The three pictures that begin this chapter appear in digital stories about an odyssey of self. Caspian,1 a student featured in the research reported here, launches his story by looking at the viewer as he leans out of a train window; Esme presents a map of Australia with a gradual encircling of her childhood home in Cairns, Australia; and Brian starts his film with a digital clock set at 6 a.m., the time he awoke every day in Israel, before he and his family relocated to the United States. Where one film captures a moment in time as an enduring memory, the other depicts a movement from one part of the world to another; and the final one, relives a past moment quite different from the present. These images express agencies and lived histories. The visual triptych embodies an argument put forth in the chapter that multimodality affords more complete expression of habitus (see Bourdieu, 1990a/1980: 55ff.) than mono-modality. Each image gives a viewer a slice of someone's life, what I call in this chapter fractal habitus – that is ‘pieces’ of habitus . Throughout Bourdieu's work, there is a constant dialogue about the ways in which habitus shifts during improvisation and cultural production. This chapter is an attempt to develop a language for the subtle shifts in habitus revealed during individual creative expression. Through gestures and movement in drama; through medium and colour saturation or desaturation in painting; and through visuals accompanied with music in film these modal choices embody parts of self in artistic and creative work. In an attempt to use Bourdieu's notion of habitus as a means of viewing how meaning-makers represent their everyday in representation and production, the chapter documents a High School ethnography and the ways in which teenagers ‘sediment’ fractiles of habitus in their production of digital stories. The study combines ethnography with multimodality by looking at a community and a group of students who use multimodality to represent their lived histories, families, and dispositions in order to foster a greater understanding of a canonical text. These ‘multimodal’ readings of lived histories illustrate arguments put forth in the chapter: that inspiration for self-expression grows from transacting with the everyday; and, that modal choice offers more creativity and expression. In the research reported in the chapter, ‘fractal habitus’ is interpreted through choices made during the production of digital stories.
FIGURE 7.1 Digital stories about an Odyssey
There is extant research that supports digital story production as a way of repositioning students within situations and settings (Rosenfield-Halverson et al., 2009). Nelson et al., 2008; Rogers, 2008). In such work, scholars demonstrate how multimodal composition offers greater motivation and greater connection to intended practices and understandings. Nelson, Hull, and Smith-Roche (2008) analyse in detail a youth's digital story, which they consider a ‘multiplicatively more complicated matter to vividly realize and publicize an authorial intention’ (2008: 415). Through their analysis of a youth's careful, deft choice of modes, Nelson et al. show how they create a powerful message about himself and his world through the production of a digital story. Similarly, Rosenfeld-Halverson et al., (2009) explore a connection between youth concepts of identity and a production of films about youth media arts organizations. The authors analyse how producers and designers of new media foster and even shape the identity development process of youth. So too, in Theresa Rogers’ research (2010), she interprets mediation and repositioning of identity by four youths in their production of short films. Rogers’ work documents the sophistication of four teenagers’ concepts of design and, more specifically, how they embed values within visual, audio, gestural and interactive modes of expression and representation. Combining an analysis of multimodal production with Bourdieu's notion of habitus chips away at bits, fractures of habitus sedimented into produced texts (see Rowsell and Pahl, 2007). I build on such work by focusing on not only what a group of teenagers produce, but also, how they produce multimodal compositions.
From twenty-four hours to fifteen years, each digital story carries with it messages about the producer. Habitus, with its adaptive quality that adjusts to internal and external shifts, helps me to interpret choices in how students design their stories. In past and present work (Rowsell, 2009; Rowsell and Pahl, 2007), I have explored ways in which individuals adjust, unconsciously and consciously, habitus when life changes happen. For instance, in a chapter about four artists and how they consciously improvise on habitus (dispositions and experience) during creative expression, I analyse how an artist expresses internal and external shifts in habitus in his art when he became a father. In the chapter, I look at a four-year study of ninth-grade secondary students taking a multimodal approach to the teaching of English and connect with Bourdieu's theory of practice in order to offer a theory of fractal habitus in their multimodal meaning-making that opens more space, more creativity, and ultimately, more learning of text content. Admittedly, the more constraints and conventions a context carries, the less freedom to improvise on their understanding of their life histories. The argument about the creation of digital stories and the use of multimodality for the project rests on a belief that participants are more motivated and have greater interest because the context and the product reinforce habitus. In the chapter, I present how students design their journey stories around their fractal habitus, and it is through the embedding of their everyday life histories that they reposition their identity in an English classroom.
