Multimodal Literacy in Secondary Language Arts Classes: Genre Appropriation and Emerging Critical Consciousness

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 2
  In Poster Session: Translanguaging and Transmodality in Education (San Diego)

Abstract

This study explored multimodal projects created by high school students in language arts classes and how they grappled to express themselves in a new genre, responding to an assignment to create a 1-2 minutes film about the 2020-2021 academic year. Content and feature analysis of students’ videos led to categories coalescing around three themes: how students seemed to appropriate the documentary film genre in different degrees, how students varied in the emotional tone of their videos, and how the sociopolitical events of the year had subtle as well as more robust influence on the students’ films. These multimodal textual practices seemed to give students new literacy choices for meaning making, and for grappling with their emerging critical awareness.

Author

• J. Hannah Park, University of Wisconsin - Madison