The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Tracey Bullington, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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I’m in a fifth-grade classroom during an afternoon lesson. Ms. Pellerin paces slowly as she reads aloud from a novel. The class is quiet but abuzz: one student draws faces with markers, while another attaches paper scraps with tape. Soon it’s time for recess, and Ms. Pellerin and I sit on a bench near the playground while she keeps eyes focused on her class. 

Ms. Pellerin tells me that while she noticed various side projects during the read aloud, today she didn’t mind since students were listening intently; sometimes kids just need to do something with their hands. “I think every elementary school classroom should have a maker’s space,” she says.

            “I think your classroom is a maker space,” I reply. 

            Ms. Pellerin laughs. “I guess you’re right.”

Whether doodling with markers while listening to a story or creating friendship bracelets at lunchtime, students in Kristin Pellerin’s class were constantly making crafts. These creations–constructed with multiple, colorful, and dimensional materials like markers, folded paper, and supplies brought from home—were just one part of a diverse literacy landscape. Still, crafting differed from other classroom literacies in important ways. First, unlike spontaneous dance routines or oral discussion contributions that began and ended across seconds, students’ crafts endured across significant time. In addition to temporal durability, students’ crafts occupied space. Different from the many worksheets that were turned in daily, classroom crafts were designed to be seen and took up physical and visual classroom real estate.

Existing literature explores the value of crafting-as-literacy for a variety of purposes. For example, crafting makes room for students to pursue varied individual interests (Dalton, 2020) and tell family stories while disrupting monolingual language ideologies (Machado et al., 2023). Barajas-López and Bang (2018) attend to the histories and cultural specificity of materials for making as they documented claywork among youth in an indigenous summer program. While scholars of multimodality assert that different kinds of composing materials have distinct affordances (Halverson, 2021; Kress, 2003), scant scholarship has emphasized the particular potentials of craft materials to alter spaces. In this paper, I share findings highlighting how fifth grade students used the aesthetic and dimensional qualities of crafts to modify space. In doing so, I take up Royster and Kirsch (2012) drawing on Geertz’s (1973) conception of “tacking in” and “tacking out.” By tacking in—that is, zooming in to pay close attention to the details of students’ compositions in overlooked sites of the elementary school—this analysis underscores the subtle but consequential work students do through crafts to make spaces more inclusive. Ultimately, this analysis considers the environments where students learn as more than “voids simply to be designed and filled” (Kervin et al., 2019, p.23) and suggests that positioning students as co-creators of their learning spaces can be an important step towards justice. I ask: How do fifth grade students use crafting to enact spatial justice through transformations of school spaces?

 

Thinking with Spatial Justice and Liberatory Feminist Perspectives

I frame this study through a theory of spatial justice (Soja, 2010) which emphasizes the transformation of physical space as a mechanism for enacting justice. Far from a static background upon which life is carried out, spatial justice considers how geographies actively shape our social world. Further, physical spaces not only transform action, but are themselves transformed in response to human intervention. Humans reconfigure spaces big and small in ways that are informed by our ideologies, from redrawing the borders of voting districts to rearranging furniture. Spaces are a dynamic reflection of the beliefs and values of their designers, a fact that frames the intentional transformation of geographies across scales as an overlooked strategy for social justice work (Soja, 2010). Schools are one important site to enact spatial justice; students can engage in critical examinations of the built environment and participate in decision making about what form their learning spaces should take (Comber, 2016).

I bring a liberatory feminist perspective (hooks, 2015) to spatial justice, considering the transformation of geographies as a tactic towards the eradication of “sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (p.14). Physical spaces reflect and instantiate sexist ideologies through both features and absences (e.g., lack of lactation rooms in a workplace). Thus, the transformation of space is an avenue through which to counter sexism. Importantly, liberatory feminism affirms the interrelatedness of oppression across axes of identity including gender, race, and sexual identity, calling for solidarity without flattening difference while centering the experiences of multiply marginalized people (hooks, 1984). Towards this goal, hooks (2015) specifically calls for theory that speaks to and is created by voices outside of academia including youth. Young people participate in this vision when they create compositions that articulate injustice and dream of change (Toliver, 2021). In this study, liberatory feminism together with spatial justice illuminated how students took up crafting to counter oppression through physical interventions in their learning spaces. Further, these theories aligned with the feminist pedagogy of Ms. Pellerin, who positioned students as scholars and activists by inviting them to critique power and enact change in class assignments and extracurricular composing.

 

Context and Methods

This analysis comes from a broader, IRB-approved qualitative case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) ​​highlighting the multidisciplinary literacies of fifth grade students in a public PK-5 elementary school in a midsize Midwestern city. The broader study investigates how students used compositional forms including drawings, videos, and comics to speak about social issues and to enact justice. Here, I focus specifically on student-driven crafting: multimodal compositions with a material presence and authentic rhetorical purpose beyond completing a class assignment. 

I spent eight weeks in the focal classroom observing student learning and at times, co-teaching literacy classes alongside classroom teacher Ms. Pellerin. Twelve students from the class of twenty-three completed the consent and assent process to participate in the study. I generated data through field notes, interviews, and artifact collection (Lareau, 2021). In alignment with the study’s theoretical perspectives, I drew upon feminist rhetorical practices (Royster & Kirsch, 2012) across data generation and analysis, for example, collaborating with Ms. Pellerin and her students as a participant in their classroom community and centering students’ self-descriptions in my writing (Blackburn, 2003/2020).

