Abstract
Purpose: This study took place in an elementary English language arts classroom during a comics writers workshop unit and focused on one fourth-grade author. This paper aims to explain how a fourth-grade student receiving special education services positions himself and is positioned by others as an expert during a unit on comics. When students’ knowledge about multimodal composition is recognized and valued, the classroom community can become a place where students can author themselves into positions of power and authority. Design/methodology/approach: Informed by sociocultural theory, social semiotics and positioning theory, the authors conducted a qualitative study to analyze the focal participant’s published comic, classroom interactions and interview data using open and in vivo coding systems. Findings: The findings documented how the focal participant was positioned as an expert by others and how he positioned himself as an expert. The findings also explore how this fourth-grade comics expert left an authorial residue that extended beyond the boundaries of this particular comics unit, impacting his teachers and future iterations of the comics workshop. Originality/value: Scholars have theorized multimodal approaches to reading and writing pedagogy as an equitable enterprise that values meaning-makers using a wide variety of semiotic resources. This study shows how incorporating an explicit multimodal composition opportunity allowed one fourth-grade author space to craft a comic and re-author traditional classroom positions of power.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 298-312 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | English Teaching |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2020 |
Keywords
- Arts
- Comics
- Composing
- English
- Language
- Multimodal
- Multimodal
- Pedagogy
- Teaching
- Workshop
- Writers
- Writing