Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Teachers College Educational ...

Augmenting The Arrival: Students’ Mobile Device-Enabled Narratives
Christian Ehret,
Vanderbilt University, Peabody College230 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN, 37203
Email: christian.m.ehret@vanderbilt.edu
Abstract: Despite their prevalence, we know little about the literacy practices associated
with mobile devices emerging in youths’ lives, and we know still less about the nexus of
these practices and learning. In this presentation, I describe data collected as part of a
larger study of a digital media enrichment class in an urban school in the southeastern
United States. In the class, two teacher-researchers guide five fifth-grade learners in
using a mobile device—the iPod Touch 4G— to compose digital stories and other digital
media. Data analyzed in this paper, focus on two students’ composing process during a
fifty-minute learning segment in which they used an augmented reality app—Flat
Stanley—to produce a digital story. Implications from the analysis contribute to the
conference theme, exploring mobile devices in educational contexts: research and
pedagogy should attend to how youths’ movement through and social production of
space affects how and whether they employ the affordances of mobile devices as
compositional tools to achieve their visions.
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