Transcript
Lalitha Vasudevan:
My name is Lalitha Vasudevan. I'm a professor of technology and education here at Teachers College and also the Vice Dean for Digital Innovation. And along with many of my colleagues who are here, oversee the work of the Digital Futures Institute. You are in our innovation space right now, specifically in the DFI Gallery. We are here to celebrate the work of five of our alums who have done really innovative work that sits at the intersection of both multidimensional inquiry and multimodal practices and methods. We're going to have a chance to talk with them, but I just want to point out to you that you're actually sitting in the gallery that features their work.
The DFI Gallery is one piece of a larger set of resources and opportunities for people who are interested in multimodal scholarship. So what we try to do at Teachers College, but also with our partners at other institutions, is to continue to think about ways that we can explore the nature of knowledge construction and how the nature of knowing is evolving and changing as we have different tools with which to inquire, with which to raise questions, with which to better understand the social and cultural worlds that we inhabit and inquire about. And we are excited to have as part of this ongoing multimodal scholarship series, and I think this brings this academic years series to a close, is this panel discussion with these five colleagues who I'll briefly introduce in a moment and then you'll hear a little bit more from each of them.
To my immediate left is Brian Mooney, who graduated a few years ago, and his exhibition using sound and music is right over there. We have Ileana...
Ileana Jimenez:
Jimenez.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Jimenez. I'm sorry, I was going to call her someone else. Ileana whose work is right here. You'll see some really interesting use of video and embodiment in this work. We have Kristin Gorski, whose work is over there, and Kristin graduated a little while ago. I had the great benefit of being on her dissertation many moons ago, really looking at young people's practices in response to note-taking and sense-making in their work. Lucius Von Joo, whose work is represented in this lovely 3D printed artifact who did a study of adventure playgrounds and really trying to understand the work of play and the work of media representations in thinking about how young people play. And we have Dagmar. Dagmar, forgot your last name.
Dagmar Spain:
Spain.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Spain. Who looked at dance and embodiment and you'll hear more of her work and we're actually in her exhibition space right now.
Lucius Von Joo:
It will be reset after the-
Lalitha Vasudevan:
So you'll get a sense of it. It's very cool. So I'm going to start actually with Dagmar and we're going to have everybody say a little bit about the nature of multimodality in their project and a little bit about their project as well. So Dagmar, will you start us off with that?
Dagmar Spain:
All right. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I am Zooming in from Frankfurt, Germany, and my dissertation was using a lot of dance and movements and I was just thinking about this panel today. So whoever is listening today, I think it's important that multimodality is really multi-sensory and I think that was why I felt, as a former dancer and dance educator and choreographer, that some of my dissertation has to represent that. So the multimodality was coming out of that need of feeling that just not just textual work, but there has to be something more to it. So I use, in my dissertation, movements. I do use visual images. I also do use some music tracks, also the audible senses and also I use obviously text. In many ways these modalities as my dissertation was very much in focusing on the dialogic space and how that manifests in research and how through that, research actually evolves in a different path.
I wanted to see how these sensory modalities do not just be there, which is nice, but how they actually communicate with each other. So it was for me important to have the movement respond to the text, to have music respond to the movement, and to have images also being an inspiration for movement. So in this way it was always this continuous dialogue. I'm not sure how long I have for this introduction. I will not talk too long about it. But I think what's important, and when I think about my journey and my dissertation, that this multimodality came out of a need. It wasn't something technically that I wanted to do because it's great to do it and we have a lot of technology nowadays, but it came actually out of an inner need to bring more perspectives to a human being. My dissertation, it was called Embodied Dialogic Spaces as we chose research methodology and in that, former dance students reflected on their dance education.
And I wanted that reflection to really be from these different perspectives, and in that way more inclusive. I often talk about the life world, which is a term that's used sometimes in research that I feel more a fuller life world of my participants and that I can grasp. What was also important that I, as a researcher, was doing the same modalities with my participants. So I was a complete participant myself, and often I talk about my participants were researchers and I was the researcher participant. In this exchange, it became very lively. I want to just give you, for example, we created I call them somatic dance narratives based on interviews that I conducted, so like texts that my participants highlighted and then they generate movements from that. I know there are obviously dancers, but I think it is not just necessary to be so skilled in movement.
I think it is more a way of imagination to see how text also can be felt embodied and can be expressed embodied. So my research methodology was important that this dialogue and this multimodality was in the research collection process, in the research analysis process and also in the research reporting process. So, you're sitting in the space right now, the panel, so hopefully you get a chance to maybe move with the dancers on screen and see how different we perceive others when we communicate through movement rather than just through words and through speech. So I think this is more or less what I wanted to add to research that this embodiment and other senses can also find their place in research.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Dagmar, thank you so much because I think you touched on a few things that is really at the root of why we have done this kind of series over the last couple of years. And it's really thinking about the importance of this concept multimodality that is bringing different modes of seeing and noticing and representing together not only to create outputs at the end, which sometimes people do, but also to think about how it shapes the way we're able to see, what we're able to notice, who we're able to into the knowledge-making space of research. So I really love how you kind of invited us into that space from the beginning. Lucius, talk to us a little bit about your project.
Lucius Von Joo:
So my mind's racing because of all of these elements and thinking through it, but I think something Dagmar you gave me and helped me pause for a second is how you were saying the need or the urge for it. My dissertation was about adventure playgrounds, and the reason those are even a place that got me excited is I was looking at... It's a place where children have a moment of altering who makes decisions and what's imagined in the world, and if you've never seen them... Sorry, this takes a little bit of background story, but they're basically curated junkyards that children create anything they can imagine. So if they imagine a slide being there, it's there. If they don't want it there, they saw it down or they knock it down and they rebuild it and it's just this constant evolution of space, and so they've been around for about 70 years. They're really interesting. There's one on Governors Island here in New York.
But even encountering that and seeing children play and seeing a space where children play and seeing a space where adults have made efforts to allow that to happen and to give agency over, I started... I was an elementary school teacher for a long time and a lot of that is about controlling a space and this one is... And you learn about low and high visibility, but to watch professionals who spend their whole day focused on low visibility and letting children be the center of that space, it was just like, "Okay, this is a story that I really want to think through." There's so many other elements, but basically what I wrote about in the dissertation, I played with three different articles to really hear each voice. And so there was a children's voice that I actually...
