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Micronarratives of immigration

Students using multimodal literacies to

surface micronarratives of United States
immigration
Mara Paula Ghiso and David E. Low

Abstract
This article explores how immigrant students in the
United States utilise multimodal literacy practices to
complicate dominant narratives of American national
identity narratives of facile assimilation, meritocracy
and linear trajectories. Such ideologies can be explicitly evident in curricular materials or can be woven
more implicitly into school literacy practices that privilege individual achievement, devalue cultural ways of
knowing, and operate on a paradigm of remediation.
Within this educational backdrop, we report on a practitioner research study that invited students in a summer school programme for English Language Learners to share their experiences in multiple formats and
media, including comics, and to draw on their cultural and linguistic heritages as sources of knowledge.
We feature comics created by two students in the programme (an 8-year-old girl of Indian heritage and a
16-year-old boy from Vietnam) to understand the potential of visual texts to articulate micronarratives of
immigration. We emphasise how students blend semiotic resources in order to represent the complexity of
their experiences, convey cultural hybridity and resist
singular narratives.
Key words: linguistic diversity, multimodality, narrative, identity, writing

[The telling is] not just a record but a filling out or a

correcting of the record a record that will supplement
or supplant other accounts. This possibility suggests a
definition of narrative as it functions in the historical and
cultural imagination: not just a story but a further story,
a missing story (Wood, 2012, p. 131).
Across the United States (US) and internationally,
schools have become increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse, and much emphasis has been
placed across the ideological spectrum on the intersections of curriculum and identity. The realities of
global migration have brought issues of diversity, access and nationhood to the forefront of educational
policies and practices (Banks, 2008). In this article, we
examine a local instantiation of broader international
dynamics by focusing on students engagement with
literacy in a US context. Though literacy instruction is
frequently treated as neutral, researchers have noted

how it conveys ideological assumptions, including regarding who belongs and whose knowledge counts
in any given educational setting (e.g. Siegel and Fernandez, 2000).
Underlying many of US policies and pedagogies
geared towards immigrant students is the overarching American dream of freedom, meritocracy and
rugged individualism . . . which is part of our can do
national character (Parini, 2012, p. 53). This bootstraps ideology (Villanueva, 1993) is often evident in
curricular materials that contain assimilationist messages (Ghiso and Low, 2012) or is woven more implicitly into school literacy practices that privilege individual achievement, devalue cultural ways of knowing
and operate on a paradigm of remediation (Campano,
2007). For many students of immigrant backgrounds,
schooling in the United States has entailed negotiating their identities along a preconceived model of
what it means to be American, including the message
that success requires shedding their ethnic identities
and smoothing over their struggles (Noguera, 2004;
Suarez-Orozco et al., 2008).
In his examination of the American mythos, Parini
(2012) troubles the dominant national narrative by focusing on its silences for example, noting that the
concept of freedom must be understood alongside the
historical reality of slavery. He asserts, There is no
point in simply reviving the old mythos the American dream of liberty, equality, and justice for all without a clear picture of the difficulties that immigrant
groups face (p. 59). Beyond the facade of national
identity as a melting pot of cultures and immigration
as facile assimilation, there are many alternative stories
to be told. In schools and classrooms, the knowledge
students derive from their legacies and experiences can
be a curricular resource for cultivating more complex
understandings of our world.
This article examines how pupils in a summer school
programme for English Language Learners took up
opportunities for authorship designed to tap into and
learn from their cultural and linguistic heritages, in
particular through visual modes. We begin by articulating trends in US literacy policies that have reinforced assumptions co-extensive with the dominant

C 2012 UKLA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Literacy Volume 47 Number 1 April 2013

American narrative, and describe how a focus on multimodal literacies can offer possibilities for additional
representations. We then feature comics authored by
two students in the programme to understand the potential of visual texts to articulate a further . . . missing story (Wood, 2012, p. 131), and consider how immigrant students utilise multiple semiotic resources to
represent the complexity of their experiences and convey cultural hybridity. Such multimodal authorship
may extend what counts as literacy and knowledge in
schools.

