54 Journal of Pedagogic Development Volume 6, Issue 1 Lo‐tech Tools as Episteme: Rethinking Student Engagement in the Writing Process and Beyond 1 Bryna Siegel Finer, Lynn Shelly, Oriana Gatta & Rachael Warmington, English Department, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Maha Alawdat, Israeli Ministry of Education Contact: brynasf@iup.edu Abstract: In this paper, five teacher‐scholars describe pedagogical inquiry into the use of ‘lo‐tech’ tools and what we discovered about the affordances of these tools. These include but are not limited to technologies like sticky notes that help students to organize written thoughts and physically move them around, crayons that allow students to highlight, trace, and categorize different types of thoughts on their paper, and index cards that they can use in a variety of interactive ways for their own writing and to write collaboratively. We found that the use of lo‐tech tools complemented our work with digital technology, engaging the kinesthetic learners in our classrooms and encouraging a spirit of play in students and teachers alike. We also discuss how teachers can encourage the use of lo‐tech tools epistemologically to help students process information, create knowledge, and to come to their own understandings or demonstrate understandings of course content ‐ with no product in mind other than knowledge‐making. Keywords: student engagement, writing process, materiality, affordances, pedagogy, composition, lo‐ tech, meaning making, play. Rethinking Student Engagement and Lo‐Tech Tools In recent scholarship on literacy and higher education, especially in the teaching of writing, articles about multimodal composition and the pedagogies that go along with student production of multimodal texts abound. This interest in multimodal composing, combined with increased opportunities for digital composing, has resulted in a ‘narrow definition of technology’ (Shipka, 2011, p. 20). By confining 1 The authors would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewer for their productive feedback, as well as the Reflective Practice Project of the IUP Center for Teaching Excellence for a grant that supported this project. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by University of Bedfordshire Repository