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Chapter 4. Communicating selves

Immigrant, emergent multilingual students’ voices and agency through their multimodal artworks
  • Hsiao-Chin Kuo and Sanela Sprecic
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Abstract

This chapter features integrating multimodal data sources (e.g., visual-arts and associated conversations) and critical multimodal analysis as an innovative methodological approach. Through multimodal literacies, we investigated how two immigrant, emergent multilingual students communicated their dialogical self with their multimodal artworks. This study is then used as a basis for the methodological discussion about multimodal data sources to give immigrant students agency to articulate their developing identities as a part of their complex, transnational lived experiences, which would have been missed by the researchers if only monomodal, verbal data sources were utilized. Implications are drawn around researchers’ professional learning of multimodal research design and future research directions to create more equitable engagement for emergent multilingual participants.

Abstract

This chapter features integrating multimodal data sources (e.g., visual-arts and associated conversations) and critical multimodal analysis as an innovative methodological approach. Through multimodal literacies, we investigated how two immigrant, emergent multilingual students communicated their dialogical self with their multimodal artworks. This study is then used as a basis for the methodological discussion about multimodal data sources to give immigrant students agency to articulate their developing identities as a part of their complex, transnational lived experiences, which would have been missed by the researchers if only monomodal, verbal data sources were utilized. Implications are drawn around researchers’ professional learning of multimodal research design and future research directions to create more equitable engagement for emergent multilingual participants.

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