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In this article, I explore laughter as a form of multimodal play in which adolescents' engage across contexts and in various configurations. With a few recent exceptions, a focus on unscripted play is largely missing from ongoing research and discussion about the education of adolescents. Whereas the space to play has been vitally important to the ways that young people communicate and build relationships in the different settings where I have conducted fieldwork, the play of adolescents is also frequently misinterpreted within school-based and community settings and often remediated or punished. Adolescents' practices of manipulation and experimentation with various media and technologies are the focus of two scenes I include of adolescents' playful engagements with video and their immediate contexts in which laughter serves as a medium of play. This article was written with educators and researchers of/with adolescents in mind, with the hope of encouraging greater reflection about how and what we notice about young people's play: there may be glimpses of being and becoming in the space of a giggle.

In order to explore how experiences with youth media production resonate with people throughout their lives, we conducted video interviews with alumni from the Educational Video Center's youth documentary programs across the organization's history of more than 30 years. We talked with alumni and watched their films together to see what memories and feelings they would share through revisiting their filmmaking. We devised a multimodal analysis method that places the films alongside the interview footage in order to observe how affect was embodied by the alumni, as well as their use of affect to reflect on their filmmaking experiences. Affective moments gave us clues about how to understand and situate the memories as lingering traces of alumni's past experiences, that centered on descriptions of belonging.

A theater project situated within an Alternative to Incarceration Program (ATIP), the Insight Project provided a venue for youth to engage in storytelling and dramatic performance, and allowed for those stories to find diverse and interested audiences. For the young men and women involved, authoring occurred at multiple instances and in multiple ways, and through the engagement of multiple cultural artifacts. Traditional scripts about youth, justice, and education were rewritten, not only through the writing of two plays, but also within the various types of authoring that were ongoing, performed, and embodied throughout the Insight Project. In this article, we discuss the various types of authoring that occurred within the theater project and we embed multimedia performance excerpts in order to elucidate six sites of authoring enacted by the participants at critical moments of the process: improvisation; focused storytelling sessions; composing scripts; rehearsals; performances; and talk-backs. (Contains 3 figures and 2 endnotes.)

In this article, we suggest that we are witnessing a challenge to the hegemony of text-based knowledge in academic scholarship, brought about by newly available modes of expression, and a cultural shift in our notions of reading and writing, authorship, and networked knowledge production. The central question we address here concerns the implications of widening our ideas of acceptable forms of inquiry, analysis and representation in academic scholarship. As a collective of scholar-practitioners exploring new modes of expression and working both within and outside the formal structures of academia, we argue for the increasing significance of multimodal research in the contemporary context of academic inquiry. By more equitably valuing different ways of thinking, knowing and communicating, multimodal research can facilitate wider and more diverse participation in the production of knowledge, offer a more nuanced and ethical mode of inquiry, emphasize different ways of knowing and connecting, and make scholarship more broadly accessible beyond academic contexts. Here, we analyze the key opportunities facilitated by multimodal inquiry, as well as the obstacles that stand in the way of a wider adoption of this type of research in higher education.

This paper conceptualizes an approach to adolescent literacies research we call "research pedagogies." This approach recognizes the pedagogical features of the research process and includes three dimensions: created spaces, engaged participation, and embodied inquiry. By drawing upon and sometimes recasting foundational anthropological approaches to education research, we argue for the development of research spaces that are also teaching spaces responsive to the emergent and multimodal communicative landscape of adolescents.

When anthropologists of education, who embrace an activist or action-focused orientation, locate their work within community-based settings, they bear a responsibility to act in ways that not only produce new knowledge but that are also responsive to the immediate circumstances. Katherine Schultz's Presidential Address evokes two related tensions: one is a tension of temporality wherein the contexts of our research may seek and demand greater urgency in how we enact ourselves than may be typical of anthropological work. A second tension involves how knowledge is produced in and about these contexts. Both of these tensions are explored through a discussion of Kathy's research and a long-term, community-based project located in an alternative to detention program where I have been engaged in participatory ethnographic research for close to a decade.

This article focuses on the concept of belonging as an embodied practice that is expressed by adolescents in multimodal ways and that can be nurtured inside and also beyond schools, such as within afterschool programs. We explore belonging in an afterschool program designed for court-involved youth. Our research is theoretically framed by educational cosmopolitanism and multimodal literacy and we situate our analysis within a discussion of cosmopolitan literacies of belonging. The research reported in this article is part of an ongoing, multi-year study, and our initial analyses suggest that youth seek out and create opportunities to experience and communicate a sense of belonging through play, in fleeting moments, during structured curricular moments, and through both verbal and non-verbal modes. Our article concludes with recommendations for how practitioners might build on adolescents' cosmopolitan literacies of belonging within institutional contexts.

