Centering Student Stories Through Multimodality in Leader Learning: A Practitioner Reflexive Inquiry

• Main Author: Johnson, Sara C
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2023
• Subjects: Education; Educational leadership
• ISBN: 9798379516543

All students carry stories. In normalizing storytelling and centralizing student stories, which can include student identity and cultural narratives, we are better able to provide leadership that is responsive to the school community we serve, ultimately impacting school culture in meaningful ways. This study is multi-faceted and includes Central Independent School alumni and current student participants, artifact analysis of photographic portraits, personal and reflective essays, small focus group discussions, and interviews. This study is guided by these practitioner inquiry research questions: What happens when I use portraits and multimodality as a vehicle for students to critically reflect upon their lived experiences? How can centering student voices through multimodal storytelling inform my learning and practice as a school leader? The conceptual framework guiding this study is inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Within this framework, I foreground student stories as an integral aspect of the school leadership decision-making process. I also examine how students present their narratives and identities through multimodal methods. To inform my study, I examine research on justice and equity-oriented leadership in education; multimodal storytelling; the role of student identity and how it is situated in an independent school setting; and culturally responsive school leadership. The focus of this study is on the use of the arts as a means for multimodal communication. The three findings within this study are: When students are engaged in multimodal literacy, they make critical and agentive decisions about how to present and communicate themselves to an audience; When students have the opportunity to present themselves multimodally and engage in reflective practice, they develop attention and awareness to the ways that identity is constructed, fluid, and changing over time; When given the opportunity to create and reflect using multimodality, students theorized about the role of the arts and its importance in their lives. These three findings reveal the necessary and significant role multimodality plays in the ways that students communicate their identities and lived experiences in school settings.