This study aims to explore the potentials of multimodal and speculative composition for hopeful storytelling and teacher becoming in troubled times. Drawing upon embodied and posthuman literacies, the research questions ask: how do pre-service teachers engage in multimodal composing for professional learning and becoming in times of climate uncertainty? And, how do these speculative compositions equip preservice teachers with pedagogical tools and heuristics for teaching and flourishing in a more-than-human world?
The author uses a qualitative case study, drawing upon methods from a/r/tography, mediated discourse analysis and posthuman constructs such as multispecies storytelling, kinmaking with more-than-human persons all for the purpose of examining the embodied and plural literacies of multimodal composition. The context of study is preservice teachers in a teacher education course.
The study details two preservice cases in which multimodal resources were combined during the process of speculative composition in ways that opened new pathways for sense-making, multispecies storytelling and shared becoming, all of which embrace more-than-human relations with the world.
The case study methodology used for this study allowed for close analysis of a particular moment in the focal participants’ composing process. Due to the small sample size, the findings of this study are not to be considered generalizable. However, teacher educators may find helpful the examples of preservice teachers engaging with literacy as embodied, plural and posthuman for purposes of designing learning experiences that might also invite multimodal, speculative composing.
The posthumanist approaches to multimodal and speculative composing may not have immediate, practical uses for classroom teaching. Rather the paper seeks to provide examples of how multimodal, speculative composing practices might be designed and used to engage preservice teachers in authentic learning experiences that have benefits both personally, professionally and globally in terms of climate adaptations.
The author argues for the need to provide preservice teachers with multimodal, speculative composing experiences for purposes of awakening the imagination to more-than-human knowing and professional becoming. Both will benefit preservice teachers as they begin their careers as English teachers and model for others the hopeful futuring and multispecies storytelling needed in troubled times of climate uncertainty.
This paper builds on the author’s examination of multimodal composition for exploring civic stance and positioning related to complex, social issues, in this case the building of more-than-human relations during uncertain climate futures.