Reading the implicit invitation in new literacies scholarship to reimagine pedagogy that leans into the lives of youth, Vasudevan reminds readers how the teacher's body is central to the meaning making of students in literacy classrooms. She extends this notion of embodiment to the work of the literacy coach and reiterates Skinner, Hagood, and Provost's call for a new literacies ethos in literacy coaching.

This article explores the idea that everyday moments hold cosmopolitan potential wherein such recognition can reorient educators and youth toward one another in meaningful and generative ways. Found in the quotidian practices of young people are indicators of their affiliations, their proclivities, their interests, and their curiosities. Educators, should they choose to take these practices seriously, will find ample fodder in the wide range of youths' communicative and expressive practices for making connections across differences and to move toward lowering barriers of participation for youth in institutional spaces. Data from an ethnographic study of a theater project housed within an alternative to detention program are reanalyzed using a lens of multimodal cosmopolitanism to explore everyday and often fleeting moments of interaction to render visible the ways in which participants expressed and experienced belonging in myriad ways--belonging to the project as well as to one another. A discussion following two ethnographic vignettes of the theater program offers recommendations for how a multimodal cosmopolitan orientation can support educators to approach curriculum and enact pedagogy that nurtures belonging with and among youth every day.

This article presents a conversation about the nature of multimodal inquiry and composing between Lalitha Vasudevan and Mary Ann Reilly. The authors draw on their Twitter exchanges, blog posts, art, photography, and reflections as they consider what literacy education is and can be in a world that offers multiple means of expression. The theoretical constructs of bricolage and rhizomatics inform how they think about their inquiry as well as how they present their ideas. The authors problematize literacy and arts education as it has been conceived and offer glimpses into what might be.

In this article, the authors argue that teachers and researchers must expand current verbo- and logo-centric definitions of critical literacy to recognize how texts and responses are embodied. Ethnographic data illustrate the ways that youth perform critical literacy in ways that educators might not always be prepared to see, hear, or acknowledge. The authors conclude with implications critical performances have for teachers and researchers. Ultimately, they argue that students use their bodies to perform critical literacy--that is, to respond to and convey their critical engagements with myriad texts--in ways that are underrecognized, may defy rationality, or transgress teacher expectations for the politically correct or classroom appropriate (Janks, 2002). (Contains 12 notes.)

In this chapter, the author rethinks literacy education and identity in the 21st century by engaging with the concept of multimodal selves. This conceptualization resonates with an understanding of identity as performed (Blackburn, 2005) wherein the ways of enacting oneself with and within a space encompass the intentional and unintentional orchestration of communicative modes to convey a range of meanings. The rest of this chapter is organized into four sections. In the first section, the author explores the linkages between multimodality and literacy and call attention to the orchestration of multiple modes in the composing of texts and meaning. A discussion of multimodal literacies is continued in the second section, which focuses on the ways in which emerging technologies are engaged by youth across digital geographies for a variety of representational purposes. In the third section, the author describes how a multimodal approach to pedagogy can be responsive to the globalizing discourses in which youth situate their literate lives. In the last section, the author offers four dimensions of pedagogies that educators might re-imagine through the lens of critical multimodality. (Contains 5 notes.)

Background/Context: This essay is part of a special issue that emerges from a year-long faculty seminar at Teachers College, Columbia University. The seminar's purpose has been to examine in fresh terms the nexus of globalization, education, and citizenship. Participants come from diverse fields of research and practice, among them art education, comparative education, curriculum and teaching, language studies, philosophy of education, social studies, and technology. They bring to the table different scholarly frameworks drawn from the social sciences and humanities. They accepted invitations to participate because of their respective research interests, all of which touch on education in a globalized world. They were also intrigued by an all-too-rare opportunity to study in seminar conditions with colleagues from different fields, those with whom they might otherwise never interact given the harried conditions of university life today. Participants found the seminar generative in terms of ideas about globalization, education, and citizenship. They also appreciated what, for them, became a novel and rich occasion for professional and personal growth. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: At a time when there is increased hybridity in local and global citizenship, language and literacy practices, and performances of cultural identity and affiliation, narrowing of our ways of knowing can detrimentally impact how educators and scholars engage in intellectual inquiry and educational practice. This essay uses the mode of questioning to create a dialogue about the discursive, rhetorical, and even physical postures that educators and scholars might embrace when re-imagining everyday practices of teaching, learning, and research to be open to unexpected trajectories. Questions are woven together with descriptive vignettes of films, excerpts from research studies, personal narratives, and reflective analyses that invoke texts from a wide range of scholarly traditions in order to propose unknowing as a stance through which to engage more fully with and be responsive to a changing world. Conclusions/Recommendations: Unknowing is proffered as a stance and a lens through which to re-imagine practices associated with educational practice and research to be more open to new ways of knowing. Rather than offering definitive recommendations, this essay concludes with an invitation for the broader educational community, and especially institutions of education, to reclaim an ethos of inquiry and possibility in the daily acts of seeing, being, becoming, belonging, and storying through which knowing and knowledge are enacted.

