Chapter 4: Image as Literacy Curriculum and Research Data: Three Seventh-Graders Experience a Multimodal English Language Arts Unit

Just as a multimodal literacy curriculum unit offers a way of valuing the work of all meaning-makers, so, too, does visual and multimodal research recognize that students can represent their thinking in multimodal ways. This multifaceted and multimodal data collection experience allowed the author greater insight into the work, play, and drudgery students experienced. The author, however, learned more about students’ meaning-making activity and learning from data sources that fell outside of the sanctioned teacher-assigned tasks and the typically privileged mode of written language. The work that students chose to turn in never represented the totality of their experience, suggesting that educational researchers must continue exploring and expanding upon the strategies that teachers use to document and understand students’ perspectives.