Multimodal Text Sets as Curricular Resistance to Untold and Silenced Stories
Carol Brochin
As we designed the NEH summer institute daily schedule, we centered inquiry as a guiding framework to understand the influence of continuous waves of migration on the making of America. We modeled for the teacher-scholars how to study historical time periods and migration by reading young adult literature, historical documents and records, maps, artifacts, newspapers, art, film and hands-on inquiry. These intertextual experiences coupled with interactions with authors, scholars, and artists offered tangible ways for teacher-scholars to engage with multiple modes and forms of texts to deepen how we teach migration histories that have been silenced and left out of traditional historical narratives in the U.S. and across the globe.
We were particularly concerned with the stories often left out of traditional narratives of U.S. history, which are traditionally rooted in the thirteen colonies and often erase the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other communities of color. As we centered Arizona as a case study, we found that in order to teach a more nuanced and complex understanding of how migration shaped history, we had to turn to many forms of texts and not rely on traditional historical textbooks since the stories we wanted to tell were often not only left out but purposefully silenced.
One of the key strategies we drew on to understand these hidden histories was the construction of multimodal text sets. Multimodal text sets are collections of materials used to study a topic across a variety of modalities which might include historical documents, oral histories, art, music, fiction, poetry, and picture books. The different modalities beyond the written text offer multiple entry points for understanding a complex theme or topic and have been documented to help deepen students’ comprehension, and dialogue (Dowdy & Fleischaker, 2018).
Multimodal text sets are especially impactful to help guide students’ inquiry in a digital age that requires us as teachers and scholars to go beyond using traditional literacy texts to teach a more complicated understanding of history and to engage with issues youth are currently facing (Dallacqua, 2020; Hoch et al, 2019). However, constructing multimodal text sets is not as simple as searching the internet for sources. Instead, teacher-scholars provide scaffolds for students on explicit ways to use databases such as the library of congress archives to search for texts related to their inquiry projects.
The text sets featured here were created by our teaching team as resources for the institute’s participants. Each set includes 10-15 pieces of literature, audio recordings, videos, and primary documents that are conceptually related and provide multiple perspectives on the theme, time period, region or community being highlighted. In these text sets, we brought together different kinds of texts to help learners understand key pieces of our past, and the people and stories that have been a part of that history. Drawing from a variety of texts to understand a particular time period was necessary so that we did not just reproduce dominant narratives.
On the website are text sets that correspond to one of the days of the institute, and were used to deepen and expand participants’ understandings of the highlighted theme, time period, region or community. These sets were central to providing even further depth to our understanding of history and migration. Each day, we introduced one or more thematic text sets and provided time for book browsing, reading, and reflection, as well as for going online to view additional texts such as music, film, and art. These interactions also provided time for sharing learning and insights with each other before engaging in dialogue to compare across perspectives using charts, diagrams, or webs. We modeled daily pedagogical practices and curriculum strategies based in the humanities and we provided the necessary time and resources for teacher-scholars to develop their own inquiry questions and gather their research materials.
Because we were interested in stories that are often left out and untold, we looked for other sources to share because we know that some stories are not present in written documents or official collections and archives. For example, racism has directly impacted how stories of Black communities in the U.S. have been historically left out of official records and most major archival collections until recently (Sturkey, 2021). To this end, we invited participants to explore newspaper archives and community archives to research the ways to intentionally include Black and African American histories and stories in their multimodal text sets.
Additionally, to have a deeper understanding of Mexican American and Latinx families and communities, we curated a collection of books, articles, songs, and images that center around Latinx families and communities. This text set centers the complexities of family dynamics and values of collectivism that hold strength and value in community. The inspiration for this text set came from the themes of family and community present in Songs My Mother Sang to Me by Patricia Preciado Martin (1992). In this book, Martin collected oral histories to document the experiences of Mexican American women in the borderlands. She had to conduct these interviews and construct narratives because they had yet to be collected in official historical archives.
As a culminating project, the teacher-scholars in the institute created multimodal text sets that can be explored here. They were required to build their own multimodal text sets based on their inquiry questions and interests about the histories and migrant waves in their own contexts across the country. Each set consists of a synopsis, digital collection, and an annotated bibliography. For example, Cynthia Vele, a teacher from New York, curated a collection of first-person narratives, documentaries, children’s books and novels, and photographs around the untold stories of Ecuadorian migrants to New York over the past 60 years. Alisen Laferriere and Jessica Scott created a text set on the silenced stories of Indigenous peoples forced into boarding schools. Their set also provides examples of how Massachusetts has used media to reinforce historical inaccuracies.
The participants left the institute with their own multimodal texts but also those of their peers. We designed this project so that participants could learn how to research and weigh evidence within the humanities as they explored historical content alongside fictional narratives such as chapter books, poetry, and fiction. Through daily engagements, the teacher-scholars were immersed in research to develop strategies for locating, evaluating, and interpreting evidence and a critical lens to question whose stories are misrepresented, silent, and purposefully left out of dominant narratives. The goal of the multimodal text set was to provide a tangible way for them to become researchers so they can engage their students as researchers.
One of our key learnings from the institute was the value of teachers having time to research and collect multimodal text sets around topics of significance to their region and students–instead of moving directly to teaching plans. Teachers rarely have time to intensively research a focus so the knowledge and perspectives they explored in gathering these resources for their own inquiries dramatically changed their understandings and shifted their ideas for how these text sets could be integrated into their classrooms. The multimodal nature of the sets also challenged them to go beyond academic and literary texts to songs, videos, podcasts, artwork, photographs, and newspaper articles. Because we integrated many teaching strategies into the institute, they experienced these strategies for themselves around our text sets and so easily made the connection between their multimodal text sets and teaching possibilities.
Multimodal text sets have become central to my own teaching practices with future bilingual teachers and also with graduate students as they offer opportunities for teacher-scholars to explore their research in creative and non-traditional ways. Crafting engagements with a variety of materials encourages intertextual connections as they dig deeper into any given topic or theme. What I especially appreciate about multimodal text sets is that they can be implemented across all content areas and grade levels including with teacher-scholars in the NEH Institute.
References
Dallacqua, A. (2022). Reading when the world is on fire: Teaching with comics and other multimodal text sets. Study and Scrutiny, 5(2): 38–63.
Dowdy, J. & Fleischaker R., (2018). Text Sets: Multimodal learning for multicultural students. Brill Sense.
Hoch, M., McCarty, R., Gurvitz, D., & Sitkoski, I. (2019). Five key principles: Guided inquiry with multimodal text sets. The Reading Teacher, 72(6): 701–710.
Martin, P. P. (1992). Songs my mother sang to me. University of Arizona Press.
Sturkey, W. (2021). Putting Black history in the record. The Atlantic.
Carol Brochin, (she/her/ella) is an associate professor of teacher education at the University of Arizona and the co-director of Salas de Libros, a community literacy program in Southern Arizona. Her professional and scholarly work is rooted in her experiences as a public-school teacher and literacy educator along the U.S./Mexico border.
Authors retain copyright over the vignettes published in this journal and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the following Creative Commons License:
WOW Stories, Volume XII, Issue 1 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on by Carol Brochin work at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/stories/xii-1/4.
WOW stories: connections from the classroom
ISSN 2577-0551