From January 2006 to the June 2010, I worked closely with an English teacher at a high school in Princeton, New Jersey. Participants involved in the study are ninth-grade students who take a support English class because they are not performing well in English and they need extra support as a supplement to their standard ninth-grade English class. I have written previously about this group of students (Rowsell, 2009; Pahl and Rowsell, 2010). What differentiates this chapter from previous writings is that I use Bourdieu's notion of habitus and the sedimentation of fractal habitus into multimodal texts to show how encouraging an active embedding of the everyday, personal experiences, dispositions opens up a space for creativity and innovation that doxa-ruled spaces like schooling obstructs. In this section, I profile the context, participants, reflexivity, and methodological approach.
Within suburban towns, social class is at times hidden in a landscape of generalized middle class. Princeton, New Jersey, for instance, is predominantly an affluent community situated between New York and Philadelphia with a cross-section of middle-class commuters and local residents whose socio-economic status is somewhat blurred and being economically disadvantaged in this university town is hidden in a landscape of privilege and upward mobility. Central to the community is the presence of Princeton University, where students come from around the world to take courses with such scholars as Toni Morrison or Paul Krugman (2008 Nobel Peace Prize in Economics winner). It is regarded as an intellectual epicentre in the United States. The local high school mirrors the values of the community and it takes pride in a tradition of academic and cultural achievements. Although the high school has many accolades for student achievement, there have been years when it has not made adequate yearly progress on the HSPA (High School Proficiency Assessment, a standardized test administered in all high schools in New Jersey). For a silent, insistent minority of students in this community, there is an on-going pattern of under-achievement, which is often attributed to a mismatch between the interests and predilections of students and the demands of the school curriculum.
In accordance with No Child Left Behind (2002), eighth-grade students are required to take the Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment (GEPA) test. Students who score below 200 on the language arts assessment are placed in a HSPA/Basic Skills program. It is this program that is the focus of my research. It seemed unacceptable to both of us (the English teacher and me) that students who clearly have the capacity to do well in English were not doing well because they did not feel connected to their study of English literature. Exploring their stories and using their lived histories and their ruling passions as material to think and write with became a means to relocate them in the formal field of practice in their English classroom.
As I have noted before (Rowsell, 2009), there is no lack of skill and effort on the part of these students. They are talented, have ruling passions and make meaning from a variety of texts, yet they fail to reach their potential in school. What continues to impress me about these teenagers is that their interests are as diverse and eclectic as they are. Some like to cook, some like to sculpt, some write stories, others like what typical teenagers like, such as videogames and sports. What is more, there are talented and caring teachers at this high school, yet there continues to be a growing pattern of disinterest and apathy displayed by students. Typically, their complex communicational worlds are rendered invisible within more anachronistic, print-ruled pedagogical frameworks. As other researchers have documented (Alvermann and McLean, 2007; Kinloch, 2009; Hagood, 2009; Vasudevan, 2009), adolescents such as these ones do not recognize themselves in their learning, particularly their learning of classical literature.
So it is with this background that we decided to create a unit of study based on Homer's The Odyssey (1996), a unit on the production of a digital journey story paralleling Odysseus’ journey back to Ithaca. We began the digital storytelling unit in October 2008, at the beginning of the second marking period. Each student participant received an outline of what they needed to do to complete the project. The assignment explanation read as follows:
Life is all about stories. Everyone has a story, either about something they have heard, seen, or only hope to see. We all remember stories that we were told as children and will tell many of those same stories to our own families one day. Stories reflect our past, present, and future and represent our heritage, beliefs, values, histories, family, and dreams.
In English class, you have read stories that others share with readers. Homer tells us the story of Telemachus, the son of great Odysseus, who in just a few weeks, must leave his boyhood behind and assume his place as ‘the true son of Odysseus.’ He has much to learn before his journey ends. Odysseus, too, is on a journey. He must not only endure the physical journey of reaching home, but he must also take an emotional journey to reunite with his wife after 20 years.
This is your opportunity to tell your story ... in your own voice.
Step One:Decide which part of your journey you will tell. Most importantly, think about your family, your heritage, and how these have contributed to your journey.
Step Two/Three:Think about pictures, sounds, movements that tell the story that you want to tell. Then, storyboard your short film to structure the content and design.
