Abstract
Across the articles in this volume and across literacy scholarship, it is not unusual to encounter the prefix “multi-.” We have multiliteracies, multimodalities, multiple perspectives, and multifaceted analyses. As editors—who routinely read piles of manuscript pages—we are continually being sensitized to patterns that define our field, and as a result inform our collective thinking. The preponderance of “multi-” is aptly reflected in the articles that we have brought together in this volume. Some of these articles explore how students use and interpret multimodal resources; others examine the multimodal products that students create and how they use those products to produce meaning. Still others focus on multiple perspectives and various aspects of schooling.
In the opening article, Pacheco and his colleagues review 74 classroom studies to identify and explore how educators report scaffolding the learning of emergent bilingual students as they engage in multimodal composition practices. Specifically, the authors attend to how teachers orchestrate semiotic resources to contribute to the development of bilingual students’ identities, help strengthen their understandings of language, and support their engagement with content. Their findings identify types and forms of scaffolding with important implications for classroom practice and literacy research.
Turning from students’ use of multimodalities to the multifaceted and multilayered spaces that constitute schools, Larson and her colleagues explore how one urban high school draws on a novel university–school partnership to revisit and refine a literacy program. Their analyses of ethnographic and quantitative school data revealed generative frictions that produced changes in the program and suggested changes in how teachers understood literacy and their students. This account of multiple layers—curriculum, scheduling, assessments, and pedagogy—invites readers to rethink the generally assumed continuum that spans autonomous and ideological literacies. It provides a framework for recognizing intersections that can generate more equitable learning opportunities and practices.
Kiili and her colleagues provide an illustrative example of meaning-making by investigating how students (n = 404) made sense of a multimodal video that emphasized the importance of vaccinating children. Through this currently relevant example—given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—they consider not only the affordances of multimodality and how various modalities affected student reasoning but also which modalities students used, partially used, or ignored. The authors indicate the value of providing students with tools for interpreting various modalities and forming coherent arguments.
Also highlighting meaning-making about pressing issues, Spires and her colleagues examine the multimodal products created by students. Through a critical project-based inquiry, they explore how six students created multimodal products designed to address problems related to the global water supply and sanitation efforts. In their analysis of these creative processes, the authors describe how synergistic collaboration and critical analysis led to the emergence of social action. While Kiili and her colleagues focus on student sense-making of multimodal texts, Spires et al. reveal the important learning that occurs when students leverage multimodal practices to convey and express their understandings. These youth-led initiatives underscore the centrality of student agency and autonomy in learning, development, and achieving equitable literacy outcomes.
Torres and Medina turn their attention to a different multimodal text: children’s books. Their emphasis is on the depictions presented in books and the complex and contradictory readings that these texts can produce. By studying four children’s books written in Puerto Rico in the shadow of Hurricane María, they foreground Puerto Rican perspectives, including hidden stories and cultural knowledge. Through their decolonial and racialized analysis, they highlight communal and activist practices that honor a Puerto Rican imaginary, communal and historical agency, and resistance. Their findings reveal the need to engage with ruptures as we participate in literacy work with children and youth.
Finally, Sánchez and Ensor identify the affordances of multimodal story exchanges to examine how classroom spaces can capitalize on students’ experiences as globally literate people. Specifically, they document the involvement of elementary students in a transnational partnership and describe how students communicated across language differences, shared everyday worlds, pursued connections, and embraced vulnerability. The authors contend that these experiences provide opportunities for children to move beyond borders of exclusion and craft cosmopolitan perspectives of the world.
Together, these articles provide glimpses into not only the multiplicities that surround literacy teaching and learning but also the complexities and contingencies that define our work. As a collective, they signify how multiplicity, plurality, and contestations of meaning can be essential ingredients for creating dynamic and unifying literacy practices that nurture through difference rather than erasing it. We are pleased to share these pieces with our Journal of Literacy Research (JLR) audience and trust that readers will find them interesting, informative, and inspiring.