Literacies and immigrant students

It has become increasingly common for educational
practitioners and researchers to conceptualise students interactions with literacy more broadly, documenting ways that youth engage with literacy as a
meaning-making practice connected to their identities and community legacies (Heath, 2010), and expanding notions of texts to include multiple semiotic
modes (Kress, 2003) such as visuals (Burmark, 2002)
and comics (Cary, 2004). However, despite scholarly
shifts in considering literacy as multiple, local and
ideological (Street, 1995), the landscape of education
in the United States, and increasingly in international
contexts, has been characterised by high-stakes testing,
curricular standardisation and skill-based approaches
to literacy (De Castell and Luke, 1986).
The narrowing of school curricula has particularly affected students from historically disenfranchised communities, including immigrant students and learners
acquiring English as an additional language (Genishi
and Dyson, 2009; Menken, 2008; Zacher-Pandya, 2011).
Current literacy policies typically frame diverse students backgrounds and experiences from a deficit orientation as factors that place students at risk of
school failure (Vasudevan and Campano, 2009), as obstacles to be overcome, or, at best, as social dimensions
unrelated to academic pursuits. Though researchers
have documented the funds of knowledge (Gonzalez
et al., 2005) children bring to school literacy practices,
including their cultural and linguistic identities, the
prevailing pedagogical model still considers the experiences of many children of colour and multilingual
learners as lacking in comparison to an implicit benchmark of achievement (Spencer, 2011). The impulse to
remediate students through curricular standardisation
homogenises experience and provides little space for
students to articulate their own narratives. In ranking
students along a normal curve, the testing paradigm so
pervasive in the United States also implicitly reinforces
an educational narrative of meritocracy and individual
mobility (Campano and Simon, 2010).

Visual texts and comics

Despite being hailed by media and literacy scholars as
vital for the 21st century (New London Group, 1996),
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multimodal and multilingual literacies remain at the

margins of literacy instruction. When they do form
a part of the curriculum, they are often described as
vehicles for transitioning students into more conventional academic modes. Two examples with implications for our study are when visual texts are seen
as a means of getting students to read real books
(McTaggart, 2008), or when native languages are used
to transition students into English acquisition (Cummins, 1991). Such cursory inclusions, while aiming to
draw on students resources, ultimately reify conventional hierarchies of knowledge.
In contrast, literacy researchers have examined how interactions with visual modes afford opportunities for
sophisticated meaning-making not available through
print text alone. Arizpe and Styles (2003), for example, trace how elementary students respond to picture books that privilege visual literacies, noting that
focusing on talk and images led to intellectually rigorous responses and engaged reading, especially for
children considered less proficient in decoding print.
Visual texts that address themes of immigration may
be especially suited to multilingual classrooms by encouraging children to draw on their life histories for
interpretation, as well as their facilities with reading
images in the world around them as part of the language learning process (Farrell et al., 2010).
The work on which we report in this article investigates the potential of multimodal literacies for fostering curricular spaces that value immigrant students
experiences and stories in schools (Gutierrez, 2008). In
particular, our pedagogical invitations focused on the
visuo-textual medium of comics or sequential art, a
form that raise[s] complex questions bearing on semiotics, linguistics, aesthetics, textuality, representation,
epistemology, narrative, and spatiality (Witek, 2009,
p. 218) and that is immensely popular with young
readers throughout the world (Tabachnik, 2009). Itself
a hybrid medium, sequential art may also be a generative format for conveying cultural hybridity. Chute
(2008) writes, visual-verbal texts are particularly
relevant to literary scholars because of the way
they represent history through narrative . . . The most
important graphic narratives explore the conflicted
boundaries of what can be said and what can be
shown at the intersection of collective histories and
life stories (p. 457). Chutes (2008) overlay of saying
and showing highlights a primary affordance of comics
authorship: the visual expresses a different message
than the linguistic. Rather than echoing one another,
in comics, words and images operate as a communicative tandem whose meaning lies in and beyond
their interrelation. This synergy enables sequential
artists and their readers to enact multiple literacies
simultaneously.
A significant feature of the medium of comics, the
blank space between panels known as the gutter
(Groensteen, 2007) allows authors to allude to that

