Cultivating Joy for Multilingual Learners Through Multimodal Pedagogies in Higher Education

• In Event: Community, Pedagogy, and Possibility

Abstract

Aligned with this year’s call to consider how educational research can cultivate paradigms of joy and justice, this qualitative case study explores the experience that one multilingual learner in a liberal arts college in the Mid-Atlantic had with multimodal coursework in order to examine the affordances and limitations of multimodal pedagogies as a catalyst for radical, resistant joy for multilingual learners in higher education. Findings reveal how opportunities to engage in multimodal composition can promote joy for multilingual learners in tertiary education by uniquely tapping into students’ everyday language practices and passions, offering a vehicle for the expression of emotion, and fueling a sense of pride often suppressed in traditional monolingual and monomodal classrooms.

Author

• Kelly Gavin Zuckerman, Bryn Mawr College