Exploring the affordances and propensities of multimodality in narrative pedagogies through multimodal ethnography

Abstract

This paper seeks to reflect on the propensities and advantages of multimodality in teaching and learning, and its rich exploration through multimodal research. It will also report and reflect upon the findings of a small-scale multimodal ethnographic study that was conducted over one scholastic year. This investigated whether, and how, the use of multimodal creative productions can facilitate adolescents’ search for meaning through the re-configuration and re-imagination of life experiences shared in a classroom context. The pedagogical context of this research consisted of RE (Religious Education), and MLE (Media Literacy Education) classrooms, enabling an exploration into a possible fruitful dialogue between these two curricular subjects. Another related aim of this paper is to investigate how a narrative-hermeneutic approach to learning can facilitate meaning-making when applied to and through multimodal production tasks in RE and MLE. The results indicate that through multimodality, made possible by the advancement of creative digital technologies, narrative pedagogies can become more effective. This transpires from the fact that multimodality expands the range of resources available for students to construct and share their narratives, as it integrates the auditory, visual, gestural, linguistic, and spatial modes, augmenting the overall narrative experience. Moreover, this study shows that multimodality can facilitate meaning-making by promoting and nurturing a pedagogy for creative expression, a pedagogy of empathy and compassion, a pedagogy of agency and authenticity, a pedagogy of vulnerability, and a pedagogy through the use of metaphor. The paper also makes specific recommendations on how a narrative-hermeneutical approach through multimodality can promote the specified pedagogies in the context of the mentioned curricular subjects.