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Transforming School Hallways Through Critical Inquiry: Multimodal Literacies for Civic Engagement

Young people use multimodal resources such as videoand photoediting tools and social media (e.g., Twitter, Instagram) in myriad ways to participate in civic life (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2017). Given the ubiquity of digital tools for composing and circulating multimodal narratives, youths actively take up these resources to resist dehumanizing narratives and push the boundaries of civic engagement, online and offline. The curriculum that we describe in this article exemplifies our belief that young people are culturally and intellectually engaged global citizens, or cosmopolitan intellectuals (DeJaynes & Curmi, 2015), who ask critical questions about the social worlds they traverse in the increasingly interconnected and mediated spaces of their lives. In this article, we—a universitybased researcher (Tiffany) and a classroom teacher (Chris)—examine the research and activism of 10th graders (ages 15–16) involved in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project. The youth researchers focused on the “lack of options for relatable characters for women of color” (classroom artifact, June 2017) in popular media and provoked critical conversations about race and gender in their school community. In a final hallway collage of words, photos, and a link to a film, the youth researchers juxtaposed media tropes with the multiple identities and experiences of young women of color in their school to visually narrate and celebrate their lived realities as scholars, media makers, and civic actors for an audience of peers, teachers, and school leaders. Multimodal Literacies and Counterstories Undergirding this work is a sociocultural view of literacies, whereby meaningmaking practices are seen as diverse, multiple, situated, and ideological rather than autonomous or universal (New London Group, 1996; Street, 1984). Following Jewitt (2005), we see literacies as always multimodal, increasingly drawing on multiple semiotic resources—visual, aural, gestural, and spatial—and traveling across mediated spaces online and offline (Kress, 2003; Siegel, 2012). The affordances and constraints of various digital tools and spaces have led to new cultural practices and exchanges and also calls for the design of “connected learning” opportunities (Ito et al., 2013), in which youths link their passions and personal interests “to academic achievement, career success or civic engagement” (p. 4). Like countless other literacy educators, we have experimented with having youths communicate their ideas through multimodal texts such as collages, zines, blogs, and short films (Siegel, 2012). Thus, this course on