ERIC Number: EJ1458542
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Jan
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0034-0553
EISSN: EISSN-1936-2722
"They're Like Slash": Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts
María José Aragón; Meghan Corella; Nora W. Lang
Reading Research Quarterly, v60 n1 e585 2025
Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and developmentalist approaches, which privilege oral and written discourse and often position these students as less capable of performing complex literacy practices. Drawing from three independent ethnographic studies, our multimodal interactional analysis examines how students of a range of ages and raciolinguistic backgrounds use embodied actions and other semiotic resources to agentively navigate text, task, and ideological constraints in activities involving reading and analyzing texts. Our analysis demonstrates the crucial role of students' embodied practices in expanding upon and challenging the constraints of literacy activities, focusing particularly on how students leveraged epistemic stance-taking, embodied affective responses, and embodied forms of argumentation to negotiate and co-construct meaning. Through a focus on embodied agency, this paper presents and applies an interactional perspective on the embodied nature of literacy activities; shows how students' creative mobilizations of embodied and other semiotic resources contribute to their critical readings of texts; and offers pedagogical and methodological implications for ways educators and researchers can attend to the intricacies of students' embodied sense-making in literacy activities.
Descriptors: Literacy, Constructivism (Learning), Learning Activities, Public Schools, Grade 2, Grade 6, Grade 11, Common Core State Standards, Elementary Secondary Education, Learner Engagement, Personal Autonomy, Reading Instruction, Minority Group Students, Reader Text Relationship, Racial Differences, Language Variation
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education; Grade 2; Primary Education; Grade 6; Intermediate Grades; Middle Schools; Grade 11; High Schools; Secondary Education; Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: California
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A