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which they choose neither to say nor show. Creators

of sequential art communicate with readers via gutterances (Low, 2012, p. 372), whereby the reader must
imaginatively fill in the gaps (Iser, 1978) between each
panel in order to construct a continuous narrative. The
meaning in comics exists between telling and showing on the one hand, and concealing on the other.
For this reason, the medium is structurally equipped
to challenge dominant modes of storytelling (Chute,
2008, p. 456) and thus uniquely tailored to exploring the tensions and borders of further and missing stories (Wood, 2012), especially for those students
whose cultures, histories and experiences have been
subordinated. As we argue in this article, because the
comics medium intrinsically blends semiotic systems,
it can serve as an instrument for authors to represent
dimensions of their life stories that may be difficult
to convey with a single mode. As a narrative device,
sequential art may be highly suited for complicating
the dominant American narrative of immigration-asassimilation.

Contextualising the project

This article draws from an ongoing partnership with a
culturally and linguistically diverse school district in
a large north-eastern city in the United States, serving students from 66 countries of origin who speak
70 home languages. The primary language groups
represented are Spanish, Bengali, Vietnamese, Punjabi, Chinese, Urdu, Arabic and French. The districts demographic shifts in recent years have been
an impetus to investigate with educators how to
envision literacy pedagogies more inclusive to the
heterogeneity of students and families. The larger partnership has involved the first authors ethnographic
immersion across the district, including documenting
and facilitating curricular activities in collaboration
with the second author, conducting participant observation at school and district-wide events, teaching professional development courses that bring educators
together from different schools, serving as a translator for families, and gathering perspectives through
interviews.
The student data featured in this article are from one
of the district initiatives: a free 5-week summer programme for English Language Learning (ELL) students offered 3 days per week for 4 hours each day. In
2011, both authors had the opportunity to work with
the teachers and students as participant observers and
volunteers in five classrooms (Grades 1, 23, 4, 78 and
912), documenting students interactions with literacy
and facilitating curricular activities. The students were
of Latin American, West African, Caribbean, Asian and
Middle Eastern descent, mirroring the larger district
population. All had been identified by the district as
learners who would benefit from what the programme
coordinators characterised as an enrichment experience where they would continue reading, writing, lisC 2012 UKLA
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Micronarratives of immigration

tening and speaking in English to maintain the language proficiencies they had acquired throughout the
year.

Data collection and analysis

Within the context of the summer programme, the
authors sought to investigate the following research
question: how do students engage in multimodal literacy activities designed to value their linguistic and
cultural resources? Drawing on a practitioner research
methodology (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009), the
study aimed to both understand patterns of student
engagement and utilise emerging insights to inform
ongoing pedagogies. Though we were not the primary
teachers in the programme, we designed and facilitated literacy curricula with the students for a portion
of the instructional time.
Data sources for the summer research consisted of field
notes, audio-recorded and transcribed classroom conversations, student work, artefacts (e.g. curricular materials) and interviews with the teachers and coordinator of the programme. In our analysis, we looked
across the data to generate themes (Strauss and Corbin,
1998) about the ways students interacted with the literacy instruction, the topics they authored and the use
of particular visual and linguistic features to convey
meaning through their narratives. Since the student
texts were visual products, we examined the use of
design elements including point of view, angles, perspectives, spatio-temporal signifiers and dialogue balloons (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). We focused on
multiple levels of analysis looking within and across
students compositions to identify represented themes
and how meaning was conveyed, but also at how
these texts functioned socio-culturally in the classroom
(Siegel and Panofsky, 2009) and within broader national discourses of immigration.

Curricular invitations and students

responses
As part of our literacy lessons in the summer school
programme, we provided openings for students to author their experiences through multiple modes, with
a focus on visuals and oral storytelling as platforms
for representation. With the 7- and 8-year-old children, our instructional experiences were conducted in
a whole-class structure. We began by reading and discussing picture books that featured cultural identities
and immigration histories (e.g. Garza, 1996; Hall, 2004;
Tan, 2006), paying specific attention to the meanings
conveyed in the illustrations. Inspired by these visual
texts, we asked students to compose their own stories through single-scene drawings and sequential art.
In the adolescent setting, the curricular experiences
were conducted in centres through which the students rotated in groups of five. The adolescent students