I put out a couple posters today, but normally I'll talk about what's here normally. What I did was thinking through Tran Templeton's work and Wendy Luttrell's work. Anyway, what I was thinking through is how a child who you say, "Hey, what does this place look like?" They're going to describe to you what you hope them to, but I would give a camera over to them and be like, "I don't know this space, can you go photograph what you care about here?" And I was really aware of the fact that I didn't want to bring too much technology into these spaces because there's a lot of analog, there's a lot of tangible in these spaces. So I didn't want to bring in a lot of cameras or things that would become the focal point, so it was like a point and shoot kind of camera.
They would bring it back to me. I had a small printer. They would print it about this big and I'd be like, "This is amazing, but what were you seeing?" And they would draw on top of it. Then I would take that to other playgrounds. My research was New York, two cities in Japan and two in California. I would bring those large posters and they would go from place to place where children would talk to each other through illustration in those pictures and they would have all these threads, like have a look at them later but there were so many different things that emerged. I really wanted to focus on that as a single paper of just hearing what the children were saying to each other. But I think with multimodality, for me, there's a weight of ethics of people, if I interview them in a traditional sense, they might be guarded. They might have a feeling. They might be performative. Whatever it is, there's a familiarity there that that's being documented in research.
So for me, I needed to make a balance in that methodology where kids knew that I was seeing it, but who their audience was--that it was other kids, other players. They knew I was eavesdropping on their conversation with each other, and so that's the first paper is just what emerged. The second paper or the first, whichever, was looking at the space. And for me, again, when I write anything thinking through posthumanism, it's always you're writing the humans. You kind of center humans no matter what, and it's like there's a metric of the human in it. So I tried to write it just about space, which obviously it's so human imprinted, which is part of posthumanism. But anyway, I did the linguistic landscape of those places and so I looked at all the markings and what that meant.
If you have a place that children are supposed to have agency, what does that mean in signage? For example, if you walk through corridors of a school and you're like, "Oh, there's children's art." But then you see adults' words chiseled in concrete, and then children's words very ephemerally laid on it. So I was just curious, how does that language exist in those spaces? And so that was looking at the space. The last, but one of several to come I'm sure, paper was focusing on the facilitators and what it meant. Even with them, I thought of Sandra Smith's work where she does critical cartography and I would look at... I basically just etched the map of their space and they would draw images of what that felt like and have memories by drawing. They would narrate to me while they were remembering and mark this place.
But it was important to me that it was different than the players methodology. It was interesting. There'd be older players because some of these places, because of their flexibility to play, there's people up to 22 who still see it as child's play there but they wouldn't feel comfortable doing one methodology, so they'd ask for the other. It was interesting. It was like a graduation. Even though they're both super valid, but anyway, it was just very interesting when you play with tons of modes. While writing about all this, which it was a three article dissertation, I just kept being, as Dagmar said, this urge and need to express it in a different way. That people, that it had their work firsthand and that it had this kind of explosion for people to see all the transparency of what I was looking at, so it ended up in an exhibit.
So it was here, and that was part of my defense and my panel was really kind with their time. They came up within the two weeks beforehand and just walked around for about an hour each. So when I was doing my defense, obviously it wasn't narrating every space, but it was I could come in here and just situate it. I could say, "Look at these three voices." And just show it spatially and show how it was spread out. And so when it came to this, I was like, "Well, it was here. How do I do a reenactment of that?"
And so for the piece, we put together a quick kind of just model of the space so that it was, again, playing with spatial awareness and playing with how quickly you can spread ideas. And I thought the overview would allow that, like a quick interaction without going into as many minutes as I probably took just now to explain all those nuances. But it was just, again, I think these pieces are one response to a really layered... All of these dissertations are so layered, so it's one response to something that we see in it. Sorry, I'm a maker and... Yeah, anyway, so not to confuse you. Yeah.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
The thing that's really nice about this is that you're going to have a chance to interact with not only the pieces, but also the people. But I appreciate that Lucia's also introduced the sort of importance of the analog and the non-digital in our conversation about multimodal, because I think there's a tendency to think multimodal equals digital or multimodal equals media--electronic or digital media. And all of these dissertations attended to multimodal as this multifaceted multi-material multimedia entity. They were pointing to and harnessing the affordances or the capacities of different tools, different spaces, different platforms, as you'll see in trying to investigate really broad, but also substantive questions about various social phenomenon. And so thinking about embodied knowledge as Dagmar was talking about, Lucia was talking about play and the invitation to remake yourself with the material conditions of a space, leads nicely into Kristin's work that she'll talk about.
Kristin Gorski:
Thank you very much. It's been great to hear Dagmar and Lucia's talk and bring these other aspects of multimodality to the fore for all of you, because I'm kind of... I want to start with my project, but I also want to address what you said, but hopefully I'll get to all of it. My dissertation was part of a three-year Institute for Education Sciences-funded grant. I was really fortunate to be on this project that was based on building a bilingual web space for middle school English learners, incorporating multimodality and multiple modes from the get-go. We designed a space. Year one was designated to pilot the web space and design it with students as the user experience kind of designers. It was a co-conversation with them. Year two, we implemented the web space that we designed with the students, with students in middle schools in New York City where they could actually use it and learn about social studies topics.
Then year three, we iterated the space even further and brought it back to the students with another group and let them use it and have more conversations. With each year we had different types of data collection, we had different types of technology involved as we iterated the space and thought about bringing in other modes, we had to bring in new technologies and new software as a new ways to capture data. So from that perspective, it was really interesting to look at multimodality driving all of this and then also how we help the students learn different concepts around social studies topics. Because we had this bilingual web space, Spanish and English, we had a digital notepad that actually one of the students came up with in the first year. They said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could have a digital notepad? We could drag it around the screen?" And we're like, "Yeah, exactly. That's what we're going to do." So the programmers on the team designed it.
