A Community Photo Walk: An Examination of the Multimodal Play of Young People's Meaning-Making

• In Event: 41.081 - Pedagogical Implications of Multimodal Pedagogy: Findings From the Reimagining Futures Project

Abstract

“What stands out to you?” “If you could show a stranger what this neighborhood is like, what would you show them?” “If you could capture a moment to tell a story about this community, what would it be?” These questions have been common themes of how we organized the community photo walks during our workshops. Meeting twice a week for two month, we took nine cameras and seventeen young people (ranging from four to fourteen participants during various workshops) outside the three block radius around the afterschool site. Drawing from Anderson’s (1991) idea of “imagined community,” the walk was inspired in part to cultivate ways for young people to not only engage with using different media mode as a way to share narratives, but also explore relationships with one another and the neighborhood in which the program was spaced.

By fostering belonging within this community, we wanted to build relationships where young people could negotiate and broaden ideas around community, family, and identity (themselves and one another). Rooted in ethos of multimodal play--a concept that recognizes that meaning making is oftentimes unscripted and playful engagement with a wide range of modes (visual, aural, gestural) and literacies (print, drawing, video)--our goal to broaden the definition of education and invite young people to reflect and contribute to meaning-making from their own varied channels of expressions and experiences.

Offering that learning is a transformative process where opportunities could help learners explore topics and that the use of multimodal tools could spark one’s capabilities to think, to represent, and to communicate, our findings helped us to appreciate and widen the definition of what counts as valued knowledge. Crafted through framework around participatory culture (Jenkins, et al. 2006) and multimodal play (Vasudevan, et al, 2010), this paper highlights the specific need to nurture a space that invites youth to share, to listen, to read, to write, and to reflect in valuable and multiple ways.

Author

• Ahram Park, Teachers College, Columbia University