Curating Selves: A Multimodal, Cosmopolitan Inquiry Into Identity and Belonging

• In Event: Harnessing Agency: Children and Youth Translanguaging and Playing With Multimodal Literacies

Abstract

Youth-produced multimodal texts can serve as a kind of social glue, an invitation for youth to make visible a range of local and global affiliations, creating a sense of belonging and deeper knowing in increasingly diverse learning contexts. In this paper, I take up the lenses of multimodality, multiliteracies, and educational cosmopolitanism for interrogating into the sense of belonging that can emerge from a lived “cosmopolitan artfulness” (Hansen, 2010) in classrooms and communities.

The paper draws upon a year-long practitioner inquiry with adolescents who conducted auto-ethnographies as part of a research course in their urban public high school. Through qualitative data collection, youth researched their own lives, cultures, and beliefs with the end goal of producing multimodal films that represented their embodied senses of “Where I’m From”, broadly defined. As youth collected and interpreted culturally and personally meaningful artifacts, stories, memories, and family discourses, they developed, however tenuous, a “receptivity to the new and loyalty to the known,” habits of mind and heart that Hansen (2010) argues are important for nurturing reflective citizens of the world.

In the process of video production or self-curation (Potter, 2010), youth palpably negotiated and represented complex, often transnational identities through the sophisticated use of a range of linguistic resources and representational modes (Jewitt, 2008; Hull & Nelson, 2005). To illustrate the powerful work of the multimodal in making visible the youths’ embodied engagements with knowing and memory, I analyze one youth’s “Where I’m From” film and her peers’ responses to screening it as means of unpacking the lived experience of multimodal self-representation and cosmopolitan understandings of belonging.

Hull and colleagues (2010) argue that multimodal texts, because of their evocative properties, can serve as communicative triggers for increased intercultural understanding. I extend this message, finding that, in interrogating their own experiences and sharing them with others through film, youth “glimpsed” belonging, connecting with diverse peers in deeper and more profound ways than usually available to them in the context of schooling (Papastergiadis, 2007).

This work illustrates the ways in which youth are knowledgeable and artful cultural producers whose embodied experiences make powerful curriculum. It also demonstrates how multimodal video production affords unique opportunities for youth to learn from and welcome one another, to foster human solidarity.

Author

• Tiffany A. DeJaynes, Lehman College