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In today's digital world, we have multiple modes of meaning-making: sounds, images, hypertexts. Yet, within literacy education, even 'new' literacies, we know relatively little about how to work with and produce modally complex texts. In Working with Multimodality, Jennifer Rowsell focuses on eight modes: words, images, sounds, movement, animation, hypertext, design and modal learning. Throughout the book each mode is illustrated by cases studies based on the author's interviews with thirty people, who have extensive experience working with a mode in their field. From a song writer to a well known ballet dancer, these people all discuss what it means to do multimodality well. This accessible textbook brings the multiple modes together into an integrated theory of multimodality. Step-by-step, beginning with theory then exploring modes and how to work with them, before concluding with how to apply this in an investigation, each stage of working with multimodality is covered. Working with Multimodality will help students and scholars to: * Think about specific modes and how they function * Consider the implications for multimodal meaning-making * Become familiar with conventions and folk knowledge about given modes * Apply this same knowledge to their own production of media texts in classrooms Assuming no prior knowledge about multimodality and its properties, Working with Multimodality is designed to appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in how learning and innovation is different in a digital and media age and is an essential textbook for courses in literacy, new media and multimodality within applied linguistics , education and communication studies.

For literacy educators, there is a need to understand students’ pathways into composition and mediate contemporary, multimodal compositional pathways with more academic ones. In an effort to mediate between middle and high school students’ schooling and curricular demands and their everyday interests and investments in media and communicational systems, the author offers educators a way to frame composition that attends to the potential and affordances of multiple modes of expression and representation. Combining affect theory with Arendt's writings on thinking and embodiment, the author presents a research study with adolescents who made stances in selfies, self‐portraits, and written artist statements that are indicative of new rhetorical and compositional practices. Stance, as a construct in modern compositions, represents the ways that young people interface with ideas and experiences within the world that materialize in and animate their designs. Stance provides young people with a space to tell the stories they want to tell through media and mediums of their choosing.

The history of this special issue takes us back to the richness of conversations and the feelings of solidarity that we experienced during a symposium held at Brock University in October 2017.1 What stood out during the event was not so much ideas, although there were many good ones, but an esprit de corps felt by the group about the future of literacy research in politically charged, media-driven times. There were papers on the politics of literacy and inclusion, collaborative partnerships and spaces, feminist and participatory youth cultures, affect, and arts methods. There were artists, Indigenous prayers accompanied by movement, and a range of maker activities. It was a memorable event filled with conversations inspired by varied histories and epistemologies, and many of the above themes are present in articles featured in this special issue. The rationale behind foregrounding the politics of literacy in the special issue resides in our desire to maintain an overall sense of activism and political action around and within notions of literacy. The phenomenon of being moved by change unites all of the articles and visual essays within the journal issue. A core text guiding all of the papers, implicitly or explicitly, is Sara Ahmed’s (2017) Living a Feminist Life. It is our ambitious hope that this special issue contributes to larger movements for change (Campbell, Pahl, Pente, & Rasool, 2018; Facer & Pahl, 2017; Ranciere, 2010; Tuhiwai Smith, Tuck, & Wang, 2019). Thinking about Ahmed’s (2017) affirmation of the 20th century feminist mantra that “the personal is political” (p. 3), as editors of this special issue, we hope that it creates a more textured sense of how people express political convictions through literacy in their everyday lives. Like Ahmed (2017), who says “feminism is wherever feminism needs to be. Feminism needs to be everywhere” (p. 3), we have witnessed the politics of literacy in environments that tend to be bracketed off from the political, such as domestic spaces, community hubs, remote classrooms, and higher education policies. In this sense, feminism is not gender-specific or even human-specific (i.e., it can be posthuman and more-than-human as seen in the work of Braidotti, 2013, and Barad, 2007). Feminism is a lived practice that everyone can engage in; it is about retracing and rewriting histories, being aware, informed, and engaged, and supporting people on the margins. Ahmed (2017) speaks of reorienting worlds and putting different slants on things. One example is watching who we cite and being mindful about decentralizing historically privileged knowledge in our citations in order to highlight scholarly practice that is explicitly decolonial. In other words, citational politics is one medium or avenue through which we can accomplish such reorientations; we must vigilantly watch who we cite. Living a feminist life is about how we challenge, question, and contest the ordinary. Literacy studies has a history of spearheading such efforts of contestation (Luke & Woods, 2009), and the research spotlighted in this special issue pushes forcefully for this conviction and for more politically charged literacy work.

In this article, the authors explore mapping as a pedagogical approach. Drawn from two literacy classrooms, the authors report on five empirical examples of mapping, elucidating the ways in which mapping activities were sites of dynamic meaning-making through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In both cases of mapping pedagogy, participants used mapping to interrogate texts, reflect on experiences, express identity, and locate emotions as language learners and readers. Employing visual analysis to ‘think with theory,’ the authors provide a coordinate plane to map the pedagogical dimensions of mapping across the five empirical examples. The authors illustrate the ways students gravitated across a continuum of literal to metaphorical visual depictions of their learning and life experiences. This inquiry offers new ways of theorizing thematic mapping of learning and experience for classroom practice.