The students were able to go into this web space and toggle between English and Spanish. They were able to open up as many resources as they wanted, whether they were text, video, images, transcriptions of speeches, maps, and position them all around the screen. One part that I'll highlight that I featured heavily in the cases in my dissertation, so I didn't have a multimodal dissertation per se, but I use multimodal transcripts, is that I would use a screen capture that we did in year three. We had a software called iShowU. It's still around. It's from a company called shinywhitebox, and it simultaneously records the screen and has a camera on the students. So you can see them talk through things, you can see the interactions with the instructors as they walk around.
You can see how they will type a note, un-type the note, re-type the note, position boards in different ways all around the screen, sometimes talk things out to themselves, talk with their friends. We let them work together in the space also. So, my case has kind of captured a lot of this note-taking process. The conclusions were, I can say in the summary, I felt as soon as I got done with the dissertation, I wanted to go back in. I was like, "I now realize where I need to go." We kind of had this conversation before and it was like, "Oh, but now I need to go further."
But one thing that was really captured by the screen capture and looking at all these modes is that often what the teachers thought was going on with the students' writing process was a bit of what was actually going on. And then what the students were able to just share by being on-screen and talking so freely about their process really gave all of us a lot of insights as a team of researchers to see what was really going on with how students interpreted multimodal resources. There's the encoding part where you're kind of looking at something and you're taking a note and you're storing it for later, and then there's this external storage part of note-taking, but it was a really rich window into how students thought about topics.
They also talked emotionally about connecting with photos of people going through events of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and '60s. That was a big topic. So, to have this connection also to people and historical events we were able to capture in the screen recording. Hope that shares a little bit about it, and happy to answer any questions at that point.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Well, I want to mark that Kristin also introduced the idea of co-design, and you have an element of that with all three so far. This idea that when you build things or when you create and co-produce things with other people, with your participants, there is this kind of collaborative effort that underlies a lot of the sense-making and knowledge making. I think the other piece that I want to just point out is people use the word multimodal in other disciplinary practices. One example is multimodal learning analytics, so we've seen this and there the emphasis is on there's so much more types of data that we can now analyze using automated tools. Here you're actually looking at five people who are taking another cut into multimodality where it doesn't have to be inherently participatory. But John Jackson, who gave the Sachs lecture here several years ago, he points out how the inclination and orientation toward multimodal knowledge-making invites greater participation, invites greater democratization of knowledge production. So, there is that kind of thread that you're seeing emerging in these. Ileana.
Ileana Jimenez:
This is amazing. You were talking earlier about you do your dissertation in so much isolation and then you graduate and you get hooded and then you walk away and you don't actually get to have a conversation with the people who have been through this process. So I just really appreciate just the space. Maybe we can say the question again just for people who have just walked in.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Do you want me to say it or do you want to say it?
Ileana Jimenez:
Yes, that would be great.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
So what we are inviting our panelists to do as a kind of initial introduction to their work is to talk about their project, but also to talk about the nature of multimodality in their project.
Ileana Jimenez:
Okay, great. Maybe I'll start with what you can see in the next exhibit over. What you can see there is a blog. It's basically shots of a feminist blog that came out of a course that I used to teach as a high school teacher. I was a high school English teacher for 26 years. During those 26 years, I taught a course that was very important to me on women of color feminisms, intersectionality, Black and Latina feminisms. That was kind of the core focus of this high school elective that I used to teach at a school right here in New York City Downtown and a small progressive school. The students who took this course were juniors and seniors, and so they elected to take this class. They were voluntarily in this class. As I moved along my career as a high school English teacher or something that I started to notice was that because I was bringing women's and gender studies as a field to the high school English classroom, what I noticed was that every time I went to a teacher conference, I couldn't find other people who were feminist teachers alongside me.
I wound up noticing that I was creating these sessions and offering these sessions and teacher spaces like conferences, and noticing that I was one of maybe two people who were offering feminist pedagogical sessions. And so I started to get frustrated and I wanted to find community in other feminist conference convening. So I started to go to women's and gender studies, like actual academic conferences with women's and gender studies professors. Then I also started going to women's and gender studies like feminist media conferences, feminist journalists for example. What I learned in these spaces is that people were engaging in, and this is the 2000s, feminist blogging. So in the 2000s there was this whole feminist blogosphere, and blogging in general was very popular, but the feminist blogosphere was particularly engaged, thoughtful, political, contributing to a kind of discourse that I wanted to be a part of and that I wanted my students to be a part of.
So the more that I attended these feminist academic conferences and feminist media conferences, the more I wanted to bring that world into the high school classroom. What I did was I experimented first with my own feminist blog, which became feministteacher.com. For a while I just kind of generated my own blog post just to see what is it like to be a feminist blogger as a teacher online. Then once I became comfortable with that for about a year, I introduced the idea of feminist blogging to my high school students in this class I mentioned earlier, which is this women of color feminism's class, intersectionality of Black and Latina feminism's class. What I was trying to do in that space was break the contract that students, high school students in particular, are going to generate the high school English five paragraph essay handed into the teacher, the teacher grades it, gives it back.
I was tired of that. And so I said, "I don't want to do this anymore. I want to create a space where students write publicly, and I want them to do it in a space that is contributing to an actual discourse that's happening. Not one that I've created, but one that they can actually contribute to." For me, that was the world I kind of learned, not discovered, but learned about through these feminist media conferences. And so we created, this blog no longer exists, but there used to be a very popular feminist blog called Feministing. If you follow Jessica Valenti, who does a lot of reproductive choice, reproductive justice, Substack and TikToks now and Reels, she was a part of the original Feministing team. They essentially made feminist politics and writing and there were other blogs out there too. There was the Crunk Feminist Collective. There was just a range of feminist blogs out there.
But I invited editors from Feministing to come into my classroom and to teach my students, how do we create a blog of our own? How do we create a feminist blog of our own so that we can contribute to feminist discourse as young people? So that's what you see in this exhibit here, which is essentially a twelve-year digital archive. We started this in 2010, fall of 2010, and then when I... I'm 50 now, but last year or a couple of years ago when I retired from high school English teaching, the blog ended in 2022. So it's a twelve-year archive of blog posts that my students generated in this class. The whole idea of it was that I wanted them to move from theory to praxis, as Bell Hooks says, which is they were reading feminist theory in the classroom, unpacking it, close reading in the way that you would do in any high school English classroom.
