Multisited Ethnography: English Language Learners in High School Drama Classrooms

• In Event: 33.046 - An Exploration of the Dialogical Possibilities for Drama and Performance for Diverse Learners

Abstract

Language and literacy research and Canadian policy have stressed the urgent need for all teachers, not just ESL teachers, to support English language learners’ (ELLs’) language and literacy learning across disciplines (e.g., Cummins 2001; Ontario Ministry of Education 2007). This presentation introduces a multi-sited ethnography that carefully examines the language and literacy experiences of ELLs in urban high school drama classrooms outlining both the affordances and the challenges of multiple drama pedagogies.
The study took place in three high school drama classrooms. One was a drama classroom designed specifically for adult English language learners completing their Ontario Secondary School Diplomas. The second was a drama classroom in a highly multicultural, multilingual inner city technical school. The third was in a high school programme for ‘at risk’ youth. Connecting ethnography with ‘multimodal research methods’ (Gallagher and Kim 2008; Royce 2007; Street, Pahl and Rowsell 2009), the data for this study comes from individual student interviews, student focus groups, teacher interviews, observation field notes, video recordings, photographs and drama artefacts. I coded and analyzed this multimodal data in the Atlas.ti software programme.
Multimodality is an area that has received considerable attention in the field of literacy education (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2003, New London Group 1996; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). Researchers in education have explored the use of digital technologies as multimodal texts (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Jewitt, 2008; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), picture books as multimodal texts (Early & Yeung, 2009; Evans, 2011); the use of video and films in the classroom as multimodal texts (Ajayi, 2012); and artifacts as multimodal texts (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). The majority of the work on multimodality in language and literacy education focuses on digital technologies and visual aspects of multimodal text creation in language and literacy education, exploring the use of picture books, video, film, computer screens, blogs, computer games, internet and social media. While these works have made significant contributions to the field of language and literacy education in showing that different modes have different affordances, investigations into embodied multimodality remains theoretically and methodologically unexamined.
Embodied multimodality, a term I coined to refer to both my methodological framework and theoretical framework, puts the body at the center of this inquiry and takes into account post-phenomenologist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and intersectionality frameworks to critically examine language and literacy experiences of linguistically diverse students in urban high schools in Toronto.
Attention to the multimodal and the embodied in education, especially in relation to drama education and language and literacy learning, is significant, especially since, as Medina and Campano (2006) write, “in the current educational and political climate, our strongest caveat is that drama itself avoids conforming to dominant understandings of literacy ...” (p.339). The data discussed here illustrate how embodied drama pedagogies generated unique meaning-making and self-expression opportunities by activating significant channels in language and literacy learning not limited to traditional literacy tasks, thereby better reaching students, including those who are often disengaged from the traditional practices of schooling.

Author

• Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou, Brandon University