Teaching Poetry Through Collaborative Art

Abstract

This study is anchored on two positions: that every communication is multimodal and that different modalities within multimodal communication have particular affordances. Written and oral language and other modalities, such as body language and audio/visual media, are interwoven in classroom communication. What might it look like to strategically deploy particular modalities whose affordances predispose them to visualizing certain kinds of knowledge in the classroom? I propose that educators purposefully employ multimodality for transformative learning. Through ethnographic approaches and multimodal interactional analysis, I analyze a possible link between multimodal pedagogy and transformative education, focusing on image-language entwinement, within an International Baccalaureate poetry classroom in Nairobi, Kenya. This article offers an illustrative resource for educators interested in the intersections of transformative learning and multimodality.