“Visitor to All, Native to None”: How Digital-Native Teacher Education Students Use Bricolage and Multiple Modalities to Construct Knowledge

The focus of this hermeneutic phenomenological study is the current generation of “digital native” or “millennial” pre-service teachers and how, in their dual roles as last-semester students and future teachers, they adopt and use multiple modes to construct knowledge. The study is concerned with the lived experiences of the participants and the multiple “texts” they create. The researcher uses the multimodal concept of bricolage as a frame for describing and analyzing how pre-service teacher education students engage multiple learning modes. Using data collected from an original survey (Multimodal Knowledge Construction Survey), student-participant interviews, teaching methods faculty interviews, and classroom observations, the author provides extensive description, analysis and discussion of how these “digital native” pre-service educators construct, synthesize and interpret meanings through multiple modes. As technologies and media forms proliferate, these simultaneous student-teachers must be aware of and actively reflect upon how different modalities contribute to and shape their own learning experiences as well as the learning experiences of their future students. The researcher calls this process “modal and textual awareness,” or MTA. The conceptual framework and guiding research questions are based on the multimodal studies of Gunther Kress, the pioneering work of the New London Group, Gardner’s multiple intelligences, Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning, and media forms. The two major themes of the study are students’ modal and textual awareness and an inherent, shared tension between structure & guidance and creativity & choice. The three major implications of the study address critical media literacy, assessment, and 21st century learning skills.