In this article, the authors engage the theoretical lens of multimodality in rethinking the practices and processes of composing in classrooms. Specifically, they focus on how learning new composing practices led some fifth-grade students to author new literate identities--what they call authorial stances--in their classroom community. Their analysis adds to the current research on the production and analysis of multimodal texts through an analysis of the interrelationships between multimodal composing processes and the development of literate identities. They found that by extending the composing process beyond print modalities students' composing shifted in significant ways to reflect the circulating nature of literacies and texts and increased the modes of participation and engagement within the classroom curriculum.These findings are based on an ethnographic study of a multimodal storytelling project in a fifth-grade urban classroom. (Contains 4 figures.)

Communicative and expressive modalities, such as smart phones and video cameras, have become increasingly multifunctional and reflect an evolving digital landscape often referred to as Web 2.0. The "ethos" and "technical" affordances of Web 2.0 have the potential to catalyze the aesthetic creativity of youth. Following a discussion of aesthetics in literacies, I explore the implications of participation in socially mediated communicative landscapes for how we might rethink the nature of participation in classrooms. New forms and spaces of participation are opening up opportunities for young people to assume new roles and perform new selves. I conclude by calling for a renewed appreciation for progress and process in how we approach curriculum and pedagogy in language arts education by broadening and reimagining understandings of literacies, participation and the performance of self in a digital communicative landscape. (Contains 1 footnote.)

In this article, the author explores the ways in which new teaching and learning geographies were crafted by adolescents and adults through the engagement and performance of multimodal literacy practices. They did so by communicating and representing knowledge through the manipulation of multiple expressive modalities, including pens for writing and drawing, voices for storytelling, cell phone cameras for sharing photos of family and friends, paint for self-portraits and other scenes, and the body for embodying new ways of being within the classroom walls. To examine how ordinary locations can create new spaces by the people who inhabit them, the author draws on the lenses of spatiality and multimodality. In saying so, the author is referring to the confluence of practices, interactions, and relationships that were "lived" at Alternative to Incarceration Program (ATIP). Thus, this article is a discussion of how teaching and learning geographies at one educational setting were transformed with the presence of multimodal and multispatial literacies. In this site, the broader landscape of adolescents' emerging literacies (e.g., texting, social networking, video and photo sharing, etc.) was organically integrated into the larger context of these new geographies as teachers placed primacy on knowing their students in order to teach them. The author presents two examples of new teaching and learning geographies. The first explores the pedagogy of Tony, the teacher who Joey describes in the opening vignette. Play is a hallmark of Tony's dynamic teaching practices, which are produced through a careful orchestration of performance, recognition, and humor. The second example comes from a theater elective in which some ATIP participants collaborated to compose and perform a play on stage in the theater district of a large northeastern city. In the theater project, it was in between moments of explicit direction and performance that the space of teaching and learning existed. That is, this terrain was lived across classrooms, subways, and a professional theater. In both cases, multimodal literacy practices were embedded in youths' in-class performances and in teachers' expectations. (Contains 2 tables and 3 notes.)

In this tale of a single event told from the perspectives of multiple narrators, Erick Gordon, Kerry McKibbin, Lalitha Vasudevan, and Ruth Vinz write about their work together on a Student Press Initiative (SPI) writing project at Horizon Academy, the Department of Correction/Department of Education high school at Rikers Island Jail in New York City. They focus on an incident that troubles them and makes them rethink the very foundations of their project. (Contains 1 note.)

In the increasingly digital and multimodal landscape of adolescents' literacies, it is particularly interesting to explore how young people are making and remaking their identities in online and offline spaces. These self-authoring practices are especially significant when the authors are African American adolescent boys, whose lives are often storied by others. This article brings the lenses of counterstorytelling and multimodality together to explore one boy's re-presentation of his multiple selves through his engagement with various technologies and the production of visual texts. (Contains 3 notes and 3 figures.)