A multiliteracies approach to online reading to learn: a case study

A Multiliteracies Approach to Online Reading to Learn: A case study Íris Susana Pires Pereira Departamento de Estudos Integrados em Literacia, Didáctica e Supervisão Research Centre on Education (CIED) Institute of Education, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal orcid.org/0000-0003-0647-2319 Corresponding author: Íris Susana Pires Pereira Instituto de Educação /Institute of Education Universidade do Minho Campus de Gualtar 4710-057 Braga, PORTUGAL [email protected] Biographical note: Íris Susana Pires Pereira, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Institute of Education and a member of the Research Centre on Education (CIED) at the University of Minho, Portugal. Her research focuses on multimodal literacy, the pedagogy of multiliteracies and teachers’ professional development. She has published in several international journals such as Language and Education, Research Papers in Education, Language, Pedagogy and Culture, Changing English, L1 and Teacher Development. She has recently co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Digital Literacies in Early Childhood. (https://iris2796.wixsite.com/irispereira) ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This work is funded by CIEd – Research Centre in Education, projects UID/CED/1661/2013 and UID/CED/1661/2016, Institute of Education, University of Minho, through national funds of FCT/MCTES-PT. A Multiliteracies Approach to Online Reading to Learn: A case study This paper aims to contribute to the discussion of a multiliteracies approach to online inquiry reading. After presenting the key principles of this theory, I focus attention on an online platform acknowledged for its learning aims – TED-Ed – as an empirical basis for researching the practicability of such an approach. An original lesson available on the platform was studied, revealing that it only partially complies with the pedagogy in question. This analysis showed that while multimodal, hyperlinked and purposeful online reading was clearly taking place as a situated and transformative experience, there were, nevertheless, significant restrictions in the enactment of the theory, specifically, the partiality of the meaning-making paths designed to scaffold students’ learning, the absolute invisibility of semiotic resources used for making meaning and the adoption of an uncritical attitude toward meaning making. Finally, discussion is made of the most significant insights to be drawn from this analysis, concerning the potentials of such platforms for practice and research and the need for practitioners to develop their understanding of online reading to learn in order to fully enact the theory underpinning the multiliteracies approach. Keywords: multiliteracies; online inquiry reading; pedagogy; professional development A Multiliteracies Approach to Reading Online to Learn: A case study Introduction Multiliteracies is a powerful social-constructivist approach to literacy learning (New London Group, 1996, 2000; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Pereira & Riaño, 2018), which focuses on social practices as the basis to understand literacies and literacy pedagogy. Its original manifesto was developed on the basis that “The world was changing, the communications environment was changing, and (…) literacy teaching and learning would have to change as well” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009: 165). This central argument has remained unaltered, though perhaps clarified and explored in Cope & Kalantzis (2009) and Kalantizs & Cope’s (2012) ‘new learning’ model. Multiliteracies is generally presented as “an agenda for the future of education, requiring the creation of educational processes and systems that are in many respects very different from those of the recent past” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012: 28). The rise of the information economy and the growth of the information and communication technologies undergirding its construction are key societal challenges sustaining the specific argument for pedagogical transformation of the literacy curriculum. This new pedagogy is envisioned with the aim of adequately preparing future citizens for the new literacies emerging from the new social reality. The Internet is a case in point. For employees and the general public alike, it has become an indisputable space for enacting fundamental new ways of constructing knowledge in the information society (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Leu et al. 2016). Leu et al. (2013: 1158) envision the Internet as “this generation’s defining technology for literacy and learning within our global community”, indeed developing as part and parcel of the lives of children around the whole world (Baron, 2015). This is clearly evidenced in the results reported by the Global Kids Online project (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gko/synthesis-report/), conducted by The Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with the support of the European Commission's Better Internet for Kids program and UNICEF. The report of the pilot study (carried out and trialed with children aged from 9 to 17 years old in Argentina, Serbia, the Philippines and South Africa) states that online literacies “can have important implications for children's lives”, since children make up “an estimated one third of Internet users worldwide” (Byrne, Kardefelt-Winther, Livingstone & Stoilova, 2016: 4). More recently, the 2017 inquiry report reveals that, for instance, in Brazil “approximately eight out of ten children (85%) aged 9 to 17 years are