exaggerated to powerful effect in animations. This includes an ability to invoke different intensities of emotions. It also demonstrates how students expanded their vocabulary for inscribing feelings from low to high levels of intensity. The research has significant implications for teachers to engage adolescents in the multimodal communication of emotions and feelings through vocabulary, images, and body language of animations as every day, moving-image texts in digital spaces.
Presenter Bio
Kathy A. Mills is Professor of Literacies and Digital Cultures at LSIA, ACU Brisbane. Professor Mills has published over 90 works in total, including 5 sole-authored books, an award-winning edited Routledge volume with USA editors, and 54 scholarly journal articles and chapters. She has published first-authored or sole-authored research in journals that include Review of Educational Research, Written Communication, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Language and Education, and Linguistics and Education. Her 2016 book, Literacy Theories for the Digital Age won the LRA Edward Fry Book Award, which is highly acclaimed by Professors James Gee (Arizona State University), Brian Street (King’s College London) and David Howes (Concordia University, Canada). Professor Mills is an Associate Editor of the Australian Educational Researcher. She leads two Australian Research Council grants, researching Indigenous ways of knowing and being in multimodal literacy practices in school (DE 140100047), and developing the multimodal expression of emotions of socially and economically disadvantaged primary students (LP 150100030). She serves on the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Literacy Research (Arizona), and on the Review Board of the Reading Teacher (New Jersey), English Teaching Practice and Critique (New Zealand), and the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. She has served in a number of executive research leadership roles for the American Educational Research Association, and is the current Chair of the American Educational Research Association Writing and Literacies SIG, of six hundred members (2015-2016).