In Dialogue: Mapping Our Truths—Envisioning the Future of Multimodal Research for Racial Justice (original) (raw)
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Framing Equitable Classroom Practices: Potentials of Critical Multimodal Literacy Research
Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 2019
This article presents an illustrative case study to explore the classroom potentials of critical multimodal literacy. We feature Marcela’s multimodal response to demonstrate how she engaged with visual and textual tools for learning. Illustrative cases are especially useful to explore a particular issue and often involve in-depth analysis of qualitative data that represents theoretical constructs or significant findings. Critical multimodal literacy is a framework that we developed from a synthesis of the research literature to describe the ways that children use tools (e.g., sketches, videos) for personal meaning-making, critique, and agentive learning in classrooms. Findings from the critical analysis of a young Latina fourth-grader’s multimodal production illuminate our framework, which consists of the following four components: communicate and learn with multimodal tools; restory, represent, and redesign; acknowledge and shift power relationships; and leverage multimodal resourc...
Designing multimodal classrooms for social justice
This paper explores the ways in which multimodal classroom discourse could inform a social justice agenda through broadening the base for representation in the classroom. It identifies some of the challenges and opportunities of designing multimodal classrooms in diverse and developing contexts, where there are vast differentials in terms of access to resources. It focuses on the ways in which multimodal classrooms could recognise a range of student resources, whilst at the same time enabling access to dominant forms. This includes access to the discourses and knowledges of official curricula and formal methods of assessment, as well as the creation of dispositions towards meaning-making outside of the classroom. Formal education often closes down access to a range of semiotic resources and multimodal classrooms can potentially recover recognition’ of these. This paper explores ways of designing multimodal classrooms for social justice in order to bring to the surface the range of students’ resources which are often not noticed or valued in formal educational settings. It proposes the following: the questioning of boundaries between domains, harnessing students’ representational resources, developing metalanguages for reflection and creating less regulated classroom spaces.
2021
Purpose-Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in US schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and physical traumas. Despite relentless attacks of anti-Blackness, Black youth fight valiantly through a range of creative outlets, including multimodal compositions, that enable them to move beyond negative stereotypes, maintain their creativity, and manifest the present and future lives they desire and so deeply deserve. Design/methodology/approach-This study aims to answer the question "How do Black students' multimodal renderings demonstrate creativity and love in ways that disrupt anti-Blackness?" The authors critically examine four multimodal compositions created by Black elementary and middle school students to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures. The authors take up Black Livingness as a theoretical framework and use visual methodologies to analyze themes of Black life, love and hope in the young people's multimodal renderings. Findings-The findings suggest that Black youth creatively compose multimodal renderings that are humanizing, allowing their thoughts, feelings and experiences to guide their critiques of the present world and envision new personal and societal futures. The authors conclude with a theorization of a Black Livingness Pedagogy that centers care for Black youth. Originality/value-Recognizing that "the creation and use of images [is] a practice of decolonizing methodology" (Brown, 2013, loc. 2323), the authors examine Black student-created multimodal compositional practices to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures.
Transforming School Hallways Through Critical Inquiry: Multimodal Literacies for Civic Engagement
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2019
Youth researchers used photography, collage, and videography to transform their school hallways into a space for critical conversations about race and gender. Y oung people use multimodal resources such as video-and photo-editing tools and social media (e.g., Twitter, Instagram) in myriad ways to participate in civic life (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2017). Given the ubiquity of digital tools for composing and circulating multimodal narratives, youths actively take up these resources to resist dehumanizing narratives and push the boundaries of civic engagement, online and offline. The curriculum that we describe in this article exemplifies our belief that young people are culturally and intellectually engaged global citizens, or cosmopolitan intellectuals (DeJaynes & Curmi, 2015), who ask critical questions about the social worlds they traverse in the increasingly interconnected and mediated spaces of their lives. In this article, we-a university-based researcher (Tiffany) and a classroom teacher (Chris)-examine the research and activism of 10th graders (ages 15-16) involved in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project. The youth researchers focused on the "lack of options for relatable characters for women of color" (classroom artifact, June 2017) in popular media and provoked critical conversations about race and gender in their school community. In a final hallway collage of words, photos, and a link to a film, the youth researchers juxtaposed media tropes with the multiple identities and experiences of young women of color in their school to visually narrate and celebrate their lived realities as scholars, media makers, and civic actors for an audience of peers, teachers, and school leaders.
