| dc.description.abstract | How and what we teach in the post-secondary English classroom has tremendous power, both regarding individual students and larger contexts in which they function. As post-secondary instructors, our pedagogical approach to our subjects can impact our student’s abilities and experiences directly through interactions with texts, and also impact our specific institutions, our academic disciplines, and larger social structures. This project will propose what is best termed a disruptive pedagogy, founded in comics literacy, and a primary goal is to effect change in the classroom and therefore in our students’ later social and professional contexts.
Increasingly, what we teach in English classrooms is moving towards a pedagogy of multimodality that reflects the contexts of our students outside of the classroom. Multimodal researchers Jennifer Rowsell and Eryn Decoste state that “To expand notions of composition, there is a need to not only introduce other modes such as visuals, sounds and interactive modes, but also develop frameworks, activities and lesson ideas to actually teach other modes of representation and expression” (246-247). Yet, as they mention, this isn’t always easy or even possible. But an additional issue is that multimodality can elide the discussion of narrative, one of the key affordances of the English classroom. Further, much emphasis in multimodal pedagogies is on technology, which access to the needed technology is not universal. Focusing education tactics in the context of internet enabled classrooms will necessarily leave some populations behind.
To address these two issues, this project works to propose a multimodal pedagogy that uses comics as an ideal narrative multimodal medium. By fitting comics into the framework of multimodal education in post-secondary classrooms, this dissertation demonstrates the potential of the medium. Therefore, the focus of this project is on building a multimodal pedagogy for comics. By focusing on the methods by which comics create, this dissertation proposes a formalized way to use them as a foundation of a pedagogy that builds student’s multimodal literacy. A standard for deploying these texts has yet to calcify, meaning that current research can impact multimodal teaching substantially in the future. | en_US |
