“Blackness is not just a single definition”: multimodal composition as an exercise for surfacing and scaffolding student theorizing in a Black Studies classroom

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to investigate multimodal composition as an exercise or tool for teaching students theory building. To illustrate, an analysis of artifacts comprising a student’s multimodal composition, which was created in response to a multipart literacy assignment on theorizing Blackness, is analyzed. Design/methodology/approach Afrocentricity served as both theoretical moor and research methodology. Qualitative case study, focusing on the case of an individual student, was the research method used. Findings Multimodal composition was an effective exercise for surfacing the multidimensionality of a student’s complex knowledge while simultaneously placing the student in the powerful position of theorist. The process of composing multimodally integrated reading, writing and speaking skills while revealing the focal student’s need for targeted writing intervention. Practical implications The study evidences multimodal composition as a useful exercise for capturing students’ nuanced interpretations or students’ critical theorizing as well as meaningfully incorporating and assessing students’ literacy skills. Originality/value Exposure to preexisting theory alone relegates students to the realm of passive knowledge consumers. This undermines the emancipatory and justice-oriented objectives of critical education, which ideally contributes to social change by challenging dominant power structures and distorted perspectives of marginalized persons. To be empowered agentic learners, students need to be both taught how to theorize and engaged as theorists. This study shows how multimodal composition can be used as a liberatory literacy tool for those intertwined pedagogical purposes.

Dark Persistence: Black College Women's COVID-19 Photo Essays

“…Building on and contributing to a growing body of research on the multimodality(ies) of Black college women (Griffin & Turner, 2023; Kynard, 2010; Ohito, 2020), this article illuminated the visual and textual representations of persistence that seven high-achieving Black undergraduate women rendered in their COVID-19 photo essays. Animated by the legacy of collective struggle and survival of Black people, the women's photographic writings evoked an endarkened persistence that affirmed Black beauty through the love and care of their Black female bodies (e.g., natural hair and physical health) and honored their spirits as reconnecting with sistafriends, reclaiming rest, and nurturing creativity.…”

“…The women's COVID-19 photo essays were composed in out-of-school contexts, yet they offer important insights for reimagining college English in pandemic times. As a “creative literacy practice that refuses whiteness and anti-Blackness” (Ohito, 2020, p. 188), photo essays serve as transformative compositional spaces that invite high-achieving Black women to bring their rich multimodal repertoires and full humanity into college English classrooms. When situated within antiracist, trauma-informed compositional pedagogies that validate writing as self-expression, freedom, and healing (Smith et al, 2022), COVID-19 photo essays powerfully (re)position Black undergraduate women as experts on their own lives; (re)authorize their multimodal communicative practices in college learning; and (re)affirm their brilliance, strength, and resilience.…”

“…Though small, the extant literature demonstrates that Black college women practice a variety of modes of literate meaning-making situated at the intersections of race and gender. The Black college women in Ohito's (2020) study created multimodal compositions that illustrated the heterogeneity, resilience, and humanity of Black people across time and place. Moreover, Kynard (2010) revealed the power of digital multimodal writing in a Sista-cypher with 13 Black undergraduate women at an urban PWU.…”

“…Historically, Black women have engaged in writing to achieve four central purposes: (a) expressing self-defined intersectional identities, (b) promoting persistence in the face of societal oppression, (c) building capacity for liberatory work, and (d) advancing collective transformation and social justice (Muhammad & Behizadeh, 2015). Contemporary young Black women in their adolescent and early adult years, rooted in the rich authorial legacies of their Black foremothers, compose photo essays and other rich multimodal compositions that nurture their liberation, healing, and persistence in an anti-Black, patriarchal society (e.g., Muhammad & Womack, 2015; Ohito, 2020; Price-Dennis et al, 2017; Turner & Griffin, 2020; Wissman, 2008). In this study, photo essays are intersectional multimodal compositions where young Black women represent their full Black womanness, entangled and imbued with endarkened, engendered, and embodied meanings, through a combination of visual modes (i.e., photographic imagery) and linguistic modes (e.g., written captions), and may include other communicative modes like aurality, gesture, and spatiality (New London Group, 1996).…”

Centering Children's Voices and Purposes in Multimodality Research

“…Semiotic grammars are effective at producing interpretations of modal ensembles but have drawn critiques; classifying modes is a contested domain (Mills, 2016). Grounded in and extending Street’s (2013) overarching critique of autonomous literacies, critiques challenge the implication that semiotic meanings are universal and fixed, rather than socially embedded, mutable, and connected to identities (Ajayi, 2015; Flewitt, 2011; Kachorsky, 2018; Low & Pandya, 2019; Ohito, 2021). While SFL is concerned with linguistic and extralinguistic grammar (Mills & Unsworth, 2017), one of its offshoots, the social semiotic theory of multimodality (Hodge & Kress, 1988), provides an alternative.…”