Activating Empathetic and Justice-Oriented Ways of Knowing: Teachers' and Students' Arts-Based Responses to Towers Falling

• In Event: 28.072 - Literary Study as Transformative Practice in a Post-Truth Age

Abstract

Purposes
This study was guided by two questions: 1) How do pairs of preservice teachers (PSTs) and 4th-grade English learners (ELs) make meaning as they use multimodal strategies to read challenging texts? 2) How can multimodal strategies activate an empathetic and social justice stance for PSTs and 4th-grade ELs?

Theoretical Framework
Sociocultural and multimodal theories define literacies as multiple; constructed across modes, with and inseparable from identities, cultures, bodies, histories, actions, and emotions; social; and political (Lewis, Pyscher, & Stutelberg, 2015; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). In this poster, we emphasize the visual and embodied ways in which PSTs and ELs made meanings about Towers Falling (Rhodes, 2016), a challenging novel that traces the journey of Dejà, a fifth-grader who learns about her family's personal connection to 9/11.

Towers Falling meets our criteria for challenging texts (Author, 2018)--it addresses topics not sanctioned in schools; teachers may feel underprepared for its content; and it's emotionally troubling. We advocate for teaching with challenging texts using arts-based strategies that open up "multiple meanings that are determined not only by the artists but also the viewer and the context of viewing" (Leavy, 2015, p. 224).

Modes of Inquiry
Participants read Towers Falling and engaged in arts-based strategies, including Cordel, a collection of multimodal texts suspended from a cord that calls for equity and social justice (Landay & Wootton, 2012). The Towers Falling cordel included poignant excerpts from the novel and news media, photos of planes flying into the World Trade Center, transcripts from telephone conversations between plane passengers and loved ones, and children's writing. Partners engaged with texts and each other by writing, drawing, or speaking their responses at multiple points and exchanging letters. We used Visual Learning Analysis (VLA; Author, 2018), a photograph analysis process that prompts learners' attention to bodies and emotions, to further examine participants' meanings.

Data Sources
Data sources included Cordel texts, researchers' fieldnotes, participants' reflections, letters between PSTs and ELs, transcripts from whole-class discussions, and VLA photographs and annotations.

Substantiated Conclusions
Participants valued moving around to engage multimodal texts, and standing next to their classmates for courage to read through traumatic events, such as the transcripts from telephone conversations. Debriefing Cordel generated readers' critical insights about how emotions functioned during their transactions with texts. These responses point to the intelligence of the body to "feel the text" (Author, 2018; Claxton, 2015), as well as the necessity for "real life" accounts to promote dialogue about "truth" when reading challenging literature.

Scholarly Significance
As Leavy (2015) notes, "arts-based practices can be employed as a means of creating critical awareness or raising consciousness" (p. 24). In this study, multimodal texts provided "real life" connections to literature and historical events that activated empathetic and justice-oriented ways of knowing. Understanding how multimodal texts mediated meaning making may inform arts-based learning with challenging texts in a post-truth era by shedding light on how emotions catalyze holistic engagements with texts.

Authors

• James S. Chisholm, University of Louisville

• Kathryn F. Whitmore, University of Louisville