Exploring Multimodality Together: Digital Multimodal Analysis With Practitioners

• In Event: Centering Broad Voices: Equity-Oriented Multimodal Methods in Literacy Research

Abstract

Objectives: This paper offers a model for equity-oriented, collaborative multimodal data analysis developed in the context of a multi-year research project investigating how ELA teachers learn to facilitate online discussions about literature. Our goal in developing this model was to explore how teachers’ knowledge-of-practice can be collectively generated through analyzing multimodal data about their own teaching practices together, with critical attention to how power circulates and is distributed in the collaborative analysis process. In developing and iterating a model for conducting multimodal analysis with a group of classroom and university-based teacher-researchers, we explored the following question: How can the process of collaborative multimodal analysis be a democratizing, equity-oriented, and anti-oppressive practice?

Practitioner Inquiry Perspectives:
Our research study is rooted in principles of practitioner inquiry that center collective and equitable knowledge-building, in which teachers develop knowledge-of-practice through an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; 2009). Building knowledge-of-practice in collaboration with teacher-researchers intentionally disrupts the status quo of literacy research that examines ELA teachers’ practice from a top-down perspective, repositioning teachers’ perspectives and multimodal practices not as an object of study but as an integral component of the research and analysis process (Goodman, et al., 2014). This commitment to equitable and distributed knowledge-construction informed our decision to engage in collective data analysis (Bernal, 1998; Smagorinsky, 2008) by developing a collaborative analysis protocol for multimodal data about teacher learning.

Methods and Data:
Our project centers two teacher-inquiry groups. Data includes audio-visual recordings of inquiry group meetings (N=X), artifacts of practice (N=X), and interviews (N=X). The project team comprises university-based researchers and classroom-based teachers; therefore, building knowledge together across multiple social, institutional, racial, and geographical locations requires diligent reflection on how power dynamics shape our methods and relationships, including our collaborative data analysis procedures. Our focus for this paper is a series of group analysis workshops that convened the project team for collective multimodal analysis of recordings and artifacts from teacher inquiry group meetings. In these workshops, university- and classroom-based researchers used a collaborative multimodal analysis protocol adapted from protocols implemented by Jordan & Henderson (1995), Erickson (2006), and Derry et al., (2010). We refined and reflected on the implementation of this protocol over the course of two years.

Results and Significance
In our initial implementation of this protocol, we encountered two tensions. First, the process of creating multimodal transcriptions (Bezemer & Mavers, 2011) of teacher inquiry group meeting recordings amplified power differentials between team members as we grappled with issues of surveillance and representation, stemming from differences in the institutional, racial, and social positionings of the teachers in the recordings and the graduate students transcribing them. Secondly, we found that silencing occurred during the collaborative analysis process in our workshop, emphasizing the unequal distribution of power that still permeated the analytic process and setting. Noticing and reflecting on these tensions prompted changes in our practices and protocols in subsequent collaborative analysis workshops. These tensions and our response to them emphasizes the need for continuous inquiry into and redesign of methodological systems that perpetuate inequities in the co-construction of knowledge.

Authors

• Bethany Monea, University of Pennsylvania

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Autumn A. Griffin, University of Pennsylvania