African American and Latinx Girls' Compositions of Multimodal Community Journaling as Artifactual Literacies About STEAM

• In Event: Disrupting Power and Dreaming Liberatory Worlds Through Multimodalities

Abstract

Objectives: Today’s adolescents compose multimodal texts that create meaningful stories beyond conventional written modes (Serafini, 2011; Vasudevan, 2011). As artifacts, multimodal texts leave traces of individuals and communities’ values through stories about who they are, how they create meaning, and how they negotiate agency. In this way, artifacts are deeply linked to cultural histories and can be used as signs of empowerment and liberation (Author, 2016; The New London Group, 1996). This session explores how African American and Latinx girls made meaning when they, and members from their community, used a Multimodal Community Journal (MCJ) to compose multimodal texts about their identities and experiences in relation to STEAM. We asked: In what ways do African American/Latinx girls engage in MCJ about women/girls in STEAM? How was the MCJ used as an artifactual text to value the girls’ cultures, identities, and agencies in a community setting?

Theoretical Framework: Using artifactual literacies as a framework helps to translate the artifact, and the story it tells, into our learning and teaching (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). Artifacts 1) have physical features; 2) are created, found, carried, or put on display; 3) embody people, stories, thoughts, communities, identities, and experiences; 4) and are valued or made by a meaning maker in a particular context. To understand artifacts, it is important to recognize how composers make meaning through multimodal texts (Kress, 1997; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010, 2014).

Methods, Techniques, Data Sources: This qualitative study focused on 10 African American and Latinx girls’ interest in STEAM during two, day-long workshops where they created digital mobile apps. Data sources consisted of interviews, surveys, photos, observations, and the Multimodal Community Journal to provide information about how the girls’ expressed cultural identities and representations of self through contributing to the creation of the MCJ. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed through open and thematic coding (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014).

Results: The girls composed in MCJ to speak to their cultural understandings of themselves and about the disparities of diverse women in STEM, as African American and Latinx women comprise just 2% of the U.S. workforce in STEM-related fields (NSF, 2017). The practice of composing the MCJ expanded when their parents, STEM researchers, and literacy researchers also wrote in the MCJ in solidarity. Through this community literacy practice, multiple stakeholders infused the artifacts with meaning. In turn, the collaborative activity cultivated identities and fostered agency to collectively engage educational changes that respond to the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx women in STEM.

Scholarly Significance: Given AERA’s call emphasizing educational responsibility for the multiple levels of racial and educational inequities specifically geared towards African American youth in and out of school settings, we highlight how the MCJ came to represent community responsibilities to cultivate rich literacies. We argue that the MCJ offered an entry point and artifactual evidence for the collaborative activity of expanding meaning and identities through multimodal texts. We also discuss how the multimodality of the MCJ provided everyone with the opportunity to make meanings through multiple modes.

Authors

• Tisha Lewis Ellison, The University of Georgia

• Brad Robinson, Texas State University

• Tairan Qiu, University of Georgia - Athens