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“Where I’m From” and belonging: A multimodal, cosmopolitan perspective on arts and inquiry

The paper draws upon a year-long practitioner inquiry with adolescents who conducted auto-ethnographies as part of a research course in their urban public high school. Through ethnographic data collection, youth researched their own lives, cultures, and beliefs with the end goal of producing multimodal films that represented their embodied senses of “Where I’m From”, broadly defined. As youth collected and interpreted culturally and personally meaningful artifacts, stories, memories, and family discourses, the cosmopolitan habits of mind and heart that it is argued are important for nurturing reflective citizens of the world. In the process of video production or self-curation, youth palpably negotiated and represented complex, often transnational, identities through the sophisticated use of a range of representational modes and art forms. The paper illustrates how youth-produced multimodal texts such as films can serve as a kind of social glue in educational communities, an invitation for youth to make visible a range of local and global affiliations, creating a sense of belonging and deeper knowing in increasingly diverse learning contexts.