Children's Multimodal Creations as Mediators for Expanding What Counts as Knowledge Through an Interdisciplinary Curriculum Partnership

• In Event: 35.051 - Mobilization of Knowledge and Boundary Crossing in a Bilingual Teacher Education Program

Abstract

While the education of bilingual students has been a focus of research across areas, too often insights and innovations remain isolated within disciplinary boundaries. This case takes a close look at the collaboration of four faculty members of a larger team, as we sought to make links across disciplines and infuse the arts into a STEM curriculum. We represent various fields, we realize the importance of studying shifting boundaries, in this case disciplinary, which can expand learning and what is possible in education (Heracleous, 2004).

We examine the expansive learning experiences of three of the bilingual participants as they embarked multimodal creation. As part of the invitations, children explored and created imaginary lands using clay, photographed examples of geomorphology around their schools, homes and communities, created multimodal compositions to express their science/geoscience ideas and identities, analyzed their photographs by drawing on digital images and recording their observations with I-pads, and listened to purposefully-created culturally and linguistically relevant science books that made use of a range of semiotic modes.

In the spirit of expansive learning (Engeström, 1988), our goal in this presentation is reporting on learning that took place through the joint work of professors and children. We aim to create a space to analyze the tensions in our partnership, to deepen our own learning, and to begin to envision a new model for curriculum development within the project and in education more broadly.

The questions that guide this case are: In what ways did four professors’ understandings about what counts as knowledge shift through our joint work planning and overseeing a curriculum segment for the project afterschool? What were some of the contradictions that triggered these shifts? And, how might our learning be furthered through purposeful, joint reflection on our experiences working on the aforementioned curriculum segment? We utilize data collection and analysis methods common to ethnographic research. We draw upon data generated during the initial curricular collaboration (e.g. observations, debriefings, email records) as well as data generated by recalling our collaborative process and reflecting on its impact (e.g. researcher memos and audio-recorded collaborative reflections). Our gaze is also on the children’s multimodal creative processes and finished work. As is the case in much qualitative research, the processes of data collection and analysis is interwoven throughout (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Our emerging findings indicate that the growth we experienced was facilitated by our purposeful attention to the tensions and contradictions in our work. Children’s multimodal creations are analyzed as key mediators of the expansive learning cycles among the faculty. The presentation spotlights several students’ transaction with multimodal creations, such as their conversations while working with clay, and a discussion spurred by a video of a family member doing science.

As children designed multimodal creations that transverse disciplinary frontiers, and took us into out-of-school spaces that shifted what counts as academic learning and knowledge, the understanding on what counts as knowledge was questioned and expanded. We examine implications of this interdisciplinary partnership for curriculum design, professional learning frameworks, and school.

Authors

• Maria Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Patricia Martínez-Álvarez, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Olga M. Hubard, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Maria E. Torres-Guzman, Teachers College, Columbia University