Cross-pollinating multimodal stories: A pathway to engage with learners' pluralistic cultural, linguistic and social resources

Abstract

Educators often ignore the multiplicity and rich cultural, linguistic, and social resources that students bring into English language classrooms, rendering their resources and identities insignificant in the learning process. Instead, the teaching and learning of English imposes dominant Anglo-cultural practices on learners (Paris and Alim, 2014, 2017; Bomer, 2017) which limits engagement with diverse forms of knowledge. The aim of this study is to use a multimodal storytelling intervention that involves telling stories across various modes to create pathways and multiple entry points for learners to draw on their diverse pluralistic resources, repertoires and social literacy practices during their learning which expands on what counts as academic achievement. Building on the concept of transduction, cross-pollination (Vally Essa and Mendelowitz, 2022) was employed to move across modes of storytelling, enabling a wide range of resources to be transformed to create meaning in each mode. The methodology of this study was qualitative and involved a teaching intervention conducted with one grade 10 class of English Home Language learners who were diverse in their demographic make-up. The intervention included a visual storytelling activity that required the learners to individually craft an Instagram post to express their identities to their followers. This was followed by two collaborative activities where the class of learners were divided into six groups. The first activity required the groups to craft either a written or verbal story about a social issue prevalent in their communities or in the world that requires addressing, and thereafter, the next activity required the learners to transduce their collaborative stories into the performative mode using any genre. The activities highlighted an overlap between individual and social agendas by encouraging learners to reflect on their own lives, the world around them and to draw on dominant and non-dominant resources and repertoires in a classroom setting to tell their stories. Data in this study is generated from selected Instagram posts, the multimodal stories crafted by the learners, a teacher interview, questionnaires, field notes and a focus group discussion. All the collaborative multimodal stories crafted during the intervention demonstrated a social consciousness by advocating for silenced and marginalized groups. Through multimodal discourse analysis of the data, I illustrate the affordances and limitations of each mode of storytelling and how the cross-pollination of stories enabled learners to connect with lived experiences, leverage diverse cultural, linguistic and social resources and repertoires, and amplify authentic voices. Storytelling across modes bridged the gap between formal learning and the learner’s social realities, and this challenged traditional conceptualisations of language education. The findings suggest that by engaging with multimodal cross-pollination of storytelling, learners found multiple entry points to learning and asserted their positionality and agency within the classroom space. This study highlights the transformative potential of cross-pollinating multimodal stories to create meaningful and inclusive English language learning experiences that honour and mobilise learners' existing identities and resources, ultimately fostering a learning environment that is as dynamic and pluralistic as the learners themselves. Key-words: Multimodality, Multimodal cross-pollination, Storytelling, English language education, Identity, Critical literacy