Meanings Made in Students’ Multimodal Digital Stories: Resources, Popular Culture, and Values

The young generation are both consumers and producers of digital multimodal texts and can thus be seen as cocreators of the culture and the contexts that they are part of. Learning more about how students create multimodal texts and what students’ texts are about can extend the understanding of contemporary meaning making. This study examines 23 Swedish fifth-grade students’ multimodal digital stories in a school context. The aim of this research was to understand the meaning that the students made in their digital narratives and to describe how they made that meaning. This study’s multimodal textual analysis is based on the multiliteracies perspective. The results indicate that all of the students, to varying degrees, took advantage of the available digital and modal resources. Some students chose writing as their sole mode, but others used all of the available resources. Furthermore, the results revealed that students’ popular culture experiences influenced many of their texts, which can indicate that popular culture texts are used as resources for making meaning about the world.

"[A]ll the students used the mode of writing when creating their stories.... [A]ll students also embraced the possibility of using multimodal design, albeit to varying degrees. This result contributes to the emerging change in students’ textual design in educational settings from the traditional focus on printed text towards a greater focus on digital and multimodal texts.... Letting multimodal text creation into educational settings may encourage students’ life worlds and thus mean that texts which students find valuable become recognized in the school world.... [This] in turn can indicate that popular culture texts as well as social media sites are used as resources when students make meaning about the world." (Authors, 53)