Event Details
Speakers: Drs. Maureen Kendrick, Melanie Wong, and Kristiina Kumpulainen
Date: Tuesday, May 20
Time: 3:00 – 4:30PM
Location: Multipurpose Room (PCN 2012), Ponderosa Commons North
Theme:
What are the affordances and constraints of doing ethnography for language and literacy education research?
Abstracts
Multimodal Approaches to Ethnographic Research
Maureen Kendrick
This presentation explores how multimodal ethnography can offer new insights into literacy research—particularly in contexts where traditional, text-based methods have limitations and constraints. As literacy becomes increasingly layered and embedded in everyday life, we need tools that capture not only what people say or write, but also how they communicate through other modes. Drawing on examples from literacy studies in Uganda and Canada, I show how incorporating multimodal methods into ethnographic fieldwork can reveal rich, often overlooked aspects of participants’ lived experiences and literacy practices. Inspired by Gillian Rose’s (2022) visual methodology, I demonstrate how media such as drawings, cartoons, ecomaps and sound postcards can open up new perspectives. I argue that multimodality is not merely illustrative but also analytic. It helps surface the experiences and emotions connected to literacy practices that might otherwise remain hidden. When combined with ethnographic methods, it enables us to create ‘thick’ descriptions and textured understandings of our participants’ lives and literacies. Ultimately, multimodal approaches expand both our data and our analytical lens.
Maureen Kendrick is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines literacy and multimodality as integrated communicative practices, and addresses a range of social and cultural issues in diverse contexts. She has a particular interest in visual communication and communicative repertoires, and has conducted research in various geographic locations in East Africa and Canada focused on women and girls, child-headed households, and students with refugee experiences. Her current research focuses on understanding the potential of digital multimodal composing (DMC) for disciplinary literacy learning for newcomer, multilingual learners.
“Mute buttons and Classroom Interactions”: Ethnography in an Online Elementary Classroom
Melanie Wong
Ethnography has been seen as an inductive science where it starts with empirical evidence and move towards theory and understanding (Blommaert & Jie, 2010). An ethnographic object of investigation focuses on an “uniquely situated reality” (p. 17) in a particular time and place. Hence, my research discussion will highlight findings from an ethnography in an online grade 4 classroom. Using a language socialization lens (Ochs, 2002), classroom interactions will be explored. Data generation included classroom observations (field notes, audio recordings and artifact collection), student focus group interviews and teacher interviews. Discourse analysis was used to analyze the spoken data (Wortham & Reyes, 2015). Findings indicate that the teacher engages in IRE (Initiation, Response, Evaluation) (Seedhouse, 2004) interactions with students. What differs from traditional classroom interactions is that these online interactions shift between voice, textual chat, emoji reactions and navigating turn-taking by the “Raise Hand” feature in Google Meets. Classroom turn-taking is teacher (expert) directed when a student (novice) is asked to unmute their microphones. Findings also highlight how within the margins of this classroom learning space, the textual chatbox is reconfigured (Wilson, 2004) by students into a non-sanctioned learning space for “off task” discourse which pushes back against school-sanctioned discussions.
Melanie M. Wong is an Assistant Professor of Teaching. She is a passionate K-12 teacher educator. Her research interests include K-12, English Language Learners, and Technology-enhanced classrooms. She is also fascinated to explore how creative research approaches can be integrated into her current scholarship and teaching.
StoryWalking: A More-Than-Human Ethnography of Literacy, Place, and Imagination
Kristiina Kumpulainen
In this talk, I introduce StoryWalking as a more-than-human ethnographic approach to literacy—one that conceptualizes literacy as an embodied, relational, and place-based practice. Rooted in posthuman and relational theories, StoryWalking invites us to move beyond language and text to explore how stories emerge through multisensory encounters with place—and how place itself becomes a co-author in the meaning-making process. Rather than framing literacy as a human-centered act of representation, StoryWalking attends to how walking and storytelling co-create knowledge across human and more-than-human relations. In this view, storytelling becomes worlding—a way of making sense of the world in motion—while walking becomes body-worlding, a sensory mode for engaging with place, memory, history, and imagination. StoryWalking has emerged through my collaborative, multi-sited research in Australia and Finland with children and educators. Using tools and methods such as video, photography, and augmented reality, we explored how children engaged in speculative storytelling that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, self and other, nature and culture. Our research demonstrates that stories are not simply told in place, but with place—foregrounding the ethical, affective, and political dimensions of literacy. By emphasizing literacy as a dynamic, relational, and embodied practice, StoryWalking offers new ways of thinking about ethnographic research, epistemologies, and pedagogies in literacy studies and beyond.
Kristiina Kumpulainen is a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on literacy, learning, and pedagogy across formal and informal settings, with a particular emphasis on posthuman, relational, and arts-based methodologies. She is internationally recognized for her interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges education, childhood studies, and environmental humanities. Kristiina’s recent work explores speculative and more-than-human approaches to literacy, including StoryWalking— a creative, embodied method for investigating literacy as a relational and place-based practice. Through collaborative research in Australia, Finland, and Canada with children, educators, and local environments, Kristiina investigates how imaginative storytelling practices can foster ecological awareness, relational learning and interconnection, and pedagogical innovation. A committed advocate for socially and environmentally just education, Kristiina brings a critical and creative lens to the ways we engage with place, story, and literacy in the Anthropocene.