Vibrant Response: Exploring Readers’ Multimodal,Multigenre,and Multilingual Intra-Actions with Social Justice Texts

Abstract

Reductive policies for teaching and defining reading largely ignore the assemblage of multiple factors and forces that impact one's engagement with text. In this paper, we attend to the complex layers of reader response among emergent multilingual elementary students while engaging with multiple modalities and genres of social justice texts. We examine reader response through critical translingual and posthumanist lenses, highlighting not just the assemblage of human–nonhuman–beyond-human bodies, but the dynamic relationship among its components. We argue that exploring this relationship allows us not just to observe students’ response to texts, but also the challenges to linguistic normativities, intra-active agency, and vibrant becomings involved. By facilitating spaces for multimodal, multigenre, and multilingual reader response, educators can counter oppressive forms of pedagogy that limit what students, especially linguistically marginalized youth, are allowed to do when responding to texts and instead nurture literacies that increase possibilities for vibrancy in multilingual students’ response to text.