Multimodal Self-Authoring Across Educator and Bi/multilingual Student Learning Spaces

• In Event: The Figured World of Bilingual Education: Proyecto Bilingüe as Context for Teacher Self-Authoring

Abstract

Purpose: Efforts have been made to reimagine educational spaces for bi/multilingual Latina/o and refugee students through professional development (Fránquiz, Salazar, & DeNicolo, 2011; Hones, 2002), and students’ practices in the classroom (Lutrell & Parker, 2001; Oikonomidoy, 2010). This study adds to this literature with a particular interest in the connections between figured worlds of professional development, education, and bi/multilingual students. Figured worlds are a collective social understanding of an imagined space where particular characters, actions and outcomes are positioned as more valuable than others by a group of people (Holland, Lachiocotte, Skinner, and Cain, 1998). Specifically, the researchers ask: How are spaces of authoring produced, extended, and sustained in educational contexts?

Theoretical Perspectives: This study is guided by the following theoretical concepts – figured worlds, authoring, cultural artifacts, and multimodality. Figured worlds provide the context, or spaces of authoring, through which individuals construct, or author, their identities (Holland, et. al., 1998). We consider cultural artifacts as tools that can mediate the process of self-authoring. Multimodality, which focuses on integrated semiotic forms, such as text, images, and videos (Kress, 2003), broadens how we think about cultural artifacts as tools for identity making in the spaces of authoring.

Methods and Data Sources: This research is based on a qualitative interpretive approach (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011) that draws on ethnographic methods (Schensul, S. L, Schensul, J. J., & LeCompte, M. D., 1999), and uses thematic (Boyatzis, 1998) and multimodal analysis (Jewitt, 2009). Our analyses focus on two professional development spaces – Proyecto Bilingue and Critical Education Studies (both pseudonyms). Data from the Proyecto Bilingüe context was collected on 53 bilingual teachers and it included written products, interviews, artifacts, and student produced multimodal cultural artifacts from the teachers’ bilingual classrooms. Data from Critical Education Studies included four student and faculty interviews, graduate student artifacts, one graduate classroom observation. It also included data produced in out-of-school digital spaces by teenage refugee students, including interviews, observations, and artifacts.

Findings: We identified the following themes 1) professional development enabled a reimagining of the figured world of education, and 2) students self-authored through multimodal cultural artifacts. The findings reveal how figured worlds can link to many other figured worlds and how multimodal cultural artifacts are important tools for extending figured worlds. Findings also show two examples that illustrate important self-authoring work bi/multilingual students can do to disrupt the deficit perspectives that subordinate them in the figured world of education. The first example focuses on Latina/o students’ production of a journey box in one Proyecto Bilingüe’s teacher’s bilingual classroom, while the second example illustrates a similar cultural artifact production in the form of digital iJourneys shared in community settings by a teenage refugee girl.

Significance: Our findings point to the importance of creating spaces of authoring within learning spaces, which allow opportunities for educators and bi/multilingual students to dialogically shape their identities across figured worlds.

Authors

• Veronica E. Valdez, University of Utah

• Delila Omerbasic, Tulane University

• Adelmira Ynostroza, University of Texas at Austin