A Collaborative Kaleidoscopic Auto-Ethnography: Leveraging Multimodality in Rural Teacher Education

• In Event: Toward Critical Multimodality: Exploring Theory, Research, and Practice in Transformative Educational Spaces

Abstract

The purpose of this interactive breakout session is to present research critically examining our experiences as two white, middle-class teacher educators in the design and implementation of an educational foundations course in a university teacher education program in rural East Texas. The course is an entry point for most undergraduate preservice teachers into their teacher education program. Because of the online, asynchronous nature of the courses, we sought to provide a more meaningful and transformative experience for supporting development of critical consciousness in our primarily white, monolingual preservice teachers. Central to this objective were our and our students’ personal journeys through critical family history (CFH). Conceived by Sleeter (2020) and grounded in critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 2016), CFH is an analytical framework that requires one to reach “back historically, usually multiple generations, in order to understand the interplay between past and present” (Sleeter, 2020, p. 3). In our adaptation, we and our students presented multimodal research projects examining how our family (and ancestral) histories intersected with white supremacist ideologies and policies.

This study was guided by collaborative autoethnography, which “involves two or more co-researchers who collectively use their self-stories as data” (Ngunjiri & Hernandez, 2017, p. 397). Framed as action research undertaken to gain critical insight into our pedagogical practice, our self-study was guided by two research questions: What does it mean for white, middle-class teacher educators to engage in multimodal criticality in a rural and online context? What is the significance of our feelings of resistance and discomfort arising from doing critical family history simultaneously with students? To address these questions, data collection included co-creation of and participation in five recorded dialogues and weekly reflective journals. We also integrated and analyzed photos, primary documents, and family artifacts collected as part of our own CFH projects.

The exploratory and vulnerable nature of critical family history incited highly personal meaning making within the diverse realities of each individual student and ourselves. Of particular importance was that these transformations were often actualized through the discovery and presentation of tangible family artifacts documenting how their family or ancestors benefitted—or were harmed—from white supremacist ideologies and policies. In the spirit of multimodality, we ‘re-present’ the study in the form of a kaleidoscopic bricolage and dialogue between us that includes embedded photos and documents in order to center attention on own sensations of ‘irritation’ arising from facilitating such a jarring, vulnerable, and transformative experience.
This breakout session promotes attendee reflection and discussion around deconstructing dominant ideologies in teacher education through the use of critical multimodal curriculum. We purposefully seek to foster dialogue between presenters regarding how critical multimodality can be leveraged in diverse spaces for learning and how it is perceived by educators. Further, our autoethnographic action research contributes a unique perspective toward critical multimodality by exploring the analytical tool both as it exists as a means of student self-expression within teacher education and also as a methodology for autoethnographic research.

Authors

• William Davis, University of Oklahoma

• Vicki G Mokuria, Stephen F. Austin State University