internet users, which corresponds to 24.7 million users across the country” (http://globalkidsonline.net/brazilian-findings-2017/, last access: 3rd December, 2019). Online reading to construct and share knowledge is a clear example of a new literacy practice established by the Internet (Leu et al., 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015; Leu & Maykel, 2016). Again, the results of the Global Kids Online study have consistently shown that the experience of being positively engaged online is part of the learning practice of the children studied, one of the main revelations being that “most children who use the internet say that they learn something new online at least every week and that children are gaining information from internet access” (Byrne et al. 2016: 6). As the latest report confirms, like adults, children are taking advantage of the internet to enjoy their right to information. Between one fifth and two fifths of children can be considered ‘information-seekers’, in that they carry out multiple forms of information searches online each week – to learn something new, to find out about work or study opportunities, to look for news, to source health information or to find events in their neighborhood (UNICEF Office of Research, 2019: 21). However, reading online is not an easy practice for young users. Research has also shown that, despite their expertise in the use of Internet for social interaction or gaming, young users reveal difficulties in using the information that they find online to learn (Leu et al., 2014). This idea finds support in the fact that “younger users lack the digital skills of their older peers, especially when it comes to children's self-reported ability to check whether or not the information they find online is true” (Byrne et al. 2016: 6) as well in recent research that shows the difficulty in planning and enacting the search for information as well as in analyzing the collected information (Danby & Davidson, 2019). Leu and colleagues tentatively attribute children’s difficulties to the lack of the specific skills and strategies required by online inquiry reading. While acknowledging that the definition of reading online to learn is an open area for research and discussion, they assume that “the nature of reading … is being transformed by the Internet” (2013: 1174). Indeed, the Internet is characterized by a new “epistemology of shared knowledge and expertise” (Mills, 2016: 34) made possible by the convergent, multimedia and hyperlinked affordances of digital technology. Though building upon print-based reading skills, it further requires specific reading skills, strategies and dispositions “to make full use of the Internet” (Leu et al., 2013; 2016). Besides, research coming from neurocognitive science has been underlining the potential effect of online reading upon attention. Attention is the first essential component in deep reading-to-learn processes (Wolf, 2016), but it is also “the most transparent, medium-influenced change seen in young and old alike” (Wolf, 2016:145). Children’s natural difficulty in focusing attention when faced with the myriad of stimuli offered by digital contexts (Klingberg, 2009) results in the configuration of fast, erratic and shallow reading (Wolf, 2006). Bearing in mind the unique nature of online inquiry reading, its role in “learning and education as students advance through our educational systems” (Leu & Maykel, 2016: 214) and the difficulties shown by online readers, there has been a call for a new, specific online reading pedagogy (Mills, 2010; Kervin, Mantei & Leu, 2018). Leu et al. call for a repositioning of online reading to a central position in policy and literacy education (Kervin, Mantei & Leu, 2018; Leu et al., 2011), maintaining that “teachers will be challenged to thoughtfully guide students’ learning within information environments that are richer and more complex than traditional print media, presenting richer and more complex learning opportunities” (2013: 1163). In effect, Leu and collaborators envision the need for a “new teacher’s role as orchestrators of learning contexts rather than dispensers of literacy skills” (ibid.), assuming that misalignments of practice and pedagogy will likely happen should educational systems not keep up with changes in practice. They see this as an area for further study, formulating the following research question: “How might we best support the developments of these aspects (of the new literacies) within both real and virtual learning contexts?” (Leu et al., 2013: 1170), an idea that resounds to Kroustallaki et al.’s (2015) recommendation to develop specific online tools that offer young users’ search spaces that might scaffold them in the necessary learning. Online learning platforms come up as relevant spaces for enacting a new reading pedagpgy. By making use of the affordances provided by an internetmediated environment, such platforms offer newly designed practices that widen “possibilities of access and participation, expanding the range of potential instructors and learners, as well as the range of semiotic resources available for designing learning environments” (Bezemer & Kress, 2016: 120), thus potentially allowing for the development of focused online reading and learning. In another field of study, Wolf (2016) also calls for the education of a focused and patient online-reader’s mind as a way to avoid “the deterioration and demise of thoughtful, deep reading” (Wolf, 2016: 154), quoting emergent research that shows how proper training and good learning can overcome the negative effects of the propensity for attention to be distracted among the multi-stimuli and multitasking