Toward Visual Cultural Multi-Literacies With/of Muralists in the Midwestern Borderlands

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research-in-Progress Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogy, Multiliteracies, Prosocial Behavior, and Critical Thinking in Arts Education (Table 6)

Abstract

This paper examines how muralists create expressions of embodied and visual knowledge that defy borders and traditional literacy practices. Specifically, I explore how muralists produce art embodying Chicana feminist teachings that reveal a complex, deep symbolic system transcending physical, linguistic, and cultural borders. Drawing from the tradition of Chicana/x feminisms and multiliteracies scholarship, I critically and dialectically engage with Chicana feminist concepts of border and borderlands and Suresh Canagarajah's notion of translingualism to understand how artists engage in creative public art expressions to create embodied sites of multimodality. Grounded on the idea of visual cultural multiliteracies, this exploration counters dominant notions of borders, language, and learning to highlight how artists and their public art enable linguistically and culturally diverse communities to retain their cultural and spiritual practices as an act of community resistance.

Author

• Maria J. Ruiz-Martinez, University of Colorado - Boulder