This is a collaborative ethnographic research project that highlights the artistic, literary contributions of racially diverse young men. It uses Critical Race Theory to question conventional, Eurocentric educational approaches that historically and currently continue to suppress various socially and culturally learned modes of communication. This article presents two research projects in urban and suburban formal and informal educational institutions to highlight multimodal literary approaches. The first project is an amalgamation of two critical, ethnographic case studies that explores how racially diverse young men express their literacy through rap and spoken word poetry. The second project uses ethnographic methods to observe racially diverse young men’s production of films and photographs in high school, community centers, and art gallery spaces. This study uses visual methods coupled with affect and sensory-laden approaches to collect data and conduct an analysis. The article reflects on conversations surrounding young men, particularly racialized young men, their relationship with literacy, and how these conversations are founded on their failure and deficit language about their literacy repertoires. We believe that such research is closely tied with other social justice themes and modes of inquiry. This article steers away from the ways racialized young men do not use literacy, and focuses instead on the ways that they do use literacy. Their literacy practices are predominantly visual in nature, frequently accompanied by other modes such as words and moving images. Fitting within the scope of the special issue on social justice and visual methods, we argue for a greater acknowledgement and analytical gaze on sensory and affective nuances within visual research. This approach adds texture and volume to interpreting racialized young men’s narratives. Interrogating their visuals and talking through their narratives that have agentive qualities gives both researchers an awareness of young men’s emotional worlds, and how the visual allows for sense-laden, agentive meaning-making.

THE COMMENTARY argues for an understanding of how texts are put together that accounts for multimodality and draws on children's ways of being and doing in the home, their habitus. It focuses on identities as socially situated. It argues that it is important to trace the process of sedimenting identities during text production. This offers a way of viewing text production that can inform research into children's text making. Particular attention is paid to the producer, contexts, and practices used during text production and how the text becomes an artifact that holds important information about the meaning maker. Four case studies describe sedimented identities as a lens through which to see a more nuanced perspective on meaning making. This work offers a lens for research and practice in that it enables researchers to question and interrogate the way texts come into being. /// ESTE COMENTARIO apunta a la comprensión de un tipo de organización textual que dé cuenta de la diversidad de modos y considere las formas del ser y del hacer de los niños en el hogar, su habitus. Se pone el acento en las identidades en cuanto socialmente situadas. Se argumenta que es importante indagar en el proceso de consolidación de las identidades durante la producción de textos. Esto ofrece una manera de ver la producción textual que podría dar información acerca de la elaboración de textos por parte de los niños. Se presta particular atención al productor, contextos y prácticas usadas durante la producción textual y a cómo el texto se convierte en un artefacto que contiene información importante acerca del generador de significados. Cuatro estudios de caso describen identidades consolidadas como una lente a través de la cual puede tenerse una perspectiva más matizada de la construcción del significado. Este trabajo ofrece una lente para ver la investigación y la práctica de un modo que permita a los investigadores cuestionar e interrogar la forma en que surgen los textos. /// DER KOMMENTAR argumentiert für ein Verstehen wie Texte zusammengestellt werden, die für die Multimodalität bestimmend sind und bezieht sich auf die Art und Weise wie sich Kinder im Hause, ihrem Habitus, geben und was sie unternehmen. Man konzentriert sich auf gesellschaftlich festgesetzte Identitäten. Es wird argumentiert, dass es wesentlich ist, den Verlauf des Sedimentierens von Identitäten während der Texterstellung zurückzuverfolgen. Dies bieter eine Möglichkeit die Texterstellung zu beurteilen, welche die Erforschung bei der Erstellung von Kindertexten informativ beeinflussen kann. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird dem Verfasser, den Inhalten und den während der Texterstellung angewandten Praktiken geschenkt, und wie der Text zu einem kreativen Schrifterzeugnis wird, das ebenfalls wichtige Informationen über dessen Sinnkonstrukteur beinhaltet. Vier Fallstudien beschreiben sedimentierte Identitäten als eine Art Optik, durch die man eine wesentlich nuanziertere Perspektive zur Sinnkonstruktion erkennt. Dieses Werk bietet eine solche Optik zum Betrachten von Forschung und Praxis, wobei es die Forscher in die Lage versetzt, die Art und Weise wie Texte entstehen, in Frage zu stellen und zu untersuchen. /// [Abstract in Japanese]. /// CE TEXTE essaie de comprendre comment les textes sont mis ensemble pour rendre compte de la multimodalité, et esquisse les manières d'être et de faire des enfants à la maison, leur habitus. Il se centre sur les identitées en tant qu'elles sont socialement situées. Il soutient qu'il est important de suivre le processus de sédimentation des identités au cours de la production de texte. Ceci ouvre une perspective sur la production de texte qui peut informer la recherche sur la façon dont les enfants font un texte. Une attention particulière est apportée au producteur, aux contextes, et aux pratiques mises en œuvre pendant la production du texte et à la façon dont un texte devient un objet construit comportant une information importante sur celui qui fabrique le sens. Dans quatre études de cas on présente les identités sédimentées comme une loupe qui permet d'avoir une perspective plus nuancée sur la fabrication du sens. Ce travail apporte une loupe considérant la recherche et la pratique comme permettant aux chercheurs de mettre en question et d'interroger la façon dont les textes arrivent à l'existence. /// [Abstract in Russian(Cyrillic)].

Building on existing research applying app maps (Israelson, ), the authors take an ideological orientation to broaden app evaluations and consider participatory literacies, social and communicational practices relevant to children's everyday digitally mediated lives. Drawing from their North American elementary classroom studies on children's technology play with iPads, the authors compare four typical literacy practices with apps: practicing a skill, reading an e‐book, animating a film, and designing an interactive world. A rubric and radar charts are introduced to help teachers assess and visualize educational apps’ potential to develop six dimensions of participatory literacies: multiplayer, productive, multimodal, multilinear, pleasurable, and connected. The authors conclude with a push for broadened definitions and looser frameworks.