Dialogue 2: Multimodal Methodologies

• In Event: Reimagining Diversity, Equity, and Justice in Early Childhood

Abstract

Multimodal literacies expand what it means to communicate in a digital, global, and cultural landscape. Literacy scholars continue to amplify and elevate the multimodal ways young people communicate in an ever-increasing social and digital landscape (Kerr, Newhouse, & Vasudevan, 2020; Wohlwend, 2022). While multimodal literacies have certainly expanded the depth of documenting and understanding literacies, this dialogue invites participants to engage multimodally as a way to document and understand children’s experience more fully. Gesturing toward the multiple modes in which young people express themselves —from the verbal and more-than-verbal—contributors describe multimodal methods with young children and provides insight into how we (as researchers) can get closer to understanding their experiences. Through tracing, mapping, and sensorial engagements, contributors reframe how we listen to and hear children out. How do children make sense of the world beyond what they say? How are children sensorially (e.g. sound) engaging and moving spatially across their environmental contexts? How are objects and space relationally networked while mediated children’s identity and experience? For example, objects might have a relational pull and network for children as they position for visibility in the classroom —some objects are associated with “troublemakers” while other objects represent inclusion or exclusion. Some objects mediate play, while others act as markers of social in/invisibility, particularly for children who are raced, classed, mis/gendered, dis/abled, or even overlooked because of their age. That is, how can adults listen better and attend to the invisible and unheard threads of children’s narratives?

For decades, qualitative research sought sustained and engaged participation in communities. Undergirding qualitative methods is a resistance from generalized, tidy, and authoritative outputs Dyson & Genishi, 2005). Instead, many of us who research with children contend with enduring questions long after our studies are over: Did we listen for what we want to hear or were our inquiries open to the unhurried pace of children, the agendas and intentions of children’s choice and agency, and the diversions that often upend our questions? In this spirit, the contributors seek to reorient our senses by attending to the material aspects of children’s worlds, the more-than-verbal communicative enactments, and the physical, social, emotional, intellectual moves of children in space. Paying attention to these multimodal affects deepen our understanding of the diverse and sophisticated ways children express who they are, want to be, and how they desire to be known in communities. They push us to see, hear, and experience differently—to move through city spaces and parks from the perspective of toddlers who intuitively sense and connect to the world; to take up definitions of play that do not look or feel like the play we are accustomed; to interrupt the discursive and material elements of classrooms that work to construct children as problems, as willful; to attune our senses to the multimodal ways that children actively and fluidly communicate lived experience.

Authors

• Amanda Reeves Fellner, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto

• Kuan Leu, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Nicole Fox, Teachers College, Columbia University