But in particular, what we were doing was saying, "How does feminist theory apply to ourselves, our own identities, our own positionalities, our own engagements with race and class and gender and sexuality and all the isms, marginalization, oppression, privilege, power systems?" So we would unpack that, and then I would ask them, "Okay, now how do you apply theory to something you care about?" And so they wrote about sexual harassment, they wrote about reproductive choice, they wrote about the Hillary Clinton-Trump election cycle. They wrote about many, many things over the course of 12 years, and that's what you'll see here. You can actually interact with the entire archive on the pad that's on the table. And I was so impressed, Lucius, you set this up so beautifully, which is that the blog was intentionally set up to be public. I think in 2010, there were still teachers out there who were maybe still shy of inviting their students to do public digital work because you never knew who was going to find it if there were going to be trolls.
And I did get trolled. Over the years, there were all kinds of women hating sites that would say, "Oh, this teacher is trying to teach young people to be haters against men," et cetera. But in actuality, what was happening on this space was the development of critical consciousness, critical thinking through feminist theory and praxis. You'll see that the students have such a wide range of blog posts over the course of 12 years, and sometimes what you'll also see is that there were moments in feminist digital history where certain memes or hashtags would become very popular. Sometimes if you scroll enough, you'll see that there was a time in the 2000s when Twitter, when it was a kind space, used to have a hashtag called #INeedFeminismBecause or #INeedFeminism. I see nods in the back because I know that you know this feminist history online, which is like #INeedFeminism.
And so if you keep scrolling, you'll see the students actually holding signs, #INeedFeminism. So one of the things we were doing was not only that the students were creating their own blog posts and digital activism on the subjects that they cared about, but they were also responding to the actual online moments that were happening. So they were actually contributing to that. We also had people who commented on their blog. Since it was a public blog, people would find the blog, write comments. Again, as a teacher, sometimes there were comments that I would not want my students to have. Some of them were vitriolic, but I would say most of them, the majority of the comments that came in were super positive, encouraging, supportive, contributing to the discourse the students were contributing online. We actually had a couple of famous commenters come on and find the blog.
It was just one of these kind of spaces that I felt was important for the students to engage in public pedagogies, particularly through digital feminist activism. And so for the dissertation, I feel like I haven't answered the dissertation part, but I'll say that quickly. For the dissertation, what I did was I only chose maybe two blog posts from 12 years worth of what we would call now data. But from 12 years worth of blog posts, I chose two. Those two became part of a three-article dissertation. Similar to Lucia's, also wrote a three-article dissertation.
In my first article I wrote about what is feminist pedagogy from a intersectional women of color feminist point of view, and then articles two and three were about the two separate blog posts that I chose and the students who wrote about them and how they drew from Black and Latina feminist theory to read themselves and their identities and their political stances and the kinds of stances they were taking in their digital activism. So that was the structure of the three articles was my own work as a feminist pedagogue, and then the students as feminist bloggers, feminist digital activists, and how they were moving from theory to praxis
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Ileana, it's such a great example of how a platform can give rise to certain embodied practices. And so you yourself, as a blogger, creating that relationship developed practices. And I think it's interesting to also think about how those public discursive practices got embodied in your pedagogical practice and then gave rise to the conditions you created for your inquiry. So I think that kind of arc and thinking about the affordances of platforms is really interesting, which I think is a good way to go right to Brian about platforms and what they afford.
Brian Mooney:
Sure. I first want to say, I'm so jealous that Kristin had a team of programmers that were able to help you with your dissertation. I'm like, if every doctoral student who was doing multimodal work had a team of programmers, I'm like so jealous. Anyway, that's amazing. But for my work, I had to figure out some platforms. I had to learn some. I don't have a lot of background in coding. Ultimately, what I created was an album with liner notes. For those of you who remember liner notes, if you're old enough, they used to come with a CD or a record and so the texts are these songs that I co-constructed with my participant collaborators. The liner notes are a place where I was able to talk about the tracks and provide some of the contextual work and theoretical work and talk about epistemology and my methodology. And so talking around these musical compositions. And I say the word composition intentionally, right? Me too as an English teacher of 10 years, not 20, so that's good. I give you your flowers for that. 10 years.
Ileana Jimenez:
You're right.
Brian Mooney:
I'm constantly thinking about the many different literacies and ways of reading and writing the world to use Paulo Freire's terminology. In this project, I was composing with digital and media literacies and ultimately what was created was an album. But I want to say that it was born of a need as well. For me, the need was how do I represent the voices of these youth poets who I worked with as their teacher in a poetry slam? How do I not unflatten their experience, to use Nick Sousanis term? And that raised a lot of questions and tensions for me. When I thought back, and I love hearing teachers who are so passionate about the work that they were obsessed with and that was the phenomena that you couldn't go to sleep without thinking about. For me, that was this poetry slam space where hundreds of poets over 10 years performed original spoken word pieces.
The sounds of that space were so important to me. The snaps were from the audience, right? The hmms and uhs and even the sound of a microphone thud, those things could not be authentically represented with the written word on the page. For that reason, I needed to embrace a sonic approach in this dissertation and sound is how I make sense of the world in lots of ways. I'm a DJ and a beat maker for 10 or 15 years, and so I'm constantly playing with different softwares and technologies and working with young people who often would come into the classroom and knowing how to create a track in a complicated software program like Ableton Live. And so I leaned heavily on technologies like Ableton Live, which is a digital audio workstation. People use it to produce music, edit podcasts, et cetera.
Then the text, the digital text with the liner notes was created with Adobe InDesign because I could embed audio, I could overlay images, I could play with the way the text was formatted. This idea of the analog in conversation with the digital is really fascinating to me because while I used many digital tools and capacities, it was rooted in the most analog thing of all, which is humans sitting in a room telling each other stories. I asked my participant collaborators this question when we reflected back on their experiences in this youth poetry slam. The question that I remember most profoundly was, what do these experiences sound like to you? And to hear the responses to that question were fascinating.
