Using digital media to interpret poetry: Spiderman meets Walt Whitman

Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with print-based poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master's course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint. Using scholarship in multiliteracies, multimodality, and semiotic design, this paper presents an analysis of one student's interpretation of Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider." Through this case, we explore what happened when digital tools were used to create, express, represent, and interpret poetry. We then discuss one student's poetic representations and learning in relation to several other students in the course to explore implications, considerations, limitations and potential affordances of new literacies for learning.