The Bridge Between: Exploring the Multimodal Home Literacies of Emergent Multilingual Mothers Enrolled in a Family Literacy Program
Open Access
- Author:
- Amevuvor, Jocelyn
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 01, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Mari Haneda, Major Field Member
Allison Henward, Major Field Member
Andrea Vujan Mccloskey, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Jason Griffith, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Deryn Verity, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- family literacy
maternal geographies
multimodal literacies
home literacies - Abstract:
- This research features a case study investigation (Yin, 2018) of the multimodal home literacies of emergent multilingual mothers enrolled in a family literacy program. In this research, I inquired into three questions: 1) How do emergent multilingual immigrant mothers studying English in a family literacy program in the U.S. present their literacies within a home context? 2) In what ways is multimodality present within the mothers’ literacies of the home context? 3) In what ways are/could the home literacies the women indicated were important to them be incorporated into the family literacy class they attend? To answer these questions, I partnered with a family literacy program in Central Pennsylvania to connect with emergent multilingual mothers, who shared the literacies of their homes with me, as well as to observe their class. To guide this study, I used a two-fold theoretical frame of both maternal geographies, which focuses on the ways mothering can transform place and vice versa (Johnson & Johnston, 2019), and multimodal literacies, which moves the conversation of literacies beyond print-based literacies and into modes that are artefactual, gestural, emerging, and lived (Kress, 1997; Kress, 2010; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Pahl & Rowsell, 2021). Five mother-students enrolled in the family literacy class participated in the research by taking photographs of multimodal texts in the home, through the visual mode of photography, that were important to them and talking about those literacies in interviews. The instructor of the family literacy class also took part in this research, through an interview and classroom observations, as I observed the ways in which the literacies were brought in and speculated on how they could be brought into the classroom. The data I collected included photographs that the mothers took; interviews with the mothers in which they discussed the literacies within the photographs; observational field notes from my observations of the family literacy class; research memos that recorded my reflections throughout the research process; and an interview with the instructor of the course to discuss the literacies that the women felt were important and the ways those literacies were or could be incorporated into the class curriculum. I analyzed the data using Saldana’s (2009) thematic analysis, coding for in vivo and values coding before defining overarching themes. Each mother-student participant and the class were analyzed as individual cases. While the themes of each mother-student participant’s home multimodal literacies differed, what remained true across cases was that the multimodal literacies of the home were rooted in the linguistic and cultural identities of the participants, as the mother-student participants noted the importance of food, gardening, and maintaining multiple languages within the home environment. Although there were moments in the classroom when the instructor drew from the mother-student’s home languages, I claim that there were more opportunities to do so by incorporating the multimodal texts and literacies of the home and pairing those texts with the reading and writing goals of the class. Thus, I end the study with a discussion of more ways that the mothers’ multimodal home literacies can be brought into the classroom to facilitate English language learning, through artefactual literacy activities, like gardening and cooking, in order to build a bridge between the home and the family literacy classroom as well as to situate learning in activities the women described as valuable in their lives, and thus potentially make learning more interesting and meaningful (Pahl & Rowsell, 2006; Kalman, 2005).