Images of Hope

• In Event: Visual Thinking Strategies: An Expansive Method for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the way we used Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to analyze a corpus of student drawings created by Black elementary school children. Like other scholars who recorded young people’s responses to crises (Goodwin & Fahnstock, 2002; Looman, 2006; Wix, 2009), we created opportunities for our participants to document the ways they were being impacted by multiple pandemics including COVID-19 and overt systemic racism. Indeed, “children are among history’s most elusive witnesses” (Henry, 2002, p. 18); the youth of this generation will be important storytellers who reflect on the unprecedented events of the early 2020s.

We drew upon critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 1998) and critical multimodal literacy framework (Cappello et al., 2019) to ground our purposes and frame our understandings of the children’s drawings. Studying how children witness crises is essential for documenting history, especially when Black children’s voices do not rise above white mainstream messaging through deliberate monitoring and exclusion of Black voices. Critical multimodal approaches are not dependent on school-valued forms of communication and thus complement CRT to critique, transform, and restory dominant narratives of this historic time.

We prompted our thirteen (self-identified) Black elementary school participants to create drawings in response to a carefully constructed prompt, “2020 was a really interesting year for everyone, can you tell me some things that you remember about it?” Drawings were chosen for “critical text production,” as a language of justice and liberation and a “tool or language to perform counter-readings of dominant texts that serve the interests of power” (Morrell, 2003, p. 5).

Drawing was chosen as an expansive literacy, an additional path for students to restory the dominant narratives of this unprecedented historical time; students spoke back to the media and challenged stories being told about them. To complement this pathway, we needed expansive analytical methods to understand students' intentions and make our own meaning from their multimodal responses.

We used a critical multimodal approach to analyze the images including multiple analytic passes both individually and collaboratively. First, we independently coded the students’ drawings using constant comparison to help us summarize the data and identify patterns of similarities and differences (Charmaz, 2014; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Afterward, we came together for a focused reading that enabled us to create categories and identified patterns (e.g., layout, composition, color choices) in the visual compositions. We soon realized that our reliance on semiotic understandings (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2020) would be insufficient for deeper, layered understandings. Therefore, we turned to VTS. We found the three-question protocol enabled us additional perspectives beyond those identified through traditional coding. Instead of noticing patterns, VTS required analytic interpretations (i.e. What’s going on in this picture?) that were supported by evidence cited in the students’ drawings (i.e. What do you see that makes you say that?). This additional analysis helped us understand that students were not only witnessing (documenting) history, but that they also saw themselves as change agents and hopeful visionaries for a better future.

Author

• Marva Cappello, San Diego State University