Reading Multimodally, Reading Critically: Recent-Arrival Immigrant Youths' Engagement With Historical Graphic Novels in an After-School Program

• In Event: 51.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 51.078-1 - Exploring the Intersections of Literacy, Language, and Culture

Abstract

Co-authored by a university-based researcher and a teacher researcher, this paper highlights the affordances of multimodal texts, specifically historical graphic novels, on the literacies of recently-arrived immigrant youth. Drawing on theories of critical literacies and multiliteracies, as well as qualitative data collected from an afterschool literacy program, the authors describe the ways in which the multimodal nature of historical graphic novels enabled the youth participants to see (through) accounts of history as socially constructed and ideologically motivated. The study’s findings have implications for literacy practitioners and researchers interested in the intersections of emergent bilingual youth, graphic novels and multimodal texts more broadly, and critical and multiliteracies.

Authors

• Jie Yie Park, Clark University

• Lori Simpson, Worcester Public Schools