Same Book but Different Pedagogical Stories: Two Teachers, Two Middle-Grade Classrooms, and One Multimodal Novel

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogies of Multimodal Reading and Composing

Abstract

This qualitative and interpretive study sought to understand what happened when two middle school English Language Arts teachers from different schools and districts taught the same multimodal novel to their students. The study shows how each teacher positioned the novel within their classroom and determined differently the text’s use and value. The first teacher positioned the multimodal text as unencountered literary art and emphasized the unique, literary, and aesthetic qualities of the text. The second teacher positioned the text as a composition resource and encouraged students to emulate the author’s multimodal composition decisions. The affordances and limitations of each teacher’s approach are discussed.

Author

• Stephanie F. Reid, University of Montana - Missoula