(Devised by Jackie Delaware in September 2008)
After being introduced to the project, student participants spent several weeks storyboarding their content, collecting multimodal assets (such as visuals, sounds, overall effects, transitions), writing and performing their voice-overs, and devoting hours in the studio/computer room to edit their films. During the final stages of production, I interviewed all of the participants about choices that they made during production, such as: What story did you decide to tell? How did you relate your story to Homer's The Odyssey? What modes/effects did you use? Why these modes and not other modes? Have they achieved the effect and mood that they wanted to create? If so, in what ways have they achieved this mood? Is there a dominant effect or mode in their digital stories? Along with interviews, Jennifer observed hours of studio time (i.e., class periods devoted to film production), noting such design practices as: selecting music for a film; choosing visuals and visual effects; the degree of collaborative work; the level of engagement in tasks; and, how much guidance each participant required during the design and production process.
There were some weaknesses and limitations to the research such as a lack of sufficient equipment and technology (e.g., we had a very small budget for equipment). In retrospect, another limitation to the study was the lack of critical framing about how equipment works and what such technical effects such as camera angles achieve and how and why certain modes afford more meaning in one instance than in others. In fact, the project would have strongly benefited from more critical framing about modes and modal effects (Sheridan and Rowsell, 2010), if the teacher-researcher and I adopted some design language. In the end, the unit dealt more with process than it did with product.
Student participants were assessed based on their multimodal competence as exhibited in their productions. The rubric that Jackie (the teacher-researcher) devised took account of how a student demonstrates a journey; choice in modal effects to give their story a mood and message; sequencing and transitioning content well; creativity and originality; and, multimodal salience and effect.
The ethnographic approach to data collection and analysis reported in this chapter resembles what Judith Green and David Bloome (1990) call ‘adopting an ethnographic perspective’, which they describe as follows:
by adopting an ethnographic perspective, we mean that it is possible to take a more focused approach (i.e., do less than a comprehensive ethnography) to study particular aspects of everyday life and cultural practices of a social group. Central to an ethnographic perspective is the use of theories of culture and inquiry practices derived from anthropology or sociology to guide the research.
(p. 6)
Establishing a spectrum of ethnography helpfully separates extensive and comprehensive studies of a given culture from shorter ethnographies that take some account of cultural practice and an emic perspective of a context (see Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume).
To conduct this research in a ninth-grade classroom, I extend Bloome and Green's distinction between an ethnography and an ethnographic perspective by taking an ecological ethnographic perspective. While the research is ethnographic in nature in that it attempts to take an insider perspective of a particular community and group of teenagers taking a support English class, differentials and geographies of opportunity played a role in data analysis. This research is tied to another research study, which is also an ecological survey, this time of the Princeton community conducted with colleagues at the University of South Australia2 (Nichols et al. 2009). In the research, the team asks such questions as: Are there socio-economic differentials in terms of access to information and networks of information within the geography of a particular community? If so, in what ways are communities sectioned off? What are some of the popular hubs of activity? Are there distinct networks and spatial hubs for specific individuals? Our study draws on a study by Neuman and Celano (2001), who conducted a comparative study of four neighbourhoods in Philadelphia in terms of the opportunities offered for children and their families to engage in literacy-related activities. Their method involved walking through a block of different neighbourhoods to systematically note different geographies and spatial features: stores and stands likely to sell reading materials, signs and their conditions (readability), public spaces where reading could be undertaken, and relevant institutional sites (libraries, child care centres, etc). Neuman and Celano found that neighbourhoods of different socio-economic status showed ‘major and striking differences at almost all levels’ in terms of access to literacy resources and opportunities (Neuman and Celano, 2001: 15). In this way, a neighbourhood's properties are broken apart and analysed, almost like looking at a habitat and analysing the inter-dependence and co-existence of animals, people, systems and properties. To collect data for the research, I observed, interviewed, and worked with students and their teacher on a digital storytelling project and I looked at the immediate community and its relationship to participants and to the high school. In so doing, I mapped out participant hubs in the town (or, in Bourdieusian terms, within their field of practice). I examined and discussed their valued artifacts, which they brought to school. Accounting for ecological dimensions of their community fosters analysis of how participants crossed fields of practice (Bourdieu, 1990a) from their home to school, and how these crossings effect habitus. For instance, mapping out their community (which for many of them is a series of streets in the centre of town) and relating these hubs to the ecology of their school is a way of breaking apart fractal habitus within a field of practice.