involved in online reading (Jimura, Cazalis, Stover & Poldrack, 2014). I see these demands for a new online reading pedagogy as a clear instance of the general call from multiliteracies for a new literacy pedagogy. Reading, in fact, plays a fundamental role in learning as envisioned in multiliteracies, in which every sensemaking process, as enacted in reading, is a “process of renewal, of personal re-creation or transformation – i.e. a process of learning” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009:175). And I consider that the pedagogy set forth by multiliteracies establishes a very suitable theoretical framework in which to discuss the required theoretical approach to online reading to learn. With this paper I thus aim to contribute to such a discussion by studying how the reading practice designed for young users by an online learning platform acknowledged for its learning aims – TED-Ed – is in line with a multiliteracies online reading pedagogy. I begin by presenting the key concepts and learning processes of a multiliteracies approach to online reading to learn. I then focus attention on a lesson offered by TED-Ed as an empirical basis for researching the practicability of this approach. I present the study of an original lesson (available on the platform), which provides an immersive context for online reading to construct and share knowledge. Analysis of this lesson reveals two major potentials that arise from applying a multiliteracies pedagogy, namely its generic organization and the experience it provides of multimodal, hyperlinked and purposeful online reading. At the same time, the analysis unveils restricted dimensions in the enactment of the theory, namely, the partiality of the meaning-making paths designed to scaffold students’ learning, the absolute invisibility of semiotic resources used for making meaning, the adoption of an uncritical attitude toward meaning making and the final rhetorical application of the knowledge constructed through reading. I conclude the article by identifying and discussing the most significant implications and conclusions drawn from the empirical analysis concerning enactment of an online reading-to-learn pedagogy. Online reading-to-learn pedagogy The concept of a distinct reading-to-learn pedagogy for web-mediated learning, which I present in this section, builds on the understanding established by multiliteracies of the what and the how of literacy pedagogy while crucially incorporating key dimensions arising from specific theories of online reading. The ‘what’ of an online reading-to-learn pedagogy Learning to read has always been a fundamental dimension of the literacy curriculum, and this tradition continues to be relevant when it comes to defining the specific contents associated with online inquiry reading. Low-level cognitive processes (such as word recognition and syntactic parsing), deep reading processes (such as imagery, perspectivetaking, background knowledge, analogy, inference, critical analysis, insight and novel thought [Wolf, 2016]), and metacognitive processes (such as monitoring and solving reading problems [Irwin, 2007]) are fundamental reading processes and have been integrated into the learning content of offline reading pedagogies. Essentially, the first group of skills leads readers to literal meaning-making; the second takes them beyond words and text structures and into personal, emotional and thoughtful meanings, which are also potentially new; and the last group of skills assures readers’ strategic control in meaning-making. Online inquiry reading generally builds upon such skills, at the same time expanding or renewing the set of competences and strategies expected from an expert online inquiry reader (Mills, 2010; Rowsell et al., 2013; Leu et al., 2013; Walsh, 2006, 2008). Online literacy practices involve the emergence of new or renewed text genres, such as posts, blogs, wikis, relay writing, fan fiction, videos, instant messaging, among many others, each differently situated in new social practice, with specific aims and showing specific organization patterns (Mills, 2010, 2016). Such text types inevitably form the reading content of any online reading pedagogy. Yet coherent meaning-making using such Internet-mediated texts involves much more than dealing with genre structures and written words alone. In effect, the affordances of digital media have significantly enhanced or transformed certain features of texts that are read online (when compared to print-based texts). Acknowledging this is essential to identify further learning content within an online reading pedagogy. Multimodality is one of such enhanced textual features, in fact assumed as one of the key meaning-making features in the design of digital texts (Jewitt, 2005, 2008; Kress, 2010; Rowsell et al., 2013; Serafini, 2014; Walsh, 2006, 2008). Modes comprise material resources for meaning-making that are “socially shaped and culturally given” (Kress, 2010: 79). In digital communication contexts, not only are the written and oral modes of verbal language used to build up representations and communicate meanings, but also static and moving images, color, sound, music and layout are employed intentionally. Digital texts have been described as multimodal ensembles (Kress, 2010), designed in accordance with the specialized potentials of different meaning-making modes, in which these various modes converge into a complex, coherent semiotic unit. This means that beyond merely using the written code, new meaning-making skills are required to make meaning of online texts. This semiotic understanding of meaning-making (Kress, 2010) is key to defining the what of a