I was drawing also on Cynthia Dillard's way of thinking about remembering and recomposing and to remember something put it back together, which is a lot of what happens with sampling and hip hop culture and this remixing. So I was drawn to fields like remix studies and sound studies and people who were thinking about those intersections. I've since gone down a rabbit hole of thinking about sound more deeply in part thanks to some amazing mentors who are on my committee and who are here today too, and it has led me to a place where I'm looking at different channels and mediums and avenues to submit things like audio papers and to submit digital web texts to peer reviewed platforms. So I'm grateful that the process didn't begin and end here at TC, that we could take this work out into the world and share it with others and for beautiful spaces like this that are co-constructed, right?
That intention to co-construct these songs with my participants was very intentional. I was drawing on Afrocentric and indigenous theories and ways of knowing that were community-based and oriented. I wanted to go beyond member checking to share a song with them and say, "What did I get right or wrong?" To me, member checking can be so superficial. I asked myself the question, what have I made with others that I feel a certain way about? In my years of teaching, what did I make? And so we made these songs together. I would send them versions of it, they would send it back to me. They would send me suggestions for samples from YouTube. Like one of my participants she's from Trinidad and Tobago, and so she was citing this spiritual Baptist tradition. And so she was like, "There's this kind of chanting that happens in these," and she sent me a YouTube video and we sampled it and we weaved it in. Is that the word? We woven it in, weaved it in. English teacher fail, right?
But no, actually weaving is interesting because I think often about the traditions of bricolage and mosaic and yes, weaving and patchwork, and I took a sonic approach to these things. What does a sonic patchwork methodology look like? Recontextualizing bits of audio samples? There's so much more to say about... I was drawing on folks like Derrida who talks about a hauntology sound recordings as a form of hauntology and even narrative approaches like Bakhtin, right? Who uses musical terminology like polyphonic, right? So I won't say any more now because I want to learn more about theirs and just get into a dialogue and conversation, but I just have enjoyed hearing you all and thanks for letting me share about mine for a bit.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
No, I think what we're hearing and seeing, and hopefully you're seeing this too, is that these projects and how they came into being but also what they've given rise to, there's such theoretical and conceptual richness to them in addition to the innovative and creative ways that each of these researchers sought to understand what they were trying to understand. I want to turn now a little bit to something I think several of you have suggested or hinted at, which is the process of doing this. Ileana, you said, "Hey, this is an inherently isolating process, the writing of the dissertation." And suddenly you're in conversation with lots of people who have had shared experiences. So I wonder if you all, and I will leave it up to you all to decide who wants to jump in, if you could think back to the process of doing this, the process of being a student who is dissertating. Have we decided if that's a word yet? Dissertating?
Brian Mooney:
We can make it.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I like it. I like it. Look, I've been using it since I was a dissertating student, so we'll use it. But if you could think back to that period in your life, and I don't just want to think about the highlights and lowlights, but what sits with you or what stays with you about that process? I think if you can say and reflect with an eye toward, you have some folks who are both advising doctoral students in this space, but also are currently or will be doctoral students. What sits with you about that process and I think maybe a sense of what would've been helpful?
Lucius Von Joo:
I can start with what was though.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
That's excellent, Lucius. Thank you.
Lucius Von Joo:
So I think when I did my master's here actually at TC in the Aughts, I left being like, "Okay, that's where scholarship is at." I was a media maker and I was like, "Okay, so my lives separate." I mean, it was... Now I'm reminiscing, so I'm going there. But I happened to take a course and taught by Professor Vasudevan, right? Lalitha was teaching this course.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
[inaudible 00:44:49].
Lucius Von Joo:
No, no. It was Video as Art and it was suddenly I could have my voice that I checked at the door be here, and I just left being like, "What was that?" And it was at the end. It was my last class, and I was like, "Yeah, I could have missed it anyway." And it just haunted me. I became faculty in Japan for 10 years, but I just kept thinking and interacting with Lalitha from a distance, but it was like, "What is going on with multimodality?"
Then Lalitha started the Media and Social Change lab. Lalitha and I did a video of a media festival for a while that led to other media fests for me and things like this and led to this. But anyway, it was that. It was, "Wait, that can happen here!" Then from a distance, I started hearing about Nick's dissertation and being like, "Whoa, it happened?" And it's at TC, right? There's one thing I really like about this place is the first graphic novel dissertation. The second dissertation is [inaudible 00:46:04] in the States. I was like, "Wait, this is happening in scholarship and people are..." Things that I didn't think could happen. So just being in conversation, being like, "All right, I got to get back there and I got to feel that out, and I got to feel out what it means to express yourself and hold other voice and have a dissertation." Like right now it's tickling my brain so heavily to hear all of the ways that all these participants are expressed in this work, and obviously I get to read all these dissertations before putting this work up.
But just all that voice so like with Kristin's that there's the idea that I'm just like, "Yes, this is what multimodality does. People can offer so much more voice in all of this." Anyway, there's a piece in every one, but I'm going to shorten it because I'm getting too excited about this work. But I think that's what helps is having allies who are advocating, like you mentioned John Jackson. People who are moving in those places and representing space that it's like this is happening and it's a quote that haunts me is the it's going to happen. And people can go kicking and screaming as he says, "But it's going to happen." And how we do it and how we embrace it. And for me as a media maker and things like that, that's where I keep mentioning that I want to be there to make sure that the ethics of what it means to share voice with other people and be in that space and move it.
And if it is in the academy, making sure that that's not being harvested, but being listened to and heard and interacted with, I think that for me. And so for me, that helped tremendously. Those interactions with voice, I'll be the... I loved writing my dissertation. I love being in conversation with these people because I was just picturing all of those moments and just seeing kids dive into mud and throw mud at adults' faces. Just these things that I'd never seen before and that I'd never seen alterations like that, and so I think multimodality for me is like embracing that and letting... I didn't bring any mud, so it's not going to be like... But just that idea. I think that helps and knowing and being challenged. Again, it's not like Lalitha's like, "Yeah, go for it." If I was like, "This and this and this." She'd be like, "Yeah, for sure. But how is that represented?"