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analysed features of comics through transactions with

wordless examples (e.g. Prohias, 2001; Tan, 2006), resequenced cut-out panels and orally constructed stories around them, added words to existing comics
that had had their words removed and utilised blank
comics panels to author narratives from their own
lives. In both age groups, students created two types
of graphic products: drawings explicitly responding to
a presented text (such as a picture book or comics excerpt), and autobiographical narratives. In this article,
we only report on analysis of the latter.
The range and variation of the students compositions suggest that immigration was a salient thematic
choice. Though the visuo-textual writing invitation
was broad for example, tell a story from your life
a significant proportion of the students elected to represent aspects of their transnational identities (9 of 13
students in the early childhood class and 12 of 15 in the
adolescent context). This included indexing their competencies in languages other than English, depicting
journeys across national borders, representing their
countries of origin or describing experiences of navigating new contexts in the United States. The young
children incorporated fewer instances of dual language texts (4 of 23 products) because as a group they
had received fewer, if any, years of schooling in their
native languages. Nonetheless, immigration experiences featured prominently in their comics narratives
(6 of 10 products). Among the students who had immigrated as adolescents, particularities of their countries of origin, including national symbols such as flags
and independence celebrations, were more salient than
with the younger children (9 of 15 products). In the
sections that follow, we look closely at examples from
two different age groups to examine the types of immigration narratives authored by the youth and explore
the potentials of multimodal writing pedagogies in diverse classrooms.

Surfacing a micronarrative of loss

To convey that authoring opportunities could encompass students cultural and linguistic resources, the
first author referenced her own immigrant journey
from Argentina to the United States when introducing the lesson to the early childhood class. Surjit [all
names are pseudonyms], 8-year-old girl of Indian heritage, created a sequence of panels about the passing
and cremation of her uncle (Figure 1). Learning of a
family members death was a topic the children had
brought up with one another during the whole group
discussion.
In sharing her visual narrative, Surjit relayed the following:
At 11 oclock me and my family went to bed. When
I heard somebody crying I woke up and I went to my
mommy room but my mommy wasnt there. I whispered,
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Who is crying? And then I went in the bathroom door.

I saw my mommy.
Why are you crying, mommy?
Because your uncle died.
What are you saying mommy, for real?
Yes. Yes, [Surjit]. Your uncle . . . I will tell you the
story. Your uncle was walking in the street and a car
just came behind and . . .
I was crying too. We got to the airport and then we got
a plane and then my big sister was playing with my little
brother. But my little brother was saying No! And then
my uncle got fired [cremated]. In India we just do that.
All day I looked at my uncle. I was crying. At the end, I
was crying. I was really mad at everybody.
Surjit utilised the multimodal writing opportunity to
convey an experience common to the phenomenology
of migration: dealing with family loss across distances.
Surjits visual design features, such as perspective and
negative space, communicate the emotional tenor of
the narrative. In the third panel, there is almost no negative space; rather, multiple dialogue balloons crowd
over each other, spilling from borders that cannot contain their content. Squeezed in and jumbled together,
the placement of the words and images aptly portrays the chaos and confusion of the scene. By contrast,
in the fourth panel negative space is a dominant feature, with a starkly open sky and a plane quietly marking the transition between contexts. This is at once a
physical, cultural and imaginative journey.
Though Surjits comics represent an emotionally
fraught narrative, they do more than merely supplant
a triumphant immigration trajectory with one on the
opposite end of the affective spectrum. The juxtaposition of the third and fourth panels renders the simultaneity of experience the grief of losing a loved one
and the excitement at being in an aeroplane and returning to India, succinctly captured by the wow in
the fourth panel. Surjits narrative is multifaceted and
encompasses contradiction.
One border crossing, represented in the fifth panel, involves the culturally inflected funereal tradition of cremation. The use of particular design features emphasises Surjits positionality in the narrative. The phrase
All day I looked at my uncle is rendered not as a disembodied voice-over in the images background, as in
the first three scenes, but embedded in a dialogue balloon emanating from Surjits downturned mouth. The
panel consists of only the uncles covered figure and
Surjits likeness as she faces her readers and speaks directly to them. Absent is any additional background
such as family attendees, ceremony details or physical elements of the space. It is Surjits experience of
encountering and mourning her uncle that is centred.

