Designing Responsive Curriculum: How One Teacher Made Space for Multimodality in a Curriculum-Sanctioned Underperforming School

• In Event: "Inside" Innovation ... "It's Not Pretty": Embodied Responses to Discourses of Technological Advancement and Accountability

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a group of youth responded to the teaching practices and responsive multimodal curriculum designed by Mr. Cardenas, a middle school teacher working in an urban school labeled underperforming. Drawing on data from an eighteen-month long ethnographic inquiry designed to explore the possibilities that incorporating digital media into curriculum provided for youth enrolled in a public school district with a scripted, traditional print-based curriculum, this research blends poststructural theories of power and positioning (B. Davies, 1994; Foucault, 1980) with spatial and multimodal theories (Kress, 2003; Leander & Rowe, 2006), to illuminate the power that a teacher and students working together can have to push against restrictive discourses permeating public school classrooms. Specifically, this research provides insights into what is possible when space is made available for immersion in meaningful practice as a community of learners, where the teacher and students draw upon the collective and varied expertise of the classroom community, and in which both serve as mentors and guides through the learning process (New London Group, 1996).

Findings from this research highlight how Mr. Cardenas created a classroom space through the responsive multimodal curriculum he designed that transcended the fixed physical space of Room 208 and opened up the restrictive barriers of his classroom walls. One way in which he accomplished this was by drawing on the affordances of his Internet-connected classroom to allow students the ability to publish texts read not only by their peers, but also for a global audience with the ability to provide comments and feedback on their work. Multimodal analysis of classroom literacy events and the texts students published and performed illuminated ways in which participants were able to use language integrated with image, movement, gesture, and music in ways that at times disrupted restrictive representations of being (e.g., a girl or boy, an immigrant, a low-income student) that circulated in and across the multiple social spaces in which students engaged in literacy practices (e.g., school, online, home) when provided access to interactive tools with which to design texts around issues important in their lives.
However, many of the multimodal teaching practices that Mr. Cardenas engaged in order to break down the physical boundaries of his classroom were not digital in nature at all. For example, his simple use of laminated paper passes allowed for students to move around the school during class time to design digital texts, a practice which would otherwise have been in violation of the school rule that students must stay in their classrooms. Viewed through the lens of (im)materiality (C. Burnett et al., 2014), Mr. Cardenas’ teaching practices allowed for students to make meaning of their lifeworlds through the design of multimodal texts across multiple physical and virtual spaces. In so doing, Mr. Cardenas legitimated students’ mobile, embodied literacy work, and disrupted the commonly held belief that reading and writing are best learned with adolescents working at their desks in the physical space of the classroom.

Author

• Stephanie Anne Schmier, College of Staten Island