And I think it's so helpful [inaudible 00:48:45] going to be video at first. It was like but that wasn't the right mode. It wasn't the right mode to represent. It was carrying too much and having to, he explained... Sorry, I'll end after this. But he explained about with video, if you're working with people who you're trying to protect their identity, you have to blur face and what that means to blur face and what that means to represent with compromise. And so it's picking that mode. I think it's like having the people around you to challenge, but feeling safe to share that process, which I think, again, with MSC lab, that's something that I could share process and people can challenge me opposed to me either refining it to the point that nobody's going to disagree or getting it broken apart before I get a chance. So I think that's the help. Sorry, I'm a heavy optimist in all this because I'm just excited that the change happened, but that's the help. But I think there's definitely struggles.
Ileana Jimenez:
I think what I would build on what Lucius just saying just in terms of I love this question about process because I think I keep thinking about my process in many ways a year out. I know there's doctoral students in the room, so there's probably some people in the room wondering what's the difference between choosing the three article format versus five, and then how do we layer on this multimodal piece? And I really love what you said earlier about multimodal doesn't necessarily mean entirely media or entirely a podcast or entirely sound or video or whatever. It can be different kinds of materials and ephemera that you're working with. So I kind of want to hit those notes. But the first logistical note I want to share into the room, especially for doctoral students, is how did I come to choose the format of a three-article dissertation?
I started my TC journey at 43. I'm 50 now, and I graduated last year. One of the things that happened during my first year, which was the 2018/19 school year, was that I just happened to open a graduate newsletter from the English Language Arts Teacher Educators Group, which the acronym is ELATE and ELATE is a part of NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English. So ELATE sent out this graduate student newsletter as a PDF file in an email and I opened it one day in the spring of 2019, my very first year at TC. I was just reading it just to see what's the conversation right now for graduate students who are doing the work of teacher ed in English education. I was scrolling and I just happened to see a small inset article about a student who had just finished writing a three-article dissertation at the University of Georgia, which is, that format is actually very popular there.
When I first started here, the three-article dissertation, particularly in English ed, wasn't very popular. I think I was one of the first as well as other... There was one other person in my cohort who also wrote a three-article. As I was reading it, I was thinking this could be the answer to, or a kind of not solution, but a kind of thinking through my work that could be a way to think through a 26-year career and to make it more accessible--this is my naivety at the time--a more accessible way to think through my 26-year career and to think through this digital archive that I knew I was going to write about. And I thought, "Wow, I'm also 43. I don't want to transform a traditional five-chapter dissertation into a book. How am I going to do that immediately after I graduate? Or how am I going to harvest articles out of a traditional format?"
So what I did was when I read that article or that kind of newsletter, I thought, "Oh my God, this is kind of the answer. I can do a three-article dissertation as a way to think through my work and as a way to end and graduate with three potential articles to publish." So I just want to share that as my first kind of moment of thinking through what a three-article dissertation could provide. As I actually did it, it was much harder to implement than I thought it was going to be. To your question about what would you have wanted as support, I think I would've wanted someone to say to me, "What's your overarching question that you're doing between these three articles? And then how are you going to then pull through specific threads from those three articles to that overarching?"
It took me a while to get to that point on my own. And then during pandemic, there were professors like Mariana Souto Manning who then said that to me. But by that point, I had already generated so much of the writing in earlier classes. So, I came in with the strategy of I'm going to use every single class to generate the writing for my dissertation. I was not going to waste any time at 43 or 44 or 45. And I think she's in the room, Felicia Mensah, you pulled me aside and you were the one who also said you need an overarching question that is threading everything through. So I kept hearing that from people along the way, but later in the process, I needed to hear that earlier in the process. So that's just advice for anyone who wants to do a three article dissertation--think about that overarching umbrella question and then the three threads that you want to pull through. Okay, that's my logistical advice.
I think something that came up for me while writing the dissertation, and I don't think it matters the format. I think for me something that happened was grief. The reason why I felt so much grief while writing was because I was literally going through my career by returning to these blog posts and reading them and choosing the ones that I really wanted to write about. Then as I was writing about them, I was grieving the letting go of 26 years of high school teaching and remembering... My students always used to say--it was a first name school--"Ileana, you're moving your hands so much." And I would remember who I was as a teacher. So it's like not only multimodality, it's like multi-feelings that are happening as you're writing your dissertation.
That was a strong feeling I was having when I was writing, which was not only the joy of working with young people, but the grief of letting them go. As I was writing about my feminist pedagogy and literally remembering a moment where Lulu, who I write about, and the sexual harassment, MeToo activism we were doing and the blog post she wrote about that, I'm like grieving the surveillance that we went through. I'm angry at the fact that we were silenced, that we were pushed back upon, that we were backlashed on. Then I'm writing about Darielle and her trans femme Afro-Latinx identity, how she was reading Black feminism to read her trans identity through Black feminism, the joy of that and the different things that we used to do to move through how do you read theory to read yourself? Those are just some things I want to put out there.
Then just to the question of it's not only media or it's also the analog parts. So because I taught for 26 years, I still have multiple archives. I have the digital archive, but then I also have... I still kept many of the papers I used to grade in pen. I still have handouts. I still have the posters for feminist events that I used to take my students to. I have a lot of ephemera, so I have a lot of material archive in my apartment that I'm just now starting to organize in my apartment in ways so that I can open them and write about what is this other ephemera of feminist teaching that I want to return to that is about also documenting the work of being a woman of color feminist teacher in the high school classroom, a queer feminist teacher in the high school classroom, a first-generation Latina feminist teacher in the high school classroom.
So all of these things that we're working with, even in the piece about Darielle, I was going back to not only her digital writing, but the moments where I took my students to go hear Black feminist abolitionists at Barnard. We heard Kimberlé Crenshaw and we heard Barbara Smith, and we heard panels of Black feminists that I used to take my students to go hear in person. And I kept the programs and I kept the other things that we did in the classroom that were a part of this work. So I think that's what stays with me. It's how do we return to the feelings at dissertation brought up in us as you were writing, and then how do we return to the multiple archives that we are still sitting with?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
For me, that connects to something Dagmar started out by saying, which was multimodality is inherently multisensory. And I wonder if you wanted to kind of jump in here and talk a little bit about that multi-sensoriality in your work in the process of doing this.
