A Multimodal Code-Meshing Project

Connecting Classrooms and Communities with Language and Technology: A Multimodal Code-Meshing Project mark b. Pacheco ■ blaine e. smith ■ Stephanie carr

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n Ms. Carr’s eighth-grade English Language Arts class, Sandra (all student names are pseudonyms) hesitated before hitting the record button on the computer screen. “You’re gonna laugh!” she warned as she moved closer to the tiny microphone embedded in the laptop. She took a deep breath, clicked her mouse, and created a message in Vietnamese—the language she speaks at home with her mother. Instead of laughing, however, her classmate, Jonul, asked to hear the recording and told her, “I can’t understand any of that . . . that’s cool!” Sandra and Jonul were in the process of creating multimodal compositions that integrated visuals, sounds, texts, and animations in response to the nonfiction text, The Warrior’s Heart (Greitens, 2012). Created in PowerPoint, these digital projects included students’ perspectives on heroism gathered through close readings of the text, as well as understandings of heroism gained through interviews with “everyday heroes” in their communities. For Sandra, this project was an opportunity to speak with her mother in Vietnamese and explore the challenges she faced raising two children on her own as a new immigrant. For Jonul, this was an opportunity to speak with his father in Bahdini, a Kurdish language, to understand the hardships of living under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. For both students, this was an opportunity to learn more about their personal histories, to develop as multimodal and multilingual composers, and to connect their classroom to their communities through language and technology.

Multimodal Code-Meshing: What Is It? We describe these student projects and processes as multimodal code-meshing (Pacheco & Smith, 2015), a composing practice that can engage diverse learners in the literacy classroom. The multimodal part of this practice includes the layering of different modes when creating digital texts (Kress, 2010), such as Sandra’s integration of image, color, and voice recording to accompany her writing (see Figure 1 for two sample

slides from Sandra’s 9-slide project). When multiple modalities interact with one another in communication, they can construct complex multimodal compositions (Smith, 2016), send distinct messages to multiple readers (Pacheco & Smith, 2015), and create opportunities for students to express important parts of their identities (Honeyford, 2014). The code-meshing part of this practice includes the purposeful use and mixing of multiple languages in written or digital texts (Canagarajah, 2011). With a growing population of students who speak languages other than English in their homes and communities (NCELA, 2011), many scholars argue for the importance of including these languages in the classroom (Garcia & Wei, 2014). Code-meshing pedagogies encourage students to thoughtfully use all their linguistic resources in the composing process, which might include gathering information on a topic in Spanish, planning and drafting parts of a composition in Korean (Velasco & García, 2014), or including phrases in Arabic to establish an author’s voice (Canagarajah, 2011).

Everyday Heroes: A Multimodal Code-Meshing Project Similar to other urban contexts across the country, Ms. Carr’s classroom had students with a variety of linguistic backgrounds, with all tweny-eight students having some proficiency in a language other than English. The majority of students were like Sandra and Jonul—former English language learners (ELL) who spoke both English and another language at home. Two students were still receiving ELL services at the time of this project. In this article, we detail a multimodal code-meshing pedagogy designed to tap into the linguistic and cultural resources of this diverse group of learners. In a culminating project for a unit on heroism and Eric Greitens’s book, The Warrior’s Heart, we asked students to consider what it meant to be a hero in their lives. Knowing the importance of integrating learners’

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Figure 1. Two slides from Sandra’s multimodal code-meshing project

experiences into the curriculum (see Cummins et al., 2005), we wanted students to make connections between the humanitarian efforts of a Navy SEAL in the text and their firsthand experiences of heroism. In this project, students participated in a three-week workshop where they interviewed heroes in their community, learned about multimodal design, created digital projects that used interview snippets, images, music, and text to respond to Greitens’s work, and shared these projects with classmates.

who moved to the United States only two years ago, focused her questions on her mother’s experiences in El Salvador during the war and her subsequent journey to America. She first drafted her questions in English and then translated them into Spanish so her mother could understand. Some students recorded their interviews on their phones and others chose to write down their hero’s responses. Both the oral recordings and written texts from these interviews would later be included in the students’ multimodal compositions.

