The study of a middle school social studies and literacy project this paper addresses occurred in the national capital region of the United States, where perceptions of “patriotism” and immigration policies were the subjects of frequent media reports. With this examination the authors considered one overarching research question: how do middle school students describe and illustrate citizenship when given access to multimodal texts and media (e.g., digital photography and slam poetry)? The authors called on young adolescents to create slam poems with incorporated images to address the question “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen’?”. The authors examined products of this project, which included surveys and slam poems, to address this research question, identifying findings that might inform social studies educators’ practices and curricula. Employing alternative and multimodal texts motivated students to engage with this project and to more candidly share expansive perspectives about what they believe makes a “citizen”.

This paper describes an integrated unit of study conducted with middle school students who— after being asked to consider the profound and potentially nebulous question, “What does it mean to be an American citizen?”—were directed to respond by developing performance poetry and highlighting themes with visual images they created, found, or manipulated. The goal of our project was to engage youth in what might be understood as a noncontroversial exploration of their conceptual considerations of citizenship. But we hoped to engage them in considering the topic more deeply and in new ways. We appealed to the tools of today’s visual culture, which resulted in creative outputs attentive to contentious early 21st century notions of national identity. We present findings and outline the steps taken to develop and deliver this unit to these students and thus aid other practitioners interested in helping young people to cultivate richer concepts of citizenship.