Teaching Poetry Through Collaborative Art: An Analysis of Multimodal Ensembles for Transformative Learning
Journal of Transformative Education
Published online on June 01, 2016
Abstract
This study is anchored on two positions: that every communication is multimodal and that different modalities within multimodal communication have particular affordances. Written and oral language and other modalities, such as body language and audio/visual media, are interwoven in classroom communication. What might it look like to strategically deploy particular modalities whose affordances predispose them to visualizing certain kinds of knowledge in the classroom? I propose for educators to purposefully employ multimodality for transformative learning. Through ethnographic approaches and multimodal interactional analysis, I analyze a possible link between multimodal pedagogy and transformative education, focusing on image-language entwinement, within an International Baccalaureate poetry classroom in Nairobi, Kenya. This article offers an illustrative resource for educators interested in intersections of transformative learning and multimodality.