Hand-I Coordination: Interpreting Student Writings and Drawings as Expressions of Identity.

In schools where curricular constraints and testing pressures narrow the ways in which students can take up identities as writers, longterm enrichment programs offer opportunities for the meaningful design of compositions. This paper, which presents the work of four elementary student participants in a writing workshop, shows how qualitative inquiry--in particular critical multimodal analysis--can enable a teacher researcher to see, interpret, and explain what might be going on in the writings and drawings of students, and how these illuminations help establish and expand the identities of students as writers. I focus especially on the work of one student over three years, and share the methodological procedures I drew upon in order to generate claims about his writing identity. Keywords: Qualitative Research, Teacher Research, literacy, Identity, Arts Enrichment, New Literacy, Multimodal Analysis From 2005 to 2008, I taught an enrichment writing program in an urban public school in the Midwest United States. Students in primary grades two, three, and four came to a designated room once a week in order to read, talk, think, play, and write. Over that time, in my role as a teacher researcher, I interpreted what they put on paper across multiple dimensions. Viewing writing as an embodied act of personal expression for my students, particularly since their regular classroom curriculum and experience was constrained by the effects of high-pressure measurement and high-stakes testing prevalent in U.S. public schools at this time, I was interested in drawing upon the tools and methods of qualitative inquiry in order to understand and interpret the nature of their writing experience holistically. Specifically, I adopted the stance of the educational connoisseur and critic described by Eisner (1998), and understood my analytic task to be one that took up a particular heuristic for regarding compositions, and then interpreting and explaning what I saw (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001) with respect to expression of identity/ies. In situ, therefore, I noticed the way students sat, held their pencils, treated their paper, and positioned their bodies in relation to their desks and paper (closed, open, clenched, intense, relaxed). I paid attention to their gaze, the pace of their writing, their apparent degree of concentration, the general feeling (or affect) in which they wrote what they wrote (Norris, 2004). What might these behaviors and habits have to with their identities as writers, as students, as people with something to say? How did the workshop environment we coconstructed contribute to development of my students as writers? Post facto, after collecting papers and projects week after week, I read the words and tried to understand what they meant. Content analysis came first: What were my students saying? But apart from this basic act of linguistic meaning-making and interpreting on my part, I undertook a form of critical multimodal analysis in order to attend to the qualities of the marks they had made across different expressive variables or modes (Bortoluzzi, 2009; Wohlwend, 2011). Like an art critic, I observed the density of the lines, the seeming urgency