Storied Lives: Teaching Memoir Writing Through Multimodal Mentor Texts

Abstract

In this article, the authors, two teacher educators and three high school teachers, examine the impact of a professional development seminar held in spring 2017. In that seminar, participants read and composed brief autobiographical sketches in a variety of media and learned a new lexicon for multimodal close reading, composition, and design. Using narrative inquiry, the three coauthoring teachers reflected on the importance and anxiety of being positioned as multimodal writers, and their subsequent interaction with multimodal mentor texts in their classrooms. The authors contend that teachers must move beyond conventional textual autobiography and memoir. Expanding teachers’ comfort with multimodal mentor texts is essential for their and their students’ literacy development. Building a lexicon for close reading and composing with multimodal texts can inspire students and empower teachers to invite autobiographical writing into their instruction and teach autobiography and memoir as acts of design.

Poetic and Visual Explorations in Pandemic Teaching

“…Final Thoughts Meixner et al (2019) pointed to the tendency to use multimodal texts, including graphic novels, comics, and other media, "in the classroom as a tool rather than studied as a narrative genre" (p. 495). A range of stories exists from the pandemic, as well as from the pre-pandemic routines of daily life.…”

Interaksi referen dan konteks dalam antologi memoar Guru Welas Asih

“…Sebuah memoar bukanlah autobiografi linier yang menceritakan kehidupan yang sepenuhnya dijalani, melainkan aspek kehidupan penulis yang "dipilih", yang biasanya diilhami oleh ingatan (Al-Sayed et al, 2016). Namun, antara autobiografi dengan memoar tidak dapat dipisahkan satu dengan yang lainnya (Meixner et al, 2018). Aspek kehidupan yang dipilih oleh penulis menentukan tema dan tujuan penulisan memoar tersebut.…”

Between Hip Hop and Me: Podcast Process Texts as Tools of Cultural Brokerage for Community Cultural Wealth

“…Drawing from sociocultural perspectives on literacy (Gee, 2015; New London Group, 1996) and asset-based pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Moll et al, 1992; Yosso, 2005), we explore how process texts might serve as artifacts for educators to recognize and lift up out-of-school, cultural, and community literacy practices. Acknowledging the importance of how our backgrounds affect our critical stance (Vasquez et al, 2019), we take space to consider our positionalities as Hip Hop listeners.…”

“…Process texts are complements to mentor texts (Dorfman & Capelli, 2007;Meixner et al, 2018) in showing how mentor texts were created and disclosing tools, techniques, procedures, and people consulted during composition. We agree with Dollins (2020) that students benefit from moving beyond identifying the moves of skilled composers in mentor texts to engage in facilitating the use of such moves, and analyses of process texts can support this goal.…”