Inquiry

I: Multimodal Collaborative Inquiry

AEN: 668
Spring, 2014

Hobson, Sarah

Readings

M. T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
Sapphire, Push
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American
History Textbook Got Wrong

Readings to Support Your Analyses

All course readings on literacy, language, language acquisition, and identity.

Overview of Inquiry

This collaborative multimodal inquiry is an opportunity to inquire into the lives of
the adolescents from your summer reading and their literacy and language
acquisition practices as they relate to their identity construction processes over
time.

The goal of this inquiry is to explore together the different kinds of literacy events,
frameworks, and practices the adolescents are engaging and the kinds of knowledge
about language, texts, their local communities, broader society and social and
institutional hierarchies, and their identities as people, readers, researchers, and
writers they are acquiring in the process.

Steps to Follow

1. To get started, work with your group members to discuss the books and to list
and choose the literacy events you would like to critically analyze that show a
progression in each adolescents language acquisition and identity construction
processes. Then, for each literacy event, please use the following questions to
analyze the language, literacy, and identity learning taking place.

What is the range of literacy events the adolescents in the summer readings
encounter?
What is the broader social, cultural, and institutional context of these events?
What kinds of literacy practices do they engage in these literacy events?

 What kind of social, economic, and political positioning are they navigating in
these events?
How do they use language in these events to position themselves and others,
to build relationships, to speak to the distribution of social goods, and to
make sense of their lives, circumstances, identities, and goals (Gee, 2005)?
How do others respond to them?
How does the broader social, cultural, and institutional context of these
events inform what language they use and how they interact with others?
What kinds of relationships with themselves, with others, with texts, and
with the world do they form through language within those events?
o How do they learn words and the structure and spelling of words,
sounds, grammatical principles, sentence structures, and how to
communicate?
o What do they use words, phrases, spelling, grammatical principles,
and sentence structure to do?
What are their purposes for reading, writing, and research within these
events and how and why do they change over time?
What kinds of discourses about themselves as readers, writers, and
researchers do they acquire and construct for themselves in these events and
over time?
o What kinds of identity kits do they acquire and construct?
o What do those identity kits mean for them and for others?
o What kinds of agency do they have to explore language and their
identities and to take on new roles and identities within these literacy
events?
o What identities are they constructing for others over time?
What understandings of social hierarchies, cultural practices, and their
assigned and possible places in the world are they constructing over time?

2. Once you have analyzed several literacy events and the progression of each
adolescents literacy practices, language learning, and identity construction, discuss
similarities and differences in each adolescents language and identity development.
As you analyze and discuss similarities and differences, frame a research question
that will guide your analysis.

3. Decide on what multimodal format you would like to use to capture each
adolescents story of literacy, language, and identity development over time,
working from his or her perspective. Storyboard how you would like to put these
adolescents stories into conversation with one another, thinking also in terms of
what collective or larger story about our society these authors together are telling.

Parameters of Inquiry

4. In order to pursue the individual and collective stories of these adolescents and
of our society, I ask that you work together to locate key passages in each work that

help you identify key literacy events and the story you interpret the adolescent to be
telling about his/her literacy, language, and identity construction. Think in terms of
passages that reveal how the adolescents (and/or writers) are telling their stories,
through what rhetorical devices and why these specific devices?


These can include but are not limited to:

Looking closely at the word patterns they use.
The types of nouns, verbs, adjectives, syntactical structures, semantics,
rhythms, phonology, clauses, phrases, etc.
What words/diction and ideas are emphasized and through what genres and
styles of writing.
What kinds of figurative language and word play and for what purposes.
Who their audiences are and what their purposes are.
How their language practices function in specific social contexts.
Their social languages.
Their first and second languages and any code switching they demonstrate.
The connections between their grammatical decisions and the discourses and
identities they are constructing/enacting.
The discourse kits that the adolescents are taking on through their language
acquisition, clothing, relationships, symbol systems, and literacies.
How the discourse kits and the smaller d discourses they are constructing
are connected with larger conversations, with histories of language and
cultural practices, and with other kinds of texts and past and social practices.

Possible Storytelling Formats

You may use any multimodal format you desire, including iMovie, pod casts, video
taping of skits, through poetry, choral readings, creating tableaux, etc.

Whatever modes you use, I ask that you stay close to the language, the purposes of
the writers, and the adolescents in terms of what you think is the story they are
trying to tell.

The six overarching questions you will want to consider for each adolescent are:

1. What story is this adolescent telling about the kinds of identities as
writers, readers, researchers, learners, and people available to him or
her?

2. What story is the adolescent telling about the kinds of identities through
writing, reading, and learning the adolescent is acquiring and developing?

3. What is the adolescent learning about him or herself, texts, language,

 other people, and the world through the literacy frameworks they are
encountering in their reading, writing, and research endeavors?

4. How is the adolescent acquiring language, discourses, and new identities
in and through significant literacy events?

5. How is he/she telling the story and why does he/she tell the story using
his/her specific rhetorical strategies?

6. How would you tell the story for or with the adolescent such that others
would be able to understand the power and subtext of his/her words?

6. What story is the author telling about society through this adolescents
story?

7. What story do you see the authors together telling about these
adolescents and society?

Individual Journals

As you engage in this inquiry, I ask that you keep a reflective journal on your
brainstorming, drafting, research, and writing processes. Please attend to how at
each stage your inquiry is shifting and changing, what new insights you are
accessing about these adolescents and their literacies and how they are acquiring
language and what that language is doing for them.

You will have an opportunity to present your multimodal inquiries to your
classmates and to hear what came through to them in your design. Using their
feedback, your final task will be to write a collaborative written inquiry analyzing
the multimodal text and reflecting on your individual and collaborative writing
processes.