Multimodal Voicing in Youths’ Video Documentaries on Immigration

• In Event: Identity, Agency, and Voice: Immigrant Resilient Practices Across Diverse Contexts

Abstract

In studies of cultural diversity in literacy education, research has sought to document the cultural and linguistic resources that young people of minority groups derive from their home and community experiences and to develop ways to leverage these resources for school-based learning (Gutiérrez, Morales, Martinez, 2009). In this study, we explore how a multimedia journalism curriculum implemented in a high school with students from immigrant backgrounds could facilitate the movement of representational resources across home, school, and civic spaces. This analysis draws on Bakhtinian theory of voicing and dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981; Wortham, 2001) and multimodal literacy (e.g., Jewitt, 2008) to examine the dialogicality of voices across social, geographical, and institutional spaces in the video documentaries on immigration produced by a group of students. We define voices as socio-ideological points of view of different groups in society (comprising of belief, values, and social experiences) and the linguistic and semiotic expression of the point of view or experience. Specifically, we examine how producing a short-form video documentary on immigration allows the students to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from educational institutions and public discourses on immigration. We examine how the students use the voices (experiences, values, aspirations, and struggles) from their community to inform and challenge public debates on immigration.
Our larger data set includes video recording of the multimedia journalism class over a four-month period; documentation of the in-progress and final videos and artifacts produced by the students; and interviews with the students to reflect on the story they were telling and the representational choices that they made. In this paper we focus on one student group that produced a video profiling the challenges that a Latino adult immigrant in their community experienced in obtaining legalization of residency in the United States. In analyzing the video documentary, we draw from the tools of discourse analysis and multimodal film analysis (Baldry & Thibault, 2006; Wortham, 2001) to examine how the students use language, image, sound, and cinematography to construct multimodal representations of the voices of their profilee and others from their community. In this way, we consider the range of multimodal semiotic resources that the students leverage from their cultural community in the process of video production. Additionally, we examine how the students’ authoring of the documentary involves articulating their point of view and social position by juxtaposing and inflecting the voices of the characters in their video narrative. This kind of “double voicing” (Bakhtin, 1991) occurs through editing of video sound clips; subtitling and translating between Spanish and English; overlay of visual images and text slides with the speech of their characters; among other techniques. This study provides implications for how new forms of media production and literacy can provide opportunities for students to draw from a broad range of social and semiotic resources from their community, as well as take up more agentic positions vis-à-vis their community, educational institutions, and public spheres.

Authors

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University

• Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University