Making Art and Seeing Voice During a Seventh-Grade Multimodal Literacies Curriculum Unit

• In Event: Voice, Equity, and Critical Consciousness: Antiracist Arts Education and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Abstract

This qualitative and interpretive study sought to understand how Pinon, a seventh-grader, experienced an explicitly multimodal Language Arts curriculum unit that prioritized modes of representation and communication beyond written and spoken White Mainstream English. The findings indicate that the unit made space for Pinon to: (a) share her personal mentor texts and the artists who inspire her life-work, (b) make visible her personal creative and learning processes, and (c) publish and disseminate multimodal work that she typically stored in her artist’s portfolio. The study findings support calls for educational stakeholders to recognize and value students’ full modal repertoires and make curricular space for students to exercise agency when representing and communicating their thinking.

Author

• Stephanie F. Reid, University of Montana - Missoula