To situate the context and ecology of their classroom, Jackie (the participant teacher) and I combined assignments and canonical texts from their regular English class with the kinds of texts and practices that they engage in outside school. Also, I documented where students sit during studio time and with whom they interact and consult during digital story production.
To be active participants in the research, Jackie and I decided to produce our own digital stories. Jackie produced a digital story about being an English teacher for twenty-five years. I produced a digital story about another project on digital and new media producers.3 It was ‘epiphanic’ to produce a film about a research study in that it made me appreciate that I lack the multimodal sensibilities that our students exhibit. For example, I chose a song by Leonard Cohen entitled Famous Blue Raincoat. What I failed to appreciate at the time is that a text producer cannot superimpose a mode because of preference, modes have to work in harmony and symbiotically with other modes and with the content of the story. In other words, the mere fact that I like the song is not a justification for its inclusion in the design. Modes affect meaning when they fit the meaning and, often they effect meaning differently when they are combined with other modes. Students in the study knew this. What is more, they had an intuitive sense about how to do it; the process appeared to be instinctual for them. Jackie and I did not have this same sense, at least we needed to hone our ability to choose the right mode to match the story that we wanted to tell. The experience of producing a digital story about another research project recalls Kress’ insights in Before Writing, that ‘cognition takes place in all modes, but differently so’ (Kress, 1997: 42). That is, words and music by Leonard Cohen did not have the connective power nor did they evoke the details that a collage of voices captured. What I realize now that I did not recognize then is that my short film needed a powerful introductory piece as a segue to the content and spliced interview sound bites as a montage of voices was exactly the kind of trope I needed to create an arc for the film's narrative. Snippets from interviews threaded together gave my film an explanatory arc, where the song without a direct connection, on its own, did not achieve the same effect. In the end, I changed the first few slides in my story from words and bits of Leonard Cohen's song to a remix of voices from interviews that I had conducted as the title rolls across the screen. My short film needed a dominant mode and that mode had to mirror the message that modal affordances are the driving force behind content and design. Modes structure content and mirror the story, in much the same way that voice in writing is crafted through words and phrases. To conduct the research, I wanted to capture not only the process of making digital stories, but also to document how the blurring of institutional space into personal, expressive space fosters meaning making. In retrospect, I now appreciate how modes tell stories and how my own habitus was improvised and, perhaps, even shifted during the process, therein illustrating a merging of Bourdieusian sociology with multimodality.
As noted in Chapter 4, habitus exists at an unconscious level, as a product of history that impacts practice. It is an internalized second nature – the basis of perception and appreciation – that is constrained by fields. In the work of theorists such as Gunther Kress (1997), Anne Haas Dyson (1993), and Kate Pahl (2003; 2004), it is clear that there are different pathways into literacy and the more freedom of expression and representation an individual has, the more meaning that can be made. A meaning-maker left to his, or her, own devices will use the best possible materials, resources, and skills to get the job done. Here, I build on the argument that field contexts of practice, such as a ninth-grade English classroom, need to offer a space to improvise on personal experiences, histories, and the everyday – i.e., the habitus – to effectively and most productively make meaning. In this way, Bourdieu's logic of practice and multimodality work in harmony as an argument for optimal meaning-making in a field of practice. The reported study illustrates well the identity work and fractal habitus transacted during a production process.
Bourdieu argues that visual forms such as photography celebrate what is photographable and signal histories, hierarchies, and social class (Bourdieu et al., 1990b: 86). As Rachel Hurdley (2006) notes in an article about the framing of material culture: ‘He (Bourdieu) comments that, as a product, it (photography) occupies a middle ground between nobility and the masses, distinguishing it from paintings and mass-produced prints’ (cited in Hurdley, 2006: 359). Bourdieu's acknowledgement of the multiple, embedded nature of photography, and by extension the visual, takes account of how producers find their way into a creative process. For instance, when a producer chooses a sound instead of a visual, it signals information not only about how the producer wants a text to be read, but also signals aspects of a producer's identity, which is improvised during the moment of production (and seen in chosen modes). Logically, it follows that if a producer is limited by resources, tools, and possible practices, meaning is obstructed. Hence, an optimum field in which to make meaning provides space for habitus and the embedding of more extensive materials, resources, and tools to produce a text. Multimodality throws improvised habitus into relief, and, by analysing modal choices made during production, a researcher is able to identify a deeper understanding of the producer's habitus. By speaking with a person, becoming acquainted with their story, then talking through why they chose music instead of visuals, it is possible to grasp an underlying message of a produced object. It also enables a researcher to get closer to what happens during multimodal production.
