Lalitha Vasudevan

Rethinking Composing in a Digital Age: Authoring Literate Identities Through Multimodal Storytelling

In this article, the authors engage the theoretical lens of multimodality in rethinking the practices and processes of composing in classrooms. Specifically, they focus on how learning new composing practices led some fifth-grade students to author new literate identities—what they call authorial stances—in their classroom community. Their analysis adds to the current research on the production and analysis of multimodal texts through an analysis of the interrelationships between multimodal composing processes and the development of literate identities. They found that by extending the composing process beyond print modalities students’ composing shifted in significant ways to reflect the circulating nature of literacies and texts and increased the modes of participation and engagement within the classroom curriculum.These findings are based on an ethnographic study of a multimodal storytelling project in a fifth-grade urban classroom.

The Social Production of Adolescent Risk and the Promise of Adolescent Literacies

Within the past decade, adolescents have become an increasingly scrutinized age group in the United States and abroad (Maira & Soep, 2005; Nayak, 2003; Nilan & Feixa, 2006; Phelan, Davidson, & Yu, 1998; Vadeboncoeur & Patel Stevens, 2005). They are often the focus of attention across disciplines when references are made to youth, although the concept, youth, encompasses a much broader age range and range of experiences than adolescence alone. The stereotypical image of youth and of adolescence by extension—as a boisterous embodiment of the “unruly” stage of life between childhood and adulthood (G. S. Hall, 1904)—has long dominated discussions about definitions of and subsequent policy regarding adolescents (Skelton & Valentine, 1998). The advent of compulsory schooling (Varenne & McDermott, 1998) and the establishment of the Juvenile Court (Platt, 1977) have influenced further discourses about adolescents, which quickly became steeped in containment, control, punishment, and remediation. These narratives persist and are reflected in the practices and policies of schools, afterschool programs, youth development organizations, the criminal justice system, and many other institutions that youth negotiate on a daily basis. This chapter focuses on a particular subset of educational issues, the literacies of adolescents, which in the past 10 years have become the focus of critique and concern in educational research, practice, and policy (Jetton & Dole, 2004; Patel Stevens, 2008; Vacca, 1998). Academic journals have devoted whole issues to the topic (e.g., special issue of Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2008—“Adolescent

Seeing and Hearing Students' Lived and Embodied Critical Literacy Practices

In this article, the authors argue that teachers and researchers must expand current verbo- and logo-centric definitions of critical literacy to recognize how texts and responses are embodied. Ethnographic data illustrate the ways that youth perform critical literacy in ways that educators might not always be prepared to see, hear, or acknowledge.

Multimodal Cosmopolitanism: Cultivating Belonging in Everyday Moments With Youth

Abstract This article explores the idea that everyday moments hold cosmopolitan potential wherein such recognition can reorient educators and youth toward one another in meaningful and generative ways. Found in the quotidian practices of young people are indicators of their affiliations, their proclivities, their interests, and their curiosities. Educators, should they choose to take these practices seriously, will find ample fodder in the wide range of youths’ communicative and expressive practices for making connections across differences and to move toward lowering barriers of participation for youth in institutional spaces. Data from an ethnographic study of a theater project housed within an alternative to detention program are reanalyzed using a lens of multimodal cosmopolitanism to explore everyday and often fleeting moments of interaction to render visible the ways in which participants expressed and experienced belonging in myriad ways—belonging to the project as well as to one another. A discussion following two ethnographic vignettes of the theater program offers recommendations for how a multimodal cosmopolitan orientation can support educators to approach curriculum and enact pedagogy that nurtures belonging with and among youth every day.

In the Middle of Something: Reflections on Multimodal Inquiry as Artful Bricolage

This article presents a conversation about the nature of multimodal inquiry and composing between Lalitha Vasudevan and Mary Ann Reilly. The authors draw on their Twitter exchanges, blog posts, art, photography, and reflections as they consider what literacy education is and can be in a world that offers multiple means of expression. The theoretical constructs of bricolage and rhizomatics inform how they think about their inquiry as well as how they present their ideas. The authors problematize literacy and arts education as it has been conceived and offer glimpses into what might be.

Bodies Matter in Literacy Coaching.

Reading the implicit invitation in new literacies scholarship to reimagine pedagogy that leans into the lives of youth, Vasudevan reminds readers how the teachers body is central to the meaning making of students in literacy classrooms. She extends this notion of embodiment to the work of the literacy coach and reiterates Skinner, Hagood, and Provosts call for a new literacies ethos in literacy coaching.

Toward multimodal inquiry: opportunities, challenges and implications of multimodality for research and scholarship

ABSTRACT In this article, we suggest that we are witnessing a challenge to the hegemony of text-based knowledge in academic scholarship, brought about by newly available modes of expression, and a cultural shift in our notions of reading and writing, authorship, and networked knowledge production. The central question we address here concerns the implications of widening our ideas of acceptable forms of inquiry, analysis and representation in academic scholarship. As a collective of scholar-practitioners exploring new modes of expression and working both within and outside the formal structures of academia, we argue for the increasing significance of multimodal research in the contemporary context of academic inquiry. By more equitably valuing different ways of thinking, knowing and communicating, multimodal research can facilitate wider and more diverse participation in the production of knowledge, offer a more nuanced and ethical mode of inquiry, emphasize different ways of knowing and connecting, and make scholarship more broadly accessible beyond academic contexts. Here, we analyze the key opportunities facilitated by multimodal inquiry, as well as the obstacles that stand in the way of a wider adoption of this type of research in higher education.