Systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis: multimodal composing and civic agency of multilingual youth

ABSTRACT

In our civic engagement afterschool program in the southeast of the United States, our youth and adult participants used a wide range of modalities including mapping, rapping, drawing, and performance to construct and convey their unique visions of school and community spaces. The purpose of this methodological paper is to explore systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF MDA) as a potential resource to gauge the effectiveness of such humanizing and multimodal spaces in positioning youth as civic leaders. Data collected for this study included curriculum materials, descriptive field notes, and video recordings of the multimodal processes of focal youth across five program modules. Informed by an SF MDA perspective, our multimodal transcriptions illustrate how youth participants engaged in an intersemiotic complementarity of modalities and languages to share their insights and enact civic identities.

KEYWORDS:

• SF MDA
• semiotic resources
• multilingual meaning making
• multimodality
• youth civic engagement

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the amazing youth, teachers, and graduate students who have taken part in our Youth and Teacher Education programs in Athens and beyond. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided us with valuable insights on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term “multilingual” to highlight the dynamic resources of youth who speak other languages and dialects at home different from the dominant school language.

2. We adopt Jason Mizell’s (2020) use of the term Latine to include all identifications across gender and ethnicity in an encompassing way.

3. All names of research schools, districts and participants are pseudonyms

4. Photovoice is a storytelling activity that uses photography taken by youth

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Harman

Ruth Harman is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. Her research interests within multilingual/multimodal education include systemic functional linguistics (SFL), youth participatory action research and critical discourse analysis. She has published widely on critical and creative approaches to multilingual education that address issues of justice and equity.

Khanh Bui

Khanh Bui is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. His research interests focus on sociosemiotic approaches to multimodality that can support multilingual learners in STEM. He has developed his own SF MDA methodological framework to explore the affordances and limitations of videos and multimodal resources in classroom contexts

Lourdes Cardozo-Gaibisso

Lourdes Cardozo-Gaibisso is an Assistant Professor of TESOL and Linguistics at Mississippi State University. Lourdes specializes in systemic functional linguistics, science literacy for minoritized populations and culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies. Her research focuses on developing more equitable learning opportunities for multilingual migrant and immigrant youth, their families and communities

Max Vazquez Dominguez

Max Vazquez Dominguez is an associate professor of science at the University of North Georgia. He has worked in numerous science and literacy programs with elementary and middle school science teachers, ESOL teachers, emergent bilingual students and their families. His research interests include using the emergent bilingual students’ interests and passions in the teaching/learning process, family involvement, science and soccer, engineering and the use of the space to enhance science learning, and bilingualism in science.

Cory A. Buxton

Cory A. Buxton is a professor of science education at Oregon State University. His research fosters more equitable and justice-centred science learning opportunities for all students, and especially for multilingual learners, by bringing together teacher professional learning and family engagement experiences in both school-based and out of school settings. Buxton’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and by several private foundations.

Shuang Fu

Shuang Fu is a doctoral student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at University of Georgia. Her research agenda focuses on the education inequities faced by racially, linguistically and socioeconomically minoritized students, critical educational policy analysis, youth participatory action research, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. She examines how language education policies and language ideologies inform teachers’ pedagogies in ways that both challenge and create affordances for multicultural and multilingual education.