In this analysis, I look closely at two student compositions. These examples speak to the range of composing in the classroom: students crafted in response to motivations beyond the curriculum and curricular tasks, using materials from home and classroom supplies. These examples also illuminate the ways that students worked to make spaces more welcoming to marginalized communities in the school (i.e., girls and LGBTQIA+ people) through material intervention.

 

“Guess What I’m Gonna Do!”: Designing a Menstrual Care Station

Logan [all student names are pseudonyms], a white eleven-year-old girl, was described by Ms. Pellerin as “a maker at the heart of who she is.” True to this description, Logan turned to crafting to propose a solution to problems she encountered when she started her period for the first time at school. She described the situation to her friend Jasmine during recess, explaining that she had found herself in the bathroom without a pad and felt stuck waiting for help. “[My friend] was gone for like ten minutes, so I didn’t even get to eat my lunch!” she exclaimed in frustration. After wondering aloud why the school bathrooms didn’t have tampon dispensers, Logan decided that she would make a station with menstrual supplies for the school’s bathroom to improve the experience for future children. “I’m gonna grab like a little basket or a bag, and I’m gonna put tampons and some pads in there and maybe some gum [for] if kids start their period,” Logan shared excitedly as she and Jasmine spun slowly on the playground’s merry-go-round. As she planned the project, her excitement grew. “Guys! Guess what I’m gonna do,” Logan called out to friends across the yard. 

In conversation with Jasmine, Logan envisioned using her skills as a maker to craft a practical solution (Halverson & Peppler, 2018) to the problem she had faced not having access to menstrual products. She imagined a material intervention that enacted spatial justice (Soja, 2010) by transforming the physical bathroom to be a more conducive place to start one’s period. Her proposal countered a sexist and adultist absence (hooks, 1984), that is, the lack of adequate consideration for menstruating children in the school’s spatial design. Logan’s proposal also demonstrated an attunement to the affordances of her selected materials (Eisner, 2002) as the proposed project not only provided pads and tampons but also considered how materials might communicate emotional care. Her vision accounted for the aesthetic dimensions of the project including the “basket or bag” to hold supplies and hand-drawn signage. Rather than attempting to present as official, these homey touches emphasized the crafted nature of the intervention and spoke to Logan’s desire to create an environment where students’ more-than-material needs were also considered. 

 

“It’s Okay to Like Both Genders!”: Advocating for Queer Acceptance

While much of the classroom crafting that kids engaged in was self-directed, Ms. Pellerin also prompted engagement with varied materials through assignments. For example, in one math extension activity, kids demonstrated an understanding of fractions by making fraction flags, geometric designs created on paper with markers and collage elements that illustrated fractional proportions including halves, thirds, and fourths. Ms. Pellerin framed the open-ended assignment as an opportunity for students to explore personal interests through symbolism. Allie, an African American ten-year-old girl, co-opted the assignment for her own activist purposes, creating a version of the bisexual flag (see Figure 1). Allie divided the top portion of her page into thirds and colored each portion with markers: magenta, purple, and blue. Underneath her flag’s stripes, Allie penned the text “it’s okay to like both genders!” punctuated with a smiley face. 

Allie’s choice to articulate a message of queer acceptance through this particular assignment appeared to be strategic. Ms. Pellerin shared in advance that compositions would be displayed on the classroom wall, thus inviting students to be co-creators of the space, and Allie took up this invitation. Allie enacted spatial justice (Soja, 2010) through her contribution to classroom decor, signaling to members of her class and outside visitors that the classroom was a place where queer identities were embraced. Indeed, Allie used the simple materials at her disposal for the assignment (i.e., paper and markers) to maximize impact. She copied the colors and shapes from the “official” bisexual flag for the top half of her composition, creating a recognizable association. Further, Allie strategically modified the bisexual flag design with a caption. Unlike her classmates who mimicked the typical dimensions of a flag on horizontally-oriented paper, Allie oriented her paper vertically, creating space for text. She penned a straightforward caption identifying her flag as an unequivocal statement of queer pride for anyone who overlooked the color symbolism. Through her public composition, Allie dreamed (Toliver, 2021) for a community that celebrated varied sexual identities, reminding people in the classroom that who they were was “okay.” 

Discussion and Implications

Through this analysis, I found that crafting was far from an inconsequential pastime in this fifth-grade classroom. Students used crafting towards a feminist conception of spatial justice (Soja, 2010) by transforming spaces of their school in ways that countered oppression. They created an accessible and comfortable context to start one’s period and a welcoming environment for queer community members. This analysis extends research on children’s multimodal composing for social justice by emphasizing an under-considered aspect of crafts: they occupy space and thus hold potentials to transform environments. Finally, even though the crafted interventions featured here were decidedly student-driven, this work has implications for classroom teachers. While Ms. Pellerin did not necessarily prompt the crafting practices students engaged in, she quite literally made space for students’ creations and allowed them to remain in the classroom across significant time. By providing time and materials for students to craft spatial interventions and positioning students as co-creators of classroom environments, this study offers possibilities for how teachers might extend commitments to social justice through student-led transformations of school spaces.

 

References

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