multiliteracies pedagogy, according to which multimodal resources are adopted as learning content (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Multiliteracies contends that people are expected to learn the “patterns and conventions of representation” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009: 175) and how to relate “meaning form to meaning function” (p. 177) as found in multimodal texts. I thus consider multimodal codes to be an essential element of content in a multiliteracies approach to online inquiry reading if they are to be proficiently ‘orchestrated’ by readers (Kress, 2010: 157). Another significant particularity of multimodal, online texts lies in their interconnectedness. Hyperlinks make online texts potentially unbounded (Lemke, 2002). shots from these scenes in the presentation of the analysis below. In addition, I performed a content analysis of the lesson as a whole and the prompts for student meaning-making within the texts. This specific analysis was undergirded by the key principles of the online inquiry reading pedagogy presented above, that is to say, I have looked into multimodality (in which case I applied the same codes described above), reading strategies and meaning making processes involved, coding meaning units accordingly. I assumed that this analytical procedure would give me strong evidence as to whether students’ knowledge construction was, in fact, “different from everyday, casual or incidental learning in the lifeworld” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012: 261). In fact, it allowed me to ascertain to what extent the lesson was in keeping with the multiliteracies approach to online inquiry reading. Findings On the whole, the main results of applying these tools of inquiry show that in the lesson analyzed there are instances of clear alignment with the multiliteracies approach to online inquiry reading but that there are also many instances of clear detachment from the presented theory. The lesson One of the most interesting aspects of the online reading pedagogy enacted in this lesson concerns its generic organization, which seems to exemplify Kalantzis and Cope’s (2012) ‘narrative’ learning path of ‘orientation – journey – destination’. The lesson-as-a-genre follows the five-section pattern followed by every TED-Ed lesson (cf. Fig. 1). It is introduced by Let's Begin ..., a paragraph which directly focuses on the topic to be addressed in the subsequent video and poses a concrete question. This clearly serves as the ‘orientation’ for the learning journey. The next moment available is the Watch section, which offers an animated video with the option of subtitles in different languages. This is, in turn, followed by the Think part of the lesson, which includes a set of reading tasks focusing on the meanings represented in the video. Next, there is Dig Deeper, offering a hyperlinked text which, as stated in the heading Additional Resources for you to explore, provides students with further relevant information on the topic. Watch, Think and Dig Deeper can be viewed as ‘the journey’. Finally, students are given the chance to enter a forum dealing with the issue under study in the Discuss section, which effectively acts as the learning ‘destination’. As such, the structure of this lesson unfolds as a very interesting designed learning environment, offering learners a simulation of the inquiry reading that they frequently perform on the Internet. Fig. 1: The lesson’s generic organization. “Let’s begin”: setting out an inquiry reading experience This section is comprised of the following paragraph: About 60 million people around the globe have been forced to leave their homes to escape war, violence and persecution. The majority have become Internally Displaced Persons, meaning they fled their homes but are still in their own countries. Others, referred to as refugees, sought shelter outside their own country. But what does that term really mean? Benedetta Berti and Evelien Borgman explain. (italics added) The question that we come across in this section further justifies characterizing this lesson as an example of inquiry reading practice (Leu et al., 2013) since it specifically identifies a term as the conceptualizing target of the envisioned learning. The paragraph guides readers into a purposeful experience of online reading so that they can construct knowledge necessary to answer that question. The reading practice thus involves a key component of online reading pedagogy, namely self-determination and clear reading purposes (Leu et al, 2013; Coiro, 2011). This paragraph remains visible throughout the lesson as a heading frame, conveying the idea that each moment in the lesson sets out a path designed to lead users to the construction of relevant knowledge in order to answer the query. Watch Watch is particularly relevant for characterizing the reading pedagogy enacted in this lesson. The video that we find there is representative of the new multimodal texts that are often used in online reading practice and it is announced as a source of information to answer the leading question introduced before. The video is a complex semiotic ensemble, indeed exemplary of the instantiation and complementary functions (that is, meanings) of the different semiotic resources (modes) used to design it as an orchestrated whole (Kress, 2010). The video has two major layers of meaning, namely a sequence of animated images (and sounds) and a verbal text. The verbal text is an expository genre (Martin & Rose, 2015), presenting information that is organized into the following parts: historic definition of the concept ‘refugees’ (vs. ‘migrants’); reasons and data (e.g. the number of refugee children); travel and reception conditions and social integration difficulties. This text predominantly conveys factual meanings strongly attached to an impersonal, authoritative voice (Halliday, 1994), thus calling for the construction of an objective meaning of what it means to be a refugee through the activation of low-level meaning-making processes: The world has known refugees for millennia (…) Today roughly half the world’s refugees are children, some of them unaccompanied by an adult, a situation that makes them especially vulnerable to child labor or sexual exploitation. (…) Most refugee journeys are long and perilous. At a certain point in the definition of refugee, one also hears the following: “but international law, rightly or wrongly, only recognizes those fleeing conflict and violence as refugees”. This opens the door to dispute the stated facts as well as challenge the understanding that what is presented in the video is probably just one among several alternative views. Moreover, at the very end of the video a personal historical perspective on the issue is introduced with the statement: “If you go back in your own family history, chances are you will discover that at a certain point, your ancestors were forced from their home, either escaping a war or fleeing discrimination and persecution”, with a final emphatic call being made towards refugees: “It would be good of us to remember their stories when we hear about refugees”. These parts demand the construction of intersubjective meaning through the explicit activation of personal background knowledge, thus hinting at reflexive meaning-making. The verbal text could exist by itself, but the animated and aural parts interweave with it in significant ways. The animated images represent a narrative organized into segments of events unfolding in time and in space with a traceable chain of reasons and consequences of characters’ actions (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). It shows the nonhappy-ending story of refugee journeys. It also makes visual use of key written words, such as refugee, displaced and asylum, which would help anchor the meaning if this were a silent film, though the support of the verbal message in fact also makes the story clearer. In addition, shapes, colors and sounds are very significant meaningful units (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006), fitting together to create a set of powerful situated meanings. For instance, throughout the animation there is a play of colors (ash-gray, sandy-yellow, dull bronze and black) and sounds (including gun shots, crackling fire and vultures’ screams). Figure 2 is a frame in which black vultures are seen and heard on a greyish horizon, the symbolic value of which is especially significant in a context in which difficult journeys are being verbally referred to. Fig. 2: Black vultures on the greyish horizon Figure 3 is a sequence of three frames which depict how a protection fortress becomes a compacted space of fragile tents (and on a highly significant dark chromatic horizon), this visual meaning complementing the verbal information that is heard referring to the difficulties encountered when arriving at the place of refuge. Fig. 3: How the dream for protection becomes a helpless amount of fragile tents Figure 4 shows the zigzag procedures for granting asylum. Fig. 4: Erratic procedures when looking for asylum Other codes and meanings are orchestrated in the animated images, such as the slow but regular cadence of the music, clearly constructing the meaning of the functioning of a machine, and thus contributing to the meaning of dehumanization in the story being shown. A very important element in these animated images is the gaze, proximity and angle between participants, which together create significant meanings regarding the relationship between the viewer and characters. The images shift from a close-up of legs walking, to a view of people’s hands and then their profiles and eye expressions, which are fixed and unsmiling. This positions the viewer as a witness to the refugees’ dramas. But the final set of images depict a series of faces staring forward searching for eye contact with us, the viewer, thus changing our positioning: we are no longer witnesses but rather directly called to become involved with what we are witnessing (Figure 5; cf. also Figs. 3 and 4). Fig. 5: From witness to participants in the refugees’ dramas. As a narrative, these animated moving images call for empathy through the activation of deep meaning-making processes such as perspective or imagery, that is to say, they call for the construction of a fully-fledged subjective meaning of what it means to be a refugee. This video illustrates the deployment of “a variety of knowledge media, representing knowledge in many ways” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012: 274). As a semiotic ensemble, the video enacts a complex pragmatic action upon the reader, offering the negotiation of a rich set of meanings (factual, controversial, experiential, emotional), which are potentially crucial to finally reaching a well-developed answer to the question leading this lesson. Since it sustains the meaning-making experience of learning (the known and the new), the video plays a very significant role in establishing the setting for some rich reading practice. Nevertheless, further analysis shows how the potential of this readingto-learn experience is, in fact, explored pedagogically only to a limited degree. Think The Think section provides a set of eight meaning-making tasks related to the video. Content analysis revealed that, in most cases, the tasks exclusively target the verbal message but only to limited extent, because learners are not guided towards all the potentially significant meanings represented in the video. Against expectations, only the verbal, objective and authoritative meanings are valued for students’ work. There is no space for subjective or reflexive meanings, no deep reasoning or questioning, as can be seen in the following questions, in which the meaning is explicitly stated in the verbal text: (2) What is the difference between refugees and internally displaced persons? (3) According to the international legal definition, a refugee is someone who ___ (4) An asylum seeker is ___; (5) Host countries have several obligations towards refugees, such as ___ . Question 1 (“Worldwide, approximately how many people have been forced to leave their homes to escape violence and war?”) is, in fact, answered in the Let’s Begin paragraph; questions 6 (“Can you explain the differences between, and common traits of, refugees and migrants?”) and 7 (“Think about a family forced to leave their country to flee war. Explain the main obstacles and challenges they may face along the way”) differ minimally from this pattern, since they can be answered by reorganizing information explicitly found in the verbal text. Question 8 (“What can ordinary people do to help families and individuals who have become refugees?”) has no answer in the video, though one can be found in the Dig Deeper section. Overall, Think offers a very restricted simulation of what reading to learn really requires from readers, thus constituting only a limited instantiation of the expected pedagogy. The multimodal complexity inherent in the symbolic visual narrative is devalued as a source of information, and deep reading processes of imagery, perspective-taking, background knowledge, analogy, inference, critical analysis, all of which are essential for meaning negotiation and reflexivity, are not on the pedagogical radar. There is a conspicuous gap between the video that is offered for meaning-making, and the meanings that are favored. The result is a very restricted meaning-making experience, involving a set of meanings that I consider too limited to enable students to construct transformative knowledge. As will become clear, this restriction conditions the meaning-making and learning aimed at in the following sections. There is, moreover, no ‘conceptualizing’ regarding the complex reading process in which learners are involved as for instance evident in the fact that no semiotic resource is made visible to the meaning maker (either by conceptualizing or analyzing functionally). Dig Deeper Since there has been no attempt to conceptualize reading, Dig Deeper cannot be expected to provide an adequate way of analyzing the reading process in the ‘learning narrative’ conceived by Kalantzis & Cope (2012). It does, nevertheless, offer a potential moment to analyze the concept of refugee previously constructed, one that is built upon another reading experience. Yet again the learning design is somewhat deceptive. Dig Deeper comprises a hyperlinked text in two parts. One consists of a set of four paragraphs offering links to different texts/genres, including reports, stories and an interview, in which authoritative as well as subjective voices talk about refugees. The second part is made up of four more paragraphs wherein a direct, impersonal voice speaks with an assertive tone: “It is important to realize… at the same time we should keep in mind”, herself offering opinions and perspectives, which readers are asked to assume as their own. There is also a link to a personal essay in which someone offers suggestions of ways to help refugees. In this section, there are no explicitly designed learning tasks besides the instruction to follow links in order “to learn more…”; “to further investigate”… (in the first part) and “here you can find a few ways in which you can help and empower…” (in the second part), thus directing the reader to an autonomous construction of further learning. Just as in the previous section, the reading experience in this section involves multimodal texts. Yet, the focus of the instructions for readers once again falls on the verbal text, which reinforces the tendency found apropos the Think section. Furthermore, although multiple information is offered with the potential to strengthen and broaden the learner’s (still weak) understanding of refugee and draw social implications, no scaffold is offered to help them analyze or think critically about the authoritative and controversial information being offered and by so doing make potentially insightful meanings. In fact, no pedagogical bridge is established between the two reading experiences (the video and the hyperlinked text) and their respective meanings, which condition the learner’s capacity to converge and reconcile both sources of information. Yet again, no attempt is made to ‘conceptualize’ or make the complex reading process visible to the meaning maker. Therefore, Dig Deeper reinforces the above finding that enactment of reading pedagogy is very restricted. Discuss Discuss provides an opportunity to apply what has been learned in the form of personal views and communication with others (Leu et al., 2013). It comes in the form of writing, a coda that involves fully enacting what has been read previously with the potential to become a space for personal insight, and thus for transformative learning. I believe that this is, indeed, the aim behind this section of the lesson. The coda reads as follows: Refugees have the right to be protected in their host countries. 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