As teacher education increasingly unfolds within globally networked digital spaces, preservice teachers must learn to navigate how texts, identities, and cultures circulate across borders. BookTok, a transnational TikTok community centered on literature, offers a powerful site for examining global literacies and digital identity formation in teacher preparation. Grounded in theories of global literacies and multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis; UNESCO), this course-embedded study examines how a multimodal BookTok assignment functioned as an innovative instructional approach to enhance engagement in literacy learning. The study was situated within a 15-week undergraduate literacy methods course in the United States. While 18 students completed the instructional assignment, five preservice teachers consented to participate in the research component. Over a 15-day period, participants created multimodal BookTok videos, engaged in reflective writing, and completed a mixed-methods survey including Likert-scale items and open-ended reflections. Data sources included survey responses and multimodal digital artifacts, analyzed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Findings indicate increased engagement with diverse, globally situated texts, strengthened confidence in selecting inclusive literature, and heightened awareness of how global digital platforms amplify marginalized voices. Participants also demonstrated growing capacity to design innovative, multimodal literacy experiences that foster cross-cultural empathy and student belonging. This poster presents a transferable pedagogical model for leveraging social media as a site of global literacy learning, offering implications for teacher educators seeking to promote engagement, inclusion, and innovation across international contexts.

Authors:
Rosa Dokes, Lamar University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Rosa Dokes is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at Lamar University. Her interests include digital literacies, diverse texts, and multimodal reading instruction. Her current research explores BookTok as a tool for global storytelling.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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