Interviewing Heroes in Students’ Communities

Developing as Multimodal Designers

Students began by identifying possible heroes in their lives, with many choosing family members and close friends, and then drafting interview questions. Using Greitens’s descriptions of working with orphaned children in Bolivia as a jumping off point, Sandra chose to focus her questions on her mother’s struggles raising children in a new country. Megan, an avid reader

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Different modalities possess different communicative affordances in a composition (Kress, 2010). At times, a picture might be more effective for communicating a particular message; and at other times, text might convey an idea best. We wanted students to consider these communicative possibilities in their compositions. To foster an awareness of how modalities interact to communicate messages, we shared with the class a

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sample digital composition we created about a hero. We he saw when visiting family in Iraq. Valerie, a student asked students to analyze different modal decisions and of Afghani descent, chose images of a peaceful Afghan their effect on the composition. This deconstruction village that challenged popular ideas about Afghanistan involved asking questions such as why the composer as a war-torn country. might have used bright red in the title, what effects particular songs made, and how text worked with images Showcase and Feedback in conveying messages. The scaffolding process (Dalton, 2013) also involved explicit mini-lessons on how to use At the conclusion of the project, Ms. Carr structured PowerPoint and its design options and how to find fair a digital showcase where students shared their use images online through websites like stockvault.net compositions. In small groups, students walked their and openclipart.org. As students began composing, we classmates through their presentations and answered encouraged them to share ideas with one another as we questions about design decisions. We circulated and provided on-the-spot encouraged students to ask questions We encouraged students assistance. about their choices of different

Collaborative Composing

to inquire about different language choices, leading to important conversations about not only what certain words or phrases meant, but why the composer chose to write in that language.

Throughout the workshop, students used laptops provided by the school library to compose their digital texts. Though students worked in PowerPoint, different composing platforms could also be used. Book Creator can easily integrate voice recordings and images, though text production can be more challenging (Rowe, Miller & Pacheco, 2014). Apps like Educreations, Tablet, and Piktochart could also be helpful as more classrooms integrate tablets. Online presentation platforms, like Google Slides and Prezi, could be options for students that wish to access their projects at home. When composing, students sat in groups of four so they could bounce ideas off one another, review each other’s work, and share technological expertise. Jonul used his knowledge of editing audio to help classmates trim their interviews on the website mp3cut.net. Megan, with a strong literacy foundation in Spanish, reviewed her classmates’ spelling and use of accent marks. Though we asked students to include specific information in their projects—an illustrative quote about heroism from the text, a personal response to an important passage, and a written or oral commentary on their own definition of heroism—we encouraged them to be creative in structuring their compositions and using different languages and modalities. As a result, their final projects exhibited variation in how they integrated text, visuals, sound, and movement (see Smith, 2016). Megan created a collage for her title slide with pictures of a Salvadorian flag, a local bird, and soldiers that connected her mother’s struggle to Greiten’s experiences of battle. Jonul included a font that looked like a headline on a Kurdish newspaper

that language. It’s important to note that not all students used their heritage languages in their compositions. Valerie, for example, represented aspects of her Afghani identity using images rather than using Pashto. For her and for students who might not speak a second language, we feel that this project can still foster important understandings about language, multimodal composition, and audience awareness. Teachers might encourage students to consider how using text speak or popular slang can engage a peer but possibly disengage an older reader. Teachers could also ask students to attend to differences between the “everyday” English that a parent uses in an interview and the more formal register of Greitens’s text. Martin-Beltrán (2014) suggests the great potential in pairing students with differing linguistic proficiencies to learn about language from one another, thus creating a classroom where the expertise of all students is valued.

Connecting Classrooms and Communities In the opening vignette, we described Sandra’s hesitancy to use Vietnamese in Ms. Carr’s class. When we talked with her after this project, she said she remembered speaking Vietnamese on only one other occasion in all

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modalities that were similar to the questions we used when reviewing the mentor text at the beginning of the project. These conversations can help students reflect on and develop intentionality as composers (Dalton et al., 2015). Similarly, we encouraged students to inquire about different language choices, leading to important conversations about not only what certain words or phrases meant, but why the composer chose to write in