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Micronarratives of immigration

Figure 1: Surjits narrative of the loss and cremation of her uncle in India
When telling her story to friends in the class, Surjit
added a verbal explanation to this image, And then
my uncle got fired. In India we just do that. On another occasion, she noted, Here in the US they put
people in the ground. In India we put them in the
fire. Within a diverse classroom where most children
did not share her heritage, Surjit utilised oral commentary as a form of cultural brokering (Jezewski and
Sotnik, 2001) to mediate her multiple realities and connect with her peers.

Excavating an alternative story

As in Surjits comics, 16-year-old Thucs piece relies
heavily on movement, both geographic and experiential (Figure 2). Thuc immigrated to the United States
from Vietnam less than a year prior to starting the
summer ELL programme, and was characterised by
his teacher as having the highest English language
proficiency in his class of 15 students, Grades 912.
Thuc often completed his assigned work quickly and
returned to reading independently from the classrooms collection of chapter books. For this reason,
David was not surprised to observe that when he invited Thuc along with four other multilingual adolescents in a small group centre to compose an
autobiographical narrative using comics (Cary, 2004),
Thuc selected the sheet with the fewest number of
blank panels, and completed his vignette in under
10 minutes.
Upon first glance, the six-panel sequence rendering
Thucs immigration, which covers roughly 1 year
in his life, seems to reinforce American narratives
of meritocratic individualism and the romance of
reinvention: one arrives in the country, learns the English language, assimilates and prospers. In spite of
Thuc writing When I came to America I was so conC 2012 UKLA
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fuse[d], there are no visual signifiers (Kress and van

Leeuwen, 2006) for expressing temporal or emotional
distance between his aeroplane landing, his entering
an American school, his learning English from a book
and his enrolling in the summer ELL programme. Cues
that might denote the passing of time or show how
Thuc negotiated the confusion he experienced are not
present. Although the sizing, spacing and perspective Thuc employs are intriguing at a semiotic level,
through a narrative focus, the end product seems to
convey a linear process of resettlement. Fortuitously,
then, the medium of comics affords a type of analysis
that goes beyond that which physically appears on the
page. In addition to Thucs few words and relatively
straightforward images, his gutterances communicate a great deal more. Contained in the spaces between the panels are numerous inferences to be made
about Thucs immigration and his early experiences in
the United States, details that he chooses not to initially
represent. For instance, what happened after Thucs
plane landed? How did his family come to settle where
it did? How was his transition to an American school?
What particularities, difficulties and fellow travellers
did he omit? Each detail absent from the panels lives
within the gutters.
The lacunae in Thucs narrative were both too many
and too large to be filled in by us, as we were unfamiliar with his personal history; if we wanted to know
more, we would need Thuc to guide us through his
comics. We wondered whether Thucs graphic narrative acted as a reproduction (sincere or parodic) of
the national narratives of rugged individualism and
social mobility, and what other stories formed a part
of Thucs experiences. Ultimately, we decided that the
pedagogical potential for considering Thucs narrative
a source of community knowledge made it worth asking him to revisit his gutters in order to cultivate a
further understanding of our hybrid classroom culture

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Figure 2: Thucs initial comics panels of coming to the United States

(Campano, 2007), at the intersection of collective history and life stories (Chute, 2008).
Following methods of practitioner research (CochranSmith and Lytle, 2009), the second author invited Thuc
to resume his graphic narrative by envisioning the gutters dividing the panels on his page as physical partitions, and imagining himself standing in one panel
holding a crowbar. If Thuc were to pry the panels
apart, what would emerge from the gutters? What
other stories did he want to tell? David invited Thuc
into a conversation, and was surprised and pleased
when Thuc suggested extending his narrative by creating an additional page of comics, for which he chose
a 12-panel format (Figure 3).
In his extension, Thuc connects each of his panels to
the heading I Didnt Know. This decision allows the
second page to serve as a response in the form of
an illustrated list to the initial storys sense of certainty. If Thucs first page presents his experiences as
largely uncomplicated, his additions give them nuance
and range. Thucs second page mines his earlier narrative and makes visible additional valences to his story,
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thus unsettling the dominant American trope of assimilation. This extension suggests how the medium of
comics in the intersection of words, images and concealments may afford authors a means for critically
engag[ing] the complexity of their own experiences
(Campano and Low, 2011).