English in Education, 2010
Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms is shaped by Pippa Stein's many years of experience as a teacher in South African schools from the latter days of apartheid to the present. She experienced during that period a conflict between children's everyday creativity and capacity for meaning-making and the 'limits, denials and silences' imposed by schools on these capacities. She argues that teaching and learning can acknowledge children's need to access dominant discourses while recognising the rich resources they bring to their learning. Her book is thus relevant to all classrooms containing social and cultural difference-in other words, to all classrooms. Stein writes firstly of her work with children and teachers in Soweto schools in the 1980s. The apartheid army was patrolling the streets in armoured vehicles while, in the schools, children were learning English by textbook drill and reading texts about African children living in remote rural villages. Stein and a colleague constituted their classes as 'unpoliced zones' where children could explore and represent their worlds in uncensored ways. At the time, Stein believed that the children should use the common language of English, but, as talking was potentially dangerous, there were many instances where the children wanted to tell their stories through dance, music and performance. Thus began Stein's interest in the possibilities of multimodal discourses and modes of representation. Her book attempts to answer two questions. Firstly, how do children draw on multi-semiotic, multimodal resources in their meaning-making? And, secondly, what kinds of pedagogy support learning in contexts of diversity? She suggests that the second question can be addressed by answering the first.
Circles de confianza: using multimodal testimonios to build culturally sustaining schools
Ethnography and Education , 2023
The intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health crises, and structural racism has deepened sources of distrust, presenting an urgent need and opportunity to reconfigure schools in ways that cultivate trust and belonging for all students, especially students of colour. Our research engages participatory design to develop practices that support students' wellbeing and create structures for change within the school. Students use photography and testimonio-counter narrative storytelling-to articulate a vision of schools de confianza and the actions requisite to enact that vision. We investigate how multimodal testimonio can be a practice to identify and heal distrust and ignite imagination, cultivate authentic individual and institutional care, and support students' wellbeing. The findings illustrate how multimodal testimonio supports schools to enact culturally sustaining pedagogies by centreing students' experiences, cultures, and hopes.
Seeing how it works : a visual essay about critical and transformative research in education
Perspectives in Education, 2015
As visual researchers in the field of education we have initiated and completed numerous participatory projects using qualitative visual methods such as drawing, collage, photovoice, and participatory video, along with organising screenings and creating exhibitions, action briefs, and policy posters. Locating this work within a critical paradigm, we have used these methods with participants to explore issues relating to HIV and AIDS and to gender-based violence in rural contexts. With technology, social media, and digital communication network connections becoming more accessible, the possibilities of using visual participatory methods in educational research have been extended. However, the value of visual participatory research in contributing to social change is often unrecognised. While the power of numbers and words in persuasive and informative change is well accepted within the community of educational researchers, the power of the visual itself is often overlooked. In this v...
The use of photographs in ethnographic education research promises new insights and challenges to researchers who wish to do good, by doing science and working for justice in the communities under examination. The use of photo-elicitation is discussed as a method that can help alleviate what Foucault described as the analytical "gaze," allowing for discussions of difficult or taboo subjects like race, sex, gender, and dis/ability. The history, uses, and techniques, are examined for different photo methods including photo-elicitation interviews and photovoice. This chapter also contributes practical suggestions for using photos in ethnographic research and illuminates new research in the field. Using photos in the reviewed studies achieved positive results for participants and revealed new understandings of communities, culture, and individuals.