Dagmar Spain:
First of all, I'm really happy to listen to all of you, and I know it's a little different being in the Zoom world. Yes, I think that process is definitely probably that urge to have that... Yeah, having these feelings and these sensory modalities in the spaces where we research, where we teach. I mean, I am in dance and professional dance education and higher education, and I have learned that it is a lot of pressure that dancers go through in their dance education. I think multimodal research is an opportunity to dissect all these layers that are there when we learn. I mean, I'm very interested in the process of learning what learning means and what it means on an individual level and on a collective level. And what we actually learn, what we take with us, so I'm also in this kind of lifelong learning perspective. I'm very interested in that.
I work mostly with that age group, which is obviously after high school, but I also have recently taught also older age groups. So in multimodality, I think if we talk about text, if we talk about letting our bodies speak, always come in contact with these new perspectives that neither I nor my participant could have anticipated. I think that is the beauty of being in spaces where... We have our perspectives, we have our understandings, but if we really enter a space where we are not familiar with the language that we usually use. Let's say we are well versed in speech, but now I'm asked to say something with my body or vice versa, or I am looking at a painting or an image and let that speak and tell me something within myself, or even I've used surveys in my dissertation also with alternative assessment tools and I think to stimulate new ways of looking at things, new ways of knowing.
I think the most amazing thing for me in my dissertation was that I could not have foreseen what the outcome is, and I think to be surprised by your own research is extremely gratifying. So I can only say, I mean, for the audience who might consider multimodal research, I would say it's extremely gratifying. I have graduated last year from the dance department at Teachers College Arts and Humanities, and I come across amazing professors, not just from my department. But I think to take really the professors that speak to us, talk to them, have dialogue with them. And I can just say, I mean, if multimodality is your passion, if you want to use other ways of reporting and analyzing your research, do it because it's...
I think I probably mentioned it may become mainstream and I think we're just at a brink to know that we as humans are so multilayered that just textual representation cannot be enough. So, just want to encourage everyone who considers multimodality in their research to really go for it. And yes, I had an extremely supportive advisor, Dr. Matt Hanley, and I also was reading a lot of multimodal dissertations or research, so be encouraged by what others did before you. There are people out there who did that already and they paved the ground for others to follow, so I think we can just rely on that and just be courageous to do it. Yeah.
Brian Mooney:
I wonder if I wanted to respond to Ileana your idea about grief and grieving throughout this process. I think we were both creating dissertations during the pandemic, and so I'm thinking a lot about the yearning for connection and maybe how multimodality enabled me to feel connected to certain communities, even if digitally. Like I remember the first time I went out of the house after lockdown, and I don't want to go back to this place because my son was, I think, six months old. I had a baby on my lap in meetings, and my daughter was a couple years older. It was a stressful time and I remember the first time I went out of the house, and I forget where I went. It's like Home Depot to buy a bolt for something and I had a panic attack. I was like, "What's happening?" There's people here. And I went home and I just started making music.
I went home and I say that also to suggest that I think all of us had a relationship with the modes in which we were working, and part of mine was a relationship with the machine, with this MIDI controller, with this digital software. It was like having conversations with a machine and then figuring out where my humanity still exists in this interaction, this exchange, right? Yeah, and I was thinking a lot about the prolific hip-hop producer, J. Dilla. There was a book that came out right around when I was writing my dissertation called Dilla Time, which was about how he sort of changed the time signature of music in some ways. He infused his own swing and groove into the traditional sort of structured four four beat, and it was neither kind of on the grid or off the grid.
I thought about that and I asked myself, "Well, what would it mean to kind of unquantize educational research or the future of educational research to knock it off the grid a bit?" Right? So yeah, I say all that to say it was a really emotional process. I didn't anticipate that it was going to be healing or spiritual for me. Music evokes something deeply spiritual for me, and I believe for many others. So, some of my research was archival recordings that I was pulling samples from like recordings of my students when they were 14, 15, 16, speaking these poems on stage and then going back. It was emotional. It took me back to this space audibly. Then putting those old samples, those fragments in conversation with their current selves as young adults in their early twenties.
So we were actively playing with time. We were manipulating time in this way that was deeply emotional, and Cynthia Dillard uses the term praise songs. How might our research and our inquiries in the world become praise songs? So I started reconceptualizing these compositions as praise songs, which that's a religious concept, right? They're like hymns, but they have music attached to that. So our poems are songs and were forms of prayer. They were forms of affirmation, of honoring what was, and maybe what could have been. Part of the longing too was a longing for... And that's the very hauntological way of yearning for a past that did not come.
Just briefly, this one example really showcases why I went to sound. There was a moment in Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz's class, shout out to her. That's our academic mama. And if anyone has taken classes with Yolanda, you know she's like the embodiment of just love and care and so we were free to be intimate and connect through different mediums. Part of the final project for that class was I think we had to do some formal kind of research protocol, do a semi-structured interview or collect some data or something, and then kind of remix it and share it in a different way. So, I interviewed a colleague in a semi-structured interview and then went and sat with it and thought about what sounds it was evoking in me, and created a beat and then sampled parts of the fragments of conversation and presented that as part of the final project. And people were crying.
I was like, "Why is that? What is it about music and sound in particular that evokes those emotions?" And that really set me on the journey to just go that direction. I just started making. I just started creating and existing fully in that mode of being a creator and making. In that, I truly did find so much peace for myself and healing. Part of it, I think, is that I realized I didn't have to be this conception of what I thought an academic or a scholar or researcher was supposed to be. It remixed it for me in some ways, in a helpful way.
Ileana Jimenez:
I'm so glad you said pandemic, because when I think about and when I go through the memory pictures of when I was generating so much of the dissertation, it was during the pandemic. And when I spoke to Darielle, who was one of my collaborators and former students who I wrote about in my dissertation, I talked to her on Zoom and I said, "Okay, here's the first draft of what I wrote about you." And I sent it ahead of time to her to read. Then we met on Zoom during height of pandemic, pre-vax and we're on Zoom, and she's telling me her reaction to what I've written about her. Similarly, she was already in college, but we're talking about her high school self. She's reflecting on the blog post that she wrote, and she's telling me all these aspects of her high school experience that she can read through the post that I cannot see.