Multiple trajectories through multiple

modes
Demographic shifts have resulted in competing narratives: on the one hand, we live in an interconnected
world with dynamic global flows (Appadurai, 1990),
while on the other there is a resurgence of nationalistic claims to identity and debates about citizenship and belonging. These are tensions immigrant students must navigate by virtue of their experiences, and
which give them privileged insights about the world
we share. Unfortunately, literacy policies aligned along
national narratives of individualism and meritocracy
devalue such cultural and linguistic knowledge. It
is thus necessary for researchers and educators to

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Figure 3: Thucs subsequent comics panels

consider how literacy pedagogies might be better attuned to the epistemic resources inherent in immigrant
students experiences and stories.
Hakakian (2012) writes, An immigrants arrival . . . has a distinct physical beginning marked
by the landing of ones plane. But theres another
arrival, the cultural one, thats incremental, perpetual. Both Surjits and Thucs visual texts include
depictions of aeroplanes, a literal and symbolic trope
that recurred throughout many of the narratives from
the summer school programme. These vehicles, a
concrete representation of the students journeys,
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index their navigation of cultural, linguistic and social

borders, as well as political ones. The students texts
emphasise that, contrary to the ostensibly linear path
of an aeroplane moving from one location to another,
experiences of immigration are complex and multidirectional. In the spirit articulated by Hakakian, Surjit
and Thuc illustrate how arriving does not imply
either an incremental shedding of one cultural identity
in favour of another, or a static endpoint. Rather,
their narratives showcase stories of struggle, loss,
excitement and disjuncture, representing, through
visual modalities, the nuance and contradiction of
claiming transnational identities.

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Critical literacy is an essential component of a

robust humanities education, where students have opportunities to deconstruct dominant discourses and redesign texts and practices in ways that challenge social hierarchies (Janks, 2010). In the context of working
with immigrant students, a critical education would
involve digging beneath dominant narratives of assimilation and meritocracy (Parini, 2012) to get at the
complexity of students experiences in negotiating new
cultural contexts. Our work suggests that multimodal
writing opportunities can expand the literacy curriculum to allow for representations of immigration that
challenge monolithic trajectories and thus offer varied,
contrasting and more complete understandings of student experiences.
The works we have featured in this article surface
less visible stories that constitute a correcting of the
record (Wood, 2012, p. 131) by representing additional accounts of immigration. The multimodal curricular invitations offered a space for Surjit, Thuc and
their peers to produce micronarratives (Lyotard, 1984)
that characterise the experiences of many youth, but
which at times get buried or crowded out in the
larger US mythos of assimilation and upward mobility.
Through their autobiographical accounts, Surjit and
Thuc surface stories that may be missing from grand
narratives, expanding the representative repertoire of
immigration.
Carving out curricular spaces for authoring practices
that value multiple modes may also invite multiple
representations of experience ones that diverge from
or complicate narratives of national identity. In our
pedagogical invitations, we sought to expand school
texts and practices beyond those privileged in US literacy policies. Valuing the visual as a source of meaningmaking both in reading images through storytelling
and analysis, and in utilising multiple modes to author ones own stories disrupted the ways students
are often sorted by their abilities to decode print and
produce personal narratives along essay conventions
for the genre. Youth considered to be in need of additional support services engaged in sophisticated literacy practices, and their texts and discussions could
be a source of critical inquiry for the larger class.
Forefronting the visual mode necessitated collaborative discussions, creating links among students shared
and divergent experiences and moving away from individualistic learning trajectories. Multimodal literacies may thus have the potential to represent varied
narratives, thus broadening the knowledge valued in
schools and nurturing mutual edification in increasingly diverse classrooms.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Gerald Campano, Robert
LeBlanc and the journal editors and reviewers for
their thoughtful suggestions on earlier versions of this
manuscript.
C 2012 UKLA
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CONTACT THE AUTHORS

Mara Paula Ghiso, Department of Curriculum
and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University, 306 Zankel, Box 31, 525 West 120th
Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.
e-mail: mpg2134@columbia.edu; ghiso@tc.edu
David E. Low, Reading/Writing/Literacy Department, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, 3700 Walnut Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
e-mail: davidlow@gse.upenn.edu

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