“Spice it Up”: Digital Literacy Scholars Expanding their Digital Teaching Practices

As online instructors know and recent scholarship documents, teaching online is different than teaching face to face (Clarke & Watts-Taffe, 2014). Recent research suggests that teaching online requires literacies distinct from what is required to teach face to face (Panda & Mishra, 2007). Being a successful online student also requires unique skills, including online engagement (Shelton, Hung, & Lowenthal, 2017), determination, organization, and the ability to work independently (Johnson & Berge, 2012). Consistent with face-to-face classrooms, engagement and a sense of community are critical for a positive and successful learning experience. How do online educators learn how to design online classes and, specifically, how do they create engaging communities in online classes. With these questions in mind, two literacy and language teacher educators passionate about technology, multiliteracies and digital literacies in their own research and professional life, came together to lead a practitioner inquiry into building and experimenting with how they build an engaging, multimodal community of learners in their online courses. We need to examine online literacy education instruction to ensure that we do not privilege a static experience of “read, write, and respond”, but rather create opportunities that encourage thinking with others and thinking and responding in-the-moment. We must have students engage with a range and variation of texts as readers, but also as producers. This work urges us to reimagine the spaces that we create for students in our online classes. What counts as community in this classroom space? How is a classroom community created and developed?