Multimodal Becoming: Literacy in and Beyond the Classroom

The author explores the possibilities that posthumanist thinking offers for amplifying our understanding of multimodality in children's literacies in school and beyond. Drawing on data from a five-month case study on the multimodal literacy practices of six fifth-grade students across home, community, and school settings, the author focuses on one 10-year-old student. The author uses the student's engagement with graphic novels as a starting place for considering what students’ entanglements with multimodal literacies beyond the classroom can teach us about multimodality in classrooms. The author first discusses multimodality as it is typically framed and then puts this framing into conversation with posthumanist perspectives on literacy learning to open up considerations of what counts as multimodality. Finally, the author discusses ways that thinking with posthumanist concepts such as affect, embodiment, relationship, movement, and place can enhance both multimodal literacy instruction and students’ engagement with literacy. © 2018 International Literacy Association