“Wearing Only Our Skin”: the multimodal literacies classroom as a living arrangement (original) (raw)
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English Education, 2020
This article details a self-study dissecting an interracial group of students' theories of Blackness in a postsecondary classroom. I begin by conceptualizing fugitive literacy practices as tools with which to awaken and animate education as the practice of liberation from whiteness and anti-Blackness. I then approach multimodal essay composition as one such practice and illuminate its application in a classroom. I show how this practice affirmed students as empowered producers of knowledge. I contend that pedagogues must pivot away from the disruption of whiteness and anti-Blackness as a defined target, and turn toward the destruction of both as a desirable goal. I conclude by considering further inquiries that this provocation invites vis-à-vis curriculum and pedagogy in English teacher education.
2020
Tenth-grade students used a contemporary graphic novel and William Shakespeare's Hamlet to create a multimodal composition speaking back to the ways in which power and privilege operate in these texts. " M aybe I do like English class, you know?" This is what one 10th grader, Diana (pseudonym), shared as we-a teacher, a researcher, and a small group of 10th graders-collectively reflected on a year's work with multimodal and multimedia texts taught alongside canonical texts. Diana laughed as she spoke, almost surprised, as she recounted her 10th-grade year in English language arts (ELA). The comics she read and the collaborative work she was a part of made her think about how this year fit into her overall schooling experiences, challenging her previous convictions around not liking or being good at English class. In this article, we document research completed in 10th-grade ELA classes where canonical literature was simultaneously being taught and challenged in the hopes of shifting power from normative canonical voices toward more equitable literacy practices. School policy and expectations required the teaching of ca-nonical literature in this research context. We strove to approach the teaching of required canonical texts in engaging and creative ways while reinforcing margin-alized and seemingly nonacademic texts as spaces to acknowledge, extend, and challenge classroom norms about whose voices matter in text discussions. We came to this research committed to acts of literacy that position students as critical readers, writers, and thinkers valued as both holders and producers of knowledge (Delgado Bernal, 2002). As such, we operated as an ELA teacher and a researcher collaborating in a diverse, high-poverty, urban secondary school who view many forms of literature as powerful, critical spaces to support student investigation and interrogation of the world around them (Luke, 2000). We engaged with canonical texts, such as Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1994), while creating space for students to read them alongside other narratives and forms, including graphic novels. For the purposes of this article, we focus our attention on reading and classwork that paired the graphic novel Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri (2010) with Hamlet. We put these texts in dialogue because of the different ways that they approach power and privilege across media, form, contexts, and communities. By sharing what came out of this dialogue, we highlight ways that teachers can value multiple aspects of learning and engaging with complex texts. Further, we offer perspectives toward not only supporting canonical reading but also challenging it.
Embodied literacies and the art of meaning making
Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2018
We contend that multimodal literary responses offer a space for students to integrate art in the interactive composing process in a way that fosters creativity that normative schooling practices often foreclose. In this qualitative study of three African American fifthgrade students' design processes, we theorize literacy as embodied to analyse the girls' interactions and negotiations as they compose multimodal responses to literature by Jacqueline Woodson. We utilize multimodal and critical discourse analysis to account for the ways interactions and the use of digital tools are negotiated within academic structures embedded with powerful discourses related to race. Findings indicate that discourses related to racial harmony are woven throughout students' multimodal representations, wherein examples focused on inequities are excluded from the final project. We argue that capturing the dynamic ways in which youth engage digital literacies throughout the composing process draws attention to the erasures that occur in the final product. Our findings suggest that researchers and educators simultaneously attend to youth authors' embodied interactions and their multimodal representations to understand the complexity of the composing process in relation to the literary responses.
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.
Multimodal Critical Inquiry Nurturing Decolonial Imaginaries
We approach the invitation of this handbook chapter-to discuss multimodality in reading research-with an acknowledgment that multimodal frameworks have a long history and numerous intellectual lineages that precede their influence in literacy studies. By "put[ting] images, gestures , music, movement, animation, and other representational modes on equal footing with language" (Siegel, 2006, p. 65), multimodal lenses offer an avenue for re-reading "literacy" beyond school-based notions of reading and writing, and underscore how individuals and collect-ivities mobilize literacy practices within and across specific contexts and in relation to power asymmetries. They also invite us to look forward, to consider how phenomena such as trans-national migration, global neoliberal policies, and activist movements of resistance might be aligned with, and inform, the next phase of multimodal literacy research. One of the well-established contributions of multimodality to reading research is a more expansive understanding of what constitutes a text (
At a time when state standards and assessments drive educational policy and literacy is defined as print-based, students who don’t meet external benchmarks for developing skills along what is considered to be a “normal trajectory” are often seen as “at-risk” or diagnosed with learning disabilities. While there may be real variations in the ways that individuals learn, schools have a responsibility to offer a variety of pedagogical approaches in order to meet the needs of all children within an inclusive setting. This practitioner research dissertation seeks to better understand the ways that students identified as having learning disabilities create and communicate using a variety of modes including narrative writing, dance, and digital composition. Using qualitative data collected over the course of a school year while teaching full-time at an urban school with a folk arts focus, the author looks closely at the multimodal writing practices of four Black middle school girls identified as having learning disabilities. Drawing upon a theoretical framework rooted in Disability Studies/ Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) and New Literacy Studies, this study investigates the ways that students use multimodal composition to construct identities as able learners, thereby challenging deficit orientations at the intersection of race, gender and ability. By examining the artifacts that these students created over the course of an academic year as well as their reflections, and by extending a definition of literacy to include multimodal representations of knowledge, the relationships between curriculum and identity are explored. Findings reveal a complex interplay between multimodal composition and collaboration, and suggest that curriculum embedded with multiple modes for representing knowledge can create pathways to culturally relevant and inclusive pedagogy, and contribute to the construction of powerful writing identities.
“They’re Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students’ Critical Engagements with Texts
Reading Research Quarterly , 2024
Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and developmentalist approaches, which privilege oral and written discourse and often position these students as less capable of performing complex literacy practices. Drawing from three independent ethnographic studies, our multimodal interactional analysis examines how students of a range of ages and raciolinguistic backgrounds use embodied actions and other semiotic resources to agentively navigate text, task, and ideological constraints in activities involving reading and analyzing texts. Our analysis demonstrates the crucial role of students' embodied practices in expanding upon and challenging the constraints of literacy activities, focusing particularly on how students leveraged epistemic stance-taking, embodied affective responses, and embodied forms of argumentation to negotiate and co-construct meaning. Through a focus on embodied agency, this paper presents and applies an interactional perspective on the embodied nature of literacy activities; shows how students' creative mobilizations of embodied and other semiotic resources contribute to their critical readings of texts; and offers pedagogical and methodological implications for ways educators and researchers can attend to the intricacies of students' embodied sense-making in literacy activities.
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...
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.