Shifting Transliteracies in Elementary School: Understanding How Transliteracy Practices Contribute to Grade Three Students’ Construction of Meaning

• Author / Creator

  Filipek, Jacqueline L.

• Situated within social constructivist understandings of multiliteracies, this eight-month ethnographic study explored transliteracy practices in a grade three classroom. The intention of this research was to conduct an ethnographic case study to understand how digital and multiliteracies support the ways children construct meaning through transliteracy practices in elementary school. Findings revealed that transliteracy, using both digital and analog technologies across modes, media, genres, and platforms, is an effective lens to understand the shifting literacy practices of young 21st-century learners. Transliteracy is described in relation to four understandings of literacy: critical transliteracy, digital transliteracy, social transliteracy, and disciplinary transliteracy. Understandings and implications of a transliteracy mindset are articulated in their contributions to scholarship and pedagogy and through descriptive examples of transliteracy in the classroom. This study contributes to growing conceptual understandings of transliteracy and supports the fluid nature of transliterate learning. It promotes the use of multiliteracies, student choice, and opportunities to use more than one mode, device, or platform simultaneously at school. Canadian students constantly face many choices in literacies, thus, being transliterate becomes significant to their literacy education.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • elementary
  • transliteracy
  • constructing meaning
  • ethnography
  • literacy

• Graduation date

  Fall 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-gpg0-mj46

• License

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