Young Adults' Affective Moments When Mapping Responses to Multimodal Texts

• In Event: 45.072 - Trauma and Affect in Digital and Nondigital Contexts: Findings From Four Classroom-Based Studies

Abstract

Objectives: This SSHRC-funded study highlights the research and pedagogical implications of mapping reactions to multimodal texts in a eight-week study conducted with young adults at a post-secondary college located in (Canadian City). The presentation addresses the implications of affect in a mapping strategy for future directions in multimodal teaching and learning.

Theoretical Framework: This research draws on multimodality in literacy research (Kress, 2010; Rowsell, 2013) and addresses affective dimensions of literacy as it relates to affect, embodiment, and non-representational theory (Ehret, Hollett & Jocius, 2016; Leander & Boldt, 2013, Lenters, 2016). Situating the multimodal essence of visual texts, I explain how the affective in literacy research transcends moments in time (Compton-Lilly, 2015) and allows for punctuated affects in the ways young people respond to trauma narratives in digital contexts.

Methods: In phase 1, participants read a text that included such trauma-related topics as civil war and sexual abuse and then compared this version to its multimodal adaptation. In phase 2, participants designed and drew mappings of their moment-by-moment reactions to and transactions with both text-based and multimodal narratives. The objective of these phases was to observe their patterns of affect in students’ meaning-making practices.

Data: Participants generated data that consists of detailed cartographies of their meaning-making processes as they read and compared both narratives. The maps and their accompanying explanatory commentary were coded with the software Atlas.ti.

Findings: Results point to the advancement of students’ comprehension and reactive abilities to both narratives as they interact with each other in digital contexts. While students’ first maps showed multiple affective moments, their subsequent cartographies revealed evidence of (re)interpretation that situated the narrative within the dimensions of expectation, anticipation, and comparison.

Significance: Researching the mapped transactions of young adults reading multimodal trauma texts impacts curriculum studies insofar as it gives them the necessary distance to understand their meaning-processes as they read sensitive material. In working with this visual approach, teachers and researchers have an outlet to guide students in discovering multifaceted and often fleeting responses to text, providing further opportunity for discussion and “embracing uncertainties” when collectively healing as students discuss texts (Jones & Spector, 2017) as to generate useful ways of coping in the classroom.

Author

• Amélie Lemieux, Mount Saint Vincent University