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Embodied literacies and the art of meaning making

ABSTRACT We contend that multimodal literary responses offer a space for students to integrate art in the interactive composing process in a way that fosters creativity that normative schooling practices often foreclose. In this qualitative study of three African American fifth-grade students’ design processes, we theorize literacy as embodied to analyse the girls’ interactions and negotiations as they compose multimodal responses to literature by Jacqueline Woodson. We utilize multimodal and critical discourse analysis to account for the ways interactions and the use of digital tools are negotiated within academic structures embedded with powerful discourses related to race. Findings indicate that discourses related to racial harmony are woven throughout students’ multimodal representations, wherein examples focused on inequities are excluded from the final project. We argue that capturing the dynamic ways in which youth engage digital literacies throughout the composing process draws attention to the erasures that occur in the final product. Our findings suggest that researchers and educators simultaneously attend to youth authors’ embodied interactions and their multimodal representations to understand the complexity of the composing process in relation to the literary responses.