Digital video composition as a tool for learning: Exploring multiple text documents in an urban social studies classroom

There are growing bodies of research on both the use of primary source documents in the social studies classroom and the use of digital video composing to construct meaning from multimodal texts. However, there is scant research on the integration of these two promising pedagogic practices. I examined the urban classroom of an innovative social studies teacher and his 11th grade students as they worked with multimodal historical documents and digital video technologies to investigate historical events and compose digital video products.; This ethnographic case study took place over a 7 month period where 56 observations were conducted for a total of 140 hours spent in the field. The research questions guiding the study were: (1) What happens in a high school social studies classroom when a teacher provides opportunities for students to use primary sources to compose digital video based on historical themes? (2) What particular habits of mind emerge as teacher and students work with documents and video production using multiple texts? (3) In what ways do the student selections of texts and sources reflect their processes of thinking about the topic and impact the overall message of the digital video production, if at all? and, (4) In what ways, if any, does actually working with documents to inform production of a digital video serve to develop skills in historical analysis?; The findings from the study included: (1) The revisionist historical stance of the teacher who presented history as an ongoing and recursive reflective inquiry; (2) The teacher's pedagogical approaches---meeting students at their points of need, offering support at the relational and cognitive levels, and engaging students in multimodalities and multimedia design of historical inquiries and analysis; (3) In all, the connected teaching (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger & Tarule, 1986) enacted by the teacher in reading students and the political world as a transformative intellectual prompted students' to take on this stance toward historical events; (4) The digital video composing directed by student-initiated questions became a collaborative inquiry; and (5) Through digital video composing using mutimodal texts students appropriated historical knowledge and thinking by using historical analysis.