Chapter 5: “Sounding Funny” and Making Sense: Multimodal Codemeshing as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in an English-Centric Classroom

This comparative case study (Stake, 2006) examines the participation of two multilingual young adolescent students during a multimodal literature response project that encouraged students to leverage multiple modalities and multiple languages, or multimodal codemeshing. More specifically, this chapter examines the different ways in which the classroom context afforded and constrained two eighth grade students’ use of Vietnamese and Spanish within their multimodal codemeshing processes and products. Findings showed how students found ways to engage with multiple audiences using text, oral language, and images, despite a marked view of their heritage languages within the English-centric context. The chapter concludes with implications for other culturally sustaining pedagogies that seek to recognize, leverage, and build on students’ linguistic strengths in middle school classrooms.