Incorporating digital multimodal composing through collaborative action research: challenges and coping strategies

Despite the increasing evidence illustrating the benefits teachers can reap from incorporating digital multimodal composing (DMC) into classrooms through collaborative action research (CAR), scant attention has been given to how teachers collaborate with each other, what challenges they may encounter and how they cope with such challenges in CAR. This study examines four English teachers’ experiences of incorporating DMC in a university-based English curriculum in China. The findings demonstrate that the teachers experienced difficulties in relation to establishing relevance, being digital novices, catering for students’ diversified composing needs, and an institutional failure to recognise the increased workload. In response to the challenges, the teachers adopted five major coping strategies during CAR, which afforded an agentive space for the teachers to engage with DMC. The study has implications for how the pedagogic use of technology-mediated literacy practices such as DMC can be better supported in mainstream curricula.