Multimodal (Re)Designing as a Pedagogy About, Through, and Beyond Fukushima

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogy of Disaster: Teaching About, Through, and Beyond Fukushima

Abstract

This paper proposes multimodal (re-)designing activities as multiliteracies pedagogy (New London Group, 1996) which may create a dialogic space within a foreign language classroom for learners to negotiate competing discourses around a social issue - the role of nuclear energy in post-Fukushima Japan in this case.
The Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011 changed the ways many Japanese people think. Especially people started rethinking the roles of the nuclear energy, because of the damage at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima and the subsequent radiation. This rethinking, however, is under the influence of the authoritative discourses that are naturalized and disseminated by media and schools. Although the learners of Japanese language in the U.S. are also interested in such social issues because of their affinity with Japan, the discourses that circulate in the U.S. may be different from the Japanese mainstream media discourse on Fukushima. How do they make sense of such differences and negotiate their subject positions?
This paper is a case study of a first year college student, a learner of Japanese, who negotiated differences in discourses around the nuclear energy, and produced a digital narrative that spoke back to the dominant discourses in Japan. The student chose to study young Japanese people’s views of nuclear energy for the research project in her intermediate Japanese course taught by the researcher. When she interviewed young Japanese people, her original belief that Japan should stop relying on nuclear energy, backed by the academic discourses on critical social movement and her experience of visiting Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with her pacifist host family, was met with the opposing views of the young Japanese people who voiced the official discourse of the necessity of nuclear energy despite its danger, at the same time denying the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. In order to communicate the results of her research project, she created a digital narrative in Japanese language that spoke back to young Japanese people like her interviewees, weaving their voices and making her arguments multimodally.
Drawing on the pedagogy of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) and Bakhtinian dialogic theory of language as historically situated utterance (Bakhtin, 1981; 1986; Bazerman, 2004), this study analyzes her multimodal design choices (Kress, 2010) in the digital narrative and a post-production interview with her, and answers the following questions. 1) How did the learner of Japanese make sense of the competing discourses around Fukushima? 2) What voices were appropriated to compose her position in her digital narratives, in dialogue with her cultural informants’ voices?
The findings show the multiplicity of voices that she appropriated, the openings that she found where she could compose her argument, while addressing the young Japanese people. This paper contributes to the field of multimodal literacies (Lotherington & Jenson, 2011) and foreign language pedagogy (Kramsch, 2009), with its transformative possibilities of (re-)designing activities to make sense of competing discourses about social issues in the target society and speak back to dominant discourses.

Author

• Keiko Konoeda, University of Massachusetts - Amherst