Bourdieu refers to an unconscious appropriation of rules, values, and dispositions as ‘the habitus,’ defining it as ‘the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations which produce practices’ (1990a: 108). He further claims that ‘habitus are spontaneously inclined to recognize all the expressions in which they recognize themselves, because they are spontaneously inclined to produce them’. In The Logic of Practice (1980), Bourdieu argues that:
official representations, which as well as customary rules, include gnomic poems, sayings, proverbs, every kind of objectification of the schemes of perceptions and action in words, things or practices (that is, as much in the vocabulary of honour or kinship, with the model of marriage that it implies, as in ritual actors or objects), have a dialectical relationship with the dispositions that are expressed through them and which help to produce and reinforce them.
(p. 108)
It is this ‘dialectic’ that I here document: the relationship between the producer and the produced object that informs not only an overall message but also how we read and transform a message ourselves. Fractal habitus, as a term and concept, helps me to identify parts of self in multimodal texts. To illustrate how artifacts such as works of art or digital stories improvise through habitus, I offer Figure 7.1. In Figure 7.1, habitus drives practice and the act of meaning making and multimodal composition of digital stories, which reinforces habitus within a more formalized and codified field context of a classroom. Each case study participant presented below is a meaning-maker who actively sediments parts of themselves (their everyday, values, dispositions) into their productions (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007). Such an improvisation of habitus in a schooling situation resuscitates marginalized meaning-makers into a field of practice (school). For participants involved in the study, at home and out in the community, habitus has more freedom and is less constrained by rules and procedures than it is in school.
In the next section, I explain the theory of fractal habitus and how it serves as a lens of analysis for the filmic narratives.
FIGURE 7.2 Depicting fractal habitus in artifacts
Bourdieu's work in Algeria provides an example of movements and tensions of habitus within fields. The Algerian peasants that Bourdieu observed in his fieldwork on the Kabyle had a less normalized structuring in that the Kabyle were regulated more by rules of honour than codified rules (Bourdieu, 1990a). The relative freedom that existed for the Kabyle provided an aperture to view habitus at work in context. It is Bourdieu's fine-grained analysis of habitus present in situations and contexts that helps me to analyse how students embed and sediment (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007) habitus into digital stories through fractal bits of habitus. That is, in creating a digital story in their English class, participants invented their own codified rules and protocols. Producing a digital story allowed more freedom of expression and subjectivity and hence, they served as an ideal forum in which to document fractal habitus in a multimodal text (through interviews and text analysis). Habitus remains habitus in situations that do not resist, but rather reinforce and even promote or endorse it. Certainly, students involved in making digital stories had very few structuring conditions and constraints, and their own ideas, values, histories, and dispositions could be fully improvised without critical challenges. In Bourdieu's words:
Through the systematic ‘choices’ it makes among the places, events and people that might be frequented, the habitus tends to protect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as preadapted as possible, that is, a relatively constant universe of situations tending to reinforce its dispositions by offering the market most favourable to its products.
(1990a: 61)
The notion of finding fractal habitus in digital texts devised by ninth-graders, opened up the field context of high school English for participants in the study. By interpreting their multimodal choices during the act of production and analysing how these choices materialize in a text and then one step further, speaking with them about their choices, fractal habitus is thrown into relief. Creating a favourable, equitable, safe environment, in which to make meaning, opens up creativity, innovation, meaning making to more properties of habitus.
Throughout his work Bourdieu has an abiding interest in what regulates practice and the ebb and flow of habitus in fields of practice. The field context here is an English classroom; the practice is creating a digital story; and habitus is an unfolding of student participant histories, dispositions, and values. A larger research question within the study and one that Bourdieu's approach helps to answer is: how can one take account of subjective action within settings while also accounting for structuring conditions that regulate practice? The answer lies in how identities mediate themselves in social reality. Social reality exists both inside and outside individuals and what Bourdieu's sociology elucidates is how individual dispositions are regulated by the constraints and affordances of situations and contexts.