So I am now seeing and reading and even feeling the post the way she sees and reads and feels the post, and she's like giving me the BTS--the behind the scenes of what she's thinking and feeling or what she was thinking and feeling when she first wrote the post. And I'm like, "Wow, I saw and remember." Let's talk about remembering. We're remembering together. We're doing the memory work together of looking at her writing and also my writing about her, and we're kind of, again, co-constructing through our memories of a very similar time, but doing it from different standpoints,
Brian Mooney:
Different vantage points, right?
Ileana Jimenez:
Completely different. What I learned from her, one of the words she used while we... Because one of the approach that I took with writing about her was Alma Flores's methodology on Muxerista portraiture. So it brings together Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot's approach of portraiture, but then she brings this Chicana Latina Muxerista approach to portraiture. So I was writing about Darielle, who's Afro-Dominican from Washington Heights had gone to this small progressive high school in New York City, writes this blog post about being a Black transfem, Afro-Latinx transfem. And she says to me, "When I was in high school, I really appreciated reading Black feminism at that time." And then this was the BTS, like what I didn't know necessarily in the moment was it was her other Afro-Latinx friends at the time in high school who were encouraging her to think about what does it mean to be Afro-Dominican? So then I was thinking, how do I represent and help--not help--but how do I begin to document also this part of her emerging identity as Afro-Dominican in this piece about her?
And how do I begin to engage multiple identities also myself as a light-skinned New-Yorkan first-generation Puerto Rican in New York, also using a Chicana Latina framework? And then how do I do all of these things together? One thing that portraiture says you can do is actually use fragments, like use the fragments of memory, use the fragments of the writing, use the fragments of all the different parts of what you're doing with your participants. So that was one approach that I took, and one word that Darielle used was she said was, "You something?" She went to Columbia for her undergrad, and she said, "You know what? Something I've been thinking about as an undergrad is this word palimpsest." She's like, "Back in high school, this is one person who I was, but something I'm learning about myself as a college student is that I have all these other layers that I'm excavating and looking at like archeology of self." For her, it was the word palimpsest.
And I try to represent that in the writing, which is how is Darielle engaging in a kind of palimpsest excavation of herself through this blog post reading through Black feminist theory, putting it online as a part of thinking about trans identities. Then also she's teaching something I didn't know about her during a time when we were disconnected and yet connected through a screen. So all of this is happening on Zoom as a conversation.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I think that the temporality and when the dissertations happen is such an important part of this conversation because people who were doing their dissertations a while ago had different contemporaneous forces and discourses that they were engaging with versus those of you who are embarking on this now. So Kristin, you can kind of fill in that gap for us. [inaudible 01:14:51].
Kristin Gorski:
Yes.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
And then we have some time for questions.
Kristin Gorski:
I completed my dissertation 10 years ago, way in the before times. Before the pandemic, before we had Nick Sousanis's multimodal dissertation. This was a monomodal dissertation. It's text, it's on page, it features multimodal transcripts. But just as I was writing this, I was introduced to the edited volume by Carey Jewitt of the Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Research and Analysis. I was like, "Ah, it's here. We're looking at this." And I was resonating with everything that you all were saying about voice and humanity and connection to students and the people that we're working with. One of the things that came out of having this dissertation happen at that time, luckily we were on this team. We had the programmers because it was funded by a very important research grant, which we all need.
Brian Mooney:
[inaudible 01:15:52].
Ileana Jimenez:
[inaudible 01:15:52].
Kristin Gorski:
It was to do this research and to do more. One of the really special moments that I had as someone who was writing my dissertation was to be able to spend time with the data, it was in as a solitary person, researcher, practitioner, writer, doctoral student, learner, reflecting, going through these screen captures. I was really resonating what you've both said about platform, blog platform, audio platform. At the time, it seemed like a really miraculous software to have this software that recorded the person and also recorded the screen as they were working together because it gave us such a level of insight into what middle schools, emergent bilingual learners, were uncovering for themselves. And it felt like such a window into their world.
And as a former middle school teacher, which is where I started, to have this screen capture--we're all teachers--and have this background, and to have this though recorded and to be able to review and re-watch it and then struggle with how do I capture all these modes that I'm seeing. Seeing students raise their hand, seeing them look around, I'm seeing them kind of move things around on the screen and write. And every single aspect of their process, I could have spent more and more time with. So our recommendation that I would have for anybody who's going to do a multimodal dissertation is give yourself plenty of time to spend time with the data. Really get to know the people you are working with.
They are co-creators and co-collaborators, even if they're not directly involved in that process, but the observations that I was able to make from just observing them and having that time to observe has continually been generative even 10 years later. And to be invited to be a part of this and to look back and reflect and now be in conversation with you all, have spurred me to think about new ways to do this work, because the tools are different. The sites are different, the technologies and the way the students engage with these technologies is so different. I was working with students before smartphones. They were just coming onto the scene. I mean, they had YouTube, they were always online. We did a pre-survey about that with them to see how they use technology, but the level of access to the ICTs at that time is very different now as well.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Each of these five exhibits that are part of this exhibition were not only identified, but also curated by Lucius and the team of the wonderful design and gallery team, many of whom were here. One of the things that was really, I think, innovative about thinking how do you exhibit people's work, is that it wasn't just, here, let's put out Brian's album or let's put out Kristen's snapshots from her dissertation. But it was an intentional set of decisions and conversations that resulted in the curation--and once we leave this space, you'll see Dagmar's as well--to invite people to interact with it. I think that's another layer of this process that you are thinking about work and you want it to have audiences. So we've used exhibition as one mode of audiencing this work, but as you heard, there's so many other modes of audiencing. So I think we're a little over time, but I want to first of all, join me in please thanking this panel.
Those of you who can stick around, I know there'll be here for a little bit. Please take some time to check out the exhibits, and I'll plug two things. We have lots of resources on the Digital Futures Institute website related to multimodal scholarship, both production support as well as database of journals that are friendly to multimodal publications, lots of other things. We'll continue to have events like this as well as other forms of support, both for faculty, but also for students who are engaged in this work. So thank you all for being here, and have a good rest of your day.