Multimodal Meaning Making in a Pandemic

When the world envisions New York City (NYC), Queens is but a periphery, in the hustle and bustle of the city. But this “periphery” is in fact the center of the very rich cultural, linguistic, and racioethnic diversity that often portrays NYC, and much of the world’s rising multicultural sites. Yet, for Queens’ predominantly immigrant-generation and non-U.S. born populations (U.S. Census), facing systemic and societal inequities is an everyday happening, including underfunded educational institutions and perpetual monolingual ideology that racializes our multilingual students’ and their communities’ ways of being, knowing, and meaning making.

In the backdrop of inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, how do language and literacy educators work to sustain and amplify the rich languaging and cultural practices of students in transnational epicenters—especially in the virtual learning context? This chapter examines how our pedagogical dispositions oriented by translingualism (Horner & Alvarez, 2019) at a public institution of tertiary education have guided us in languaging, and cultivating multimodalities to better answer to our multilingual students’ meaningmaking practices and the conditions they work in, while being attentive to the potential structural and technological constraints. We describe how we, as educators, have drawn on our criticality, in tandem with our students’ labor and vision toward their own criticality, to resist dominant conceptualizations of meaning making. As recent research examining multilingualism has shown, to cultivate the full potential of racialized and language-minoritized students’ practices, we must consider the multimodalities that rest on the bodies of people languaging in various contexts (San Pedro, 2017). We must also contend with the impact of linguistic injustice and harm done to students in the name of education (Baker-Bell, 2020), and we must take into account how professional settings and accessibility dynamically transform students’ meaning-making in multimodal design (Gonzales, 2018).

In examining our translingual-informed pedagogy, we heed recent critiques on uncritical framing of multilingualism and multimodality that perpetuate neoliberalism and racism in education (Flores, 2013; Kubota, 2020). Therefore, our approach to transforming literacy learning spaces in relationship to translingualism focuses on material conditions and/of laboring language difference, ideology, and disposition to language (Horner & Alvarez, 2019) and recognizes multimodality as a critical part of multilingual students’ meaning making. We argue that the integration of these orientations around translingualism, multimodality, labor, and materiality are essential in supporting and centralizing language-minoritized students, so that their practices and expertise move from the periphery to the center.