As noted, the difference between the notion of ‘fractal habitus’ and my previous work with Kate Pahl on the notion of ‘sedimented identity’ (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007) is that for me fractal habitus represents the parts of self that students (subconsciously and perhaps even consciously) sediment into texts. I find fractal habitus is palpable in physical, material features in texts such as images, colours, camera angles that express habitus. Sedimented identity can be seen as the act of embedding layers of habitus into texts, where fractal habitus are the shards that do not necessarily represent the collective habitus but instead aspects, impressions of the everyday and innate dispositions that relate to the composition. Sedimented identity is the active layering of identity into texts; as our article describes it, ‘we consider that this way of seeing texts is the instantiations of habitus’ (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007: 394). Put simply, sedimentation is the process whilst fractal habitus is the product. To offer an example, in Caspian's film, rather than presenting all facets of his history and unfolding dispositions, he represents one key piece, valuing family and intergenerational presence in his life. Family and its foundational role in his character represent fractal habitus. As instantiations of habitus, sedimented identities are a process and practice, whereas fractal habitus are modes used to signal parts of habitus. Through multimodal composition and framing work around life histories, the artifactual and the everyday inspired participants to focus their story and choose fitting modes of expression. Any theorization of fractal habitus therefore rests on a belief that there is a tension between English and language arts curricula and multimodality.
What becomes clear in watching the participants’ digital stories several times is that students chose modes to tell their story. This seems fairly obvious but the point is that students can communicate more powerfully when multiple forms of representation and expression are introduced into their learning. Relying on Kress and Van Leeuwen's work on the grammar of visual design (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996), there are two types of images: narrative images tell stories by having actors and goals, with actors doing something with these goals; whilst conceptual images depict timeless, stable meanings and the subject of a picture is often, almost always, seen frontally.
Many of the students such as Caspian and Esme took advantage of a strategy of ‘framing through distances’. There were intimate distances where an image indicates a close distance between the viewer and the image. Caspian exploits intimate distances to represent the closeness that he feels with his family so that the viewer identifies closely with and connects to the story. Social distance frames narratives in such a way as to depict the viewer and the subjects in the image. Brian, another of the case studies profiled below, uses framing to create social distance between the viewer of his digital story and his quotidian world in Tel Aviv.
Students also use angles in their stories to force the viewer to look up or down on subjects in an image. Caspian, for instance, looks straight at the viewer to connect with the viewer. Upper and lower angles create power dynamics with the viewer – looking up at a subject implies that a viewer is deferring power to the subject, whereas, looking down at a subject implies that a viewer has more power. Manuel takes advantage of angles by presenting Cyclops having eye contact with the viewer – as a confrontation. This is shown in Figure 7.3.
Spatial arrangements indicate salience in images. The centre of a picture is the heart of the picture – where Patsy puts her rick-rack dresses or where Caspian puts his Grandpa. So too, eye contact indicates a relationship, almost a beckoning to the viewer. Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) talk about a demand when a subject gazes at the viewer as in Manuel's digital story when he threads in the story of Odysseus and the obstacles that he faces head-on during his journey. In contrast, there are images that offer engagement with a viewer – the viewer maintains an almost god-like power of observing subjects as in Brian's presentation of parts of Tel Aviv. Differing modes are used to create an atmosphere and they draw out fractal habitus, and through looks, image placement, etc. The case studies presented below show a marked competence with choosing the right mode to express a meaning and to signal fractal habitus.
FIGURE 7.3 Confronting Cyclops
My approach to case studies derives, in part, from the ethnographic tradition described by Clyde Mitchell (1984); that is, rather than ‘enumerative induction’ to generalize or to establish ‘representativeness,’ I adapt what Mitchell describes as ‘a case study to support an argument ... to show how general principles deriving from some theoretical orientation manifest themselves in some given particular circumstance’ (Mitchell, 1984: 239). In this case, I support my argument through five students’ productions of digital stories as evidence of fractal habitus within texts. In addition, I adopt Dyson and Genishi's definition of case studies as examples of ‘the meaning people make of their lives in very particular contexts’ (Dyson and Genishi, 2005: 35). Certainly, within the research, students privilege their local worlds (their home, their family, their community) as signifiers of self, as their values, beliefs, and dispositions. All of the participants are in the age range of fourteen to fifteen years old.
Caspian embedded parts of habitus through his touching tribute to his family trip to Niagara Falls. Shy about showcasing his digital story at our screening event, Caspian produced a highly personal account of what a trip to Canada taught him about himself and his family and what his family means to him. What strikes me as I watch Caspian's film is the intergenerational and cultural piece of his filmic narrative. Caspian takes time to present every member of his family and depicts their characters through camera angles and photographs. In this way, habitus materializes in a sedimenting of family relations in the digital text and connecting with family in new, different ways through a journey.
