Multimodality and Immigrant Children

This response to Marni Binder reflects upon two examples of (im)migrant children's artwork and challenges the dominant notion that (im)migration experiences - and their subsequent portrayals - can be fit into neat slots. The authors position multimodal composing opportunities as affording children a vital instrument for deploying their full semiotic repertoires to defy stereotypes and capture the complexities of experience. In a lecture on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2008) addressed criticism that he might be trivializing his depictions of tragic events by leavening them with laugh-out-loud prose. We live in a blockbuster society, he responded (our paraphrase based on a memory that does not do justice to Diaz's eloquence), which attempts to slot our stories into marketable genres, such as tragedy, comedy, and drama. But the realities of our lives will not comport to such neat labels. There is 'simultaneity' to experience, where one can experience humor and tragedy, loss and hope, and other - often multiple - ostensibly contradictory emotions at the same time. One experience that is often rife with complexity and contradiction is that of immigration. This may especially be the case for the immigrant, refugee, and migrant narratives of young children, whose own renditions of personal and familial history have not been, following Hayden White (1973), fully 'emplotted' by dominant genres such as the romance of reinvention and upward mobility. How can early childhood educators and researchers help create spaces in schools that enable children to critically engage the complexity of their own experiences? And how can this happen against the prevailing and related ideological winds of curricular standardization and national assimilation? One promising lens through which to explore these issues is multimodality, as suggested by Marni Binder in her piece 'Contextual Worlds of Child Art: experiencing multiple literacies through images'. Binder investigates her own practice as a former classroom teacher who takes seriously children's artwork as a cultural and intellectual resource. She describes how the children's visual productions often convey understandings and critical perspectives that are not exhausted by their written texts. An interesting example is Viktor's aerial rendition of a 'Silly Town' that both captures and asserts his community, including friends and teachers. This more omniscient panoramic view afforded by the visual medium subverts stereotypes of immigrant children as having a fractured social existence, being betwixt and between worlds with only partial understandings of them. Viktor has a whole community, one that he is at once part of and can gain distance from through a type of cosmopolitan perspective that potentially affords more objective understandings of all the worlds he inhabits (Campano & Ghiso, 2011). In his own research, Gerald, one of the co-authors of this article, has also learned from his students' multimodal literacy practices, such as a Hmong child's drawing, aesthetically inspired by her community's tradition of story quilts, of her early memories in a refugee camp in Thailand