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her years in school. Jonul told us he had used Bahdini in the classroom before, but only when he didn’t want the teacher to know what he was telling his friends. We see this project as a way of creating a classroom space where students’ languages are not only welcomed, but are signs of strength. Gay (2000) argues for culturally responsive pedagogies that teach to and through these strengths to make learning “more relevant” and “effective” (p. 29). Multimodal code-meshing offers one avenue for building on students’ linguistic strengths and practices used in their communities—like translating for family members (Orellana & Reynolds, 2008)—that often go ignored in the classroom (Daniel & Pacheco, 2016). At the same time, multimodal composition can tap into students’ rich digital lives outside of school. As more students consume and produce multimedia online, this type of project can bridge their out-ofschool digital literacies with the classroom. Van Leeuwen (2015) notes that classroom instruction plays a necessary role in helping develop these practices. While some students might know how to use PowerPoint or email, for example, explicit technical instruction can strengthen students’ digital expertise and push students to consider the power of different multimodal elements in composition. Jimênez, Smith, and Teague (2009) suggest that including multilingual texts from students’ communities can engage all students, and not just English language learners, in the classroom. The authors call these community literacies, where students might examine a Spanish-language newspaper or supermarket flyer to consider how language and modalities are used. We view the Everyday Heroes project as a type of community literacy, where a student like Sandra can share meaningful parts of her cultural and linguistic identity with classmates, and vice versa. We offer this multimodal code-meshing project as a way for students to not just read and critique these community literacies, but to create them as well.

References Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 401–417. Cummins, J., Bismilla, V., Chow, P., Cohen, S., Giampapa, F., Leoni, L., . . . & Sastri, P. (2005). Affirming identity in multilingual classrooms. Educational Leadership, 63(1), 38–43. Dalton, B. (2013). Multimodal composition and the Common Core Standards. The Reading Teacher, 66 (4), 333–339.

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Dalton, B., Robinson, K., Lavvorn, J., Smith, B. E., Alvey, T., Mo, E., . . . & Proctor, C. P. (2015). Fifth-grade students’ multimodal compositions: Modal use and design intentionality. Elementary School Journal, 115(4), 548–569. Daniel, S. M., & Pacheco, M. B. (2016). Translanguaging practices and perspectives of four multilingual teens. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(6), 653–663. Garcia, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Greitens, E. (2012). The warrior’s heart: Becoming a man of compassion and courage. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Honeyford, M. A. (2014). From aquí to allá: Symbolic convergence in the multimodal literacy practices of adolescent immingrant students. Journal of Literacy Research, 46(2), 194–233. Jimênez, R. T., Smith, P. H., & Teague, B. L. (2009). Transnational and community literacies for teachers. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(1), 16–26. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. New York, NY: Routledge. Martin-Beltrán, M. (2014). “What do you want to say?” How adolescents use translanguaging to expand learning opportunities. International Multilingual Research Journal, 8(3), 208–230. National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (NCELA). (2011, Feb.) The growing numbers of English learner students: 1997/98-2007-08. Retrieved from http://www.ncela.us/files/ uploads/9/growingLEP_0809.pdf Orellana, M. F., & Reynolds, J. F. (2008). Cultural modeling: Leveraging bilingual skills for school paraphrasing tasks. Reading Research Quarterly,43(1), 48–65. Pacheco, M. B., & Smith, B. E. (2015). Across languages, modes, and identities: Bilingual adolescents’ multimodal codemeshing in the literacy classroom. Bilingual Research Journal, 38(3), 292–312. Rowe, D. W., Miller, M. E., & Pacheco, M. B. (2014). Preschoolers as digital designers: Composing dual language eBooks. In Anderson, R. & Mims, C. (Eds.) Handbook of research on digital tools for writing instruction in K–12 settings. (279–306). Hershey, PA: IGI-Global Press. Smith, B. E. (2016). Composing across modes: A comparative analysis of adolescents’ multimodal composing processes. Learning, Media & Technology, 1–20. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1182924. Van Leeuwen, T. (2015). Multimodality in education: Some directions and some questions. TESOL Quarterly, 49(3), 582–589. Velasco, P., & García, O. (2014). Translanguaging and the writing of bilingual learners. Bilingual Research Journal, 37(1), 6–23.

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Mark B. Pacheco is an assistant professor of Bilingual and Bicultural Education at Illinois State University. Blaine E. Smith is an assistant professor of Language and Literacy Learning in Multilingual Settings at the University of Miami. Stephanie Carr is an eighth-grade English and German teacher in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools.

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