FIGURE 7.4 The end of the rainbow
Beginning with Caspian leaning out of a train window, we are then introduced to members of his family: his Mum and sister, his Grandpa, his Dad and brother, his Grandmother, and the whole family together. After introductions, the viewer moves into the trip and highlights of seeing Niagara Falls and the end of a rainbow. The rainbow is the symbol of his digital story and gives the story a metaphorical arc as seen in Figure 7.4, because it appears at the beginning and end of his digital story.
To me, the most touching part of the film happens at the end when Caspian says, ‘What I love most is coming home with more appreciation of my family.’ With that line in mind, Caspian's digital story is potentially the most powerful example of how fractures of habitus, childhood and family infuse inspiration into a creative process. In the span of four minutes, a viewer develops a keen sense of Caspian and his familial roots sedimented (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007) into the film as a text. When I asked Caspian about how he composed his film, he said: ‘My themes were trips that I took with my family because family is a big part of my life. I really enjoyed our trip to Canada and when we went to Niagara Falls’.
Caspian produced a film that is very much an ode to his family, depicted through visuals, camera angles, and symbols, such as the end of a rainbow. An epiphany that Caspian experienced after producing his digital story is to appreciate his voice. He did not expect to like his voice on the voice-over but, in the end, it worked for him. His voice-over was a way of navigating the story as an accompaniment to the strengths of his visual narrative.
Esme's story charts her move from Cairns, Australia, all the way to Princeton, New Jersey. Esme created a digital story that looks back at her childhood home in Australia and then at her present-day world: her friends, her high school, and her daily routines. Esme has difficulty focusing on tasks and is frequently distracted by texting and Facebook. She claims that she does not feel like a writer, yet, she had an immediate sense of how she would produce her digital story. Materialized in her digital story through movement in visuals, Esme embeds her everyday life, her habitus, into her journey. She uses Google Earth as a rhetorical device to show the thread between the local – Cairns, Australia to the global – to Google Earth and back to the local in Princeton, NJ. Like Brian featured later, Esme situates two quite different pictures of embodied self by contrasting her two homes.
There are hints or fractures of Esme's everyday embedded in her digital story as a text from her interest in fashion to her strong connections with friends. Unlike Caspian, there is less privileging of family and more privileging of friends and daily rites. There is a sense of the struggles that she had moving to the United States and in accepting a new identity. In our interview, Esme describes her compositional process: ‘the story is about my life growing up in Australia and moving to America and meeting new people and staying with them for a few years and them helping me through moving. It showed the new friends I met when I moved’. Esme wanted to have a different spin on the notion of making a decision. In her interview, she points out that in The Odyssey, Odysseus ‘chose between the whirlpool, and he made the decision to lose all of his crew and go into whirlpool’. Decision-making became a leitmotif in her film, in her words: ‘it shows that I made decisions, well, my family did, with moving from Australia to America.’ Throughout the year, Esme was critical of her work, but had to admit that the final version worked, there was cohesion through symbolism and she had grounded her film in her everyday.
Patsy is one of the most visually attuned and design-savvy students I have ever worked with. Once given an assignment, Patsy knows exactly what she is going to do and sets to work immediately on the design. Not only does she visualize quickly, but also, she wastes no time in finding visuals. She is focused and creative and has strong multimodal sensibilities. Early on in her production and design of her digital story, Patsy envisioned a sequence of her own fractal habitus within a rich tapestry of images from the fashion world. Like other case study participants, she is not inspired by her English classes, yet she exhibits comprehension skills, metacognition, and an understanding of figurative devices. She is Guatemalan-American and aspires to be a fashion designer one day and live in New York City – all three of these descriptors are foregrounded in her digital story. Patsy's short film moves from her childhood interest in dresses and fancy clothes to her present, abiding interest in fashion, trends, popular culture, and iconic designers such as Coco Chanel and Valentino. What amazes me about Patsy's film is the sheer number of images she combines to match her voice-over. As a multimodal composition, Patsy's film exhibits both proficiency with image selection and image sequencing, and technical skills by matching images with a spoken voice-over. Patsy's first screen throws into relief fractal habitus. After the first slide, Patsy foregrounds fractures of her childhood through a series of rick-rