As access to digital technology increases, teachers and students today use a variety of semiotic resources, modalities and different media in school assignments. Also, in the contemporary media landscape the norms for text, writing and communication are changing for example from written, printed text on paper to multimodal, dynamic texts on screens. These processes, where both old and new challenges appear, holds a potential for deeper understandings of communication and literacy. 

My PhD project aims to investigate how students' participation in school assignments in connected classrooms, which involve digital, multimodal text design, can be understood in terms of literacy and what it means from a student perspective. My study has a qualitative, video ethnographical approach, where data consists of video recorded lessons and field notes from Swedish lower secondary classrooms from year 7 to 9. The video data was generated during 2019- 2021 using three cameras to capture face-to-face interactions as well as students´ screen mediated activities. The thesis is in form of a monograph.

The theoretical foundations are social understandings of literacy from the field New Literacy Studies (Barton, 2007) and multimodal social semiotic theory (Kress, 2010). With these perspectives, communication and interaction, as well as identity, are put at the center. The video data are transcribed with methods for detailed, multimodal transcription, and interaction could be analyzed in relation to use of communicative meta-functions from ideational, interpersonal, and textual perspectives (Jewitt, 2008; Kress, 2010). 

In my first sub study I investigate a teaching sequence where a focus student is producing a Power Point and preparing his oral presentation on a piece of favorite music. The sequence captures the process of designing the Power Point as well as the student´s oral presentation. Preliminary results show that students become each other's resources not only in matters of technical issues, but also when it comes to social interactions about choosing images and music and questions related to the assignment. Since the content on the screen is part of the interaction the visuality of the screen becomes a central part of communication and affects both teacher – student interaction and student – student interaction. In the teaching sequence, two tracks are developed, one in relation to other students, and one in relation to the school assignment and the teacher. The study can bring contributions to the field in understanding of how digitalization of teaching enhances and changes teaching and learning processes. Participation in digital multimodal school assignments becomes a network of social interactions and a complex form of literacy(-ies) related to classroom-, subject specific- and social contexts. 

At the round table session, I have a special interest in feedback concerning digital multimodal text design as a subject specific matter or a generic literacy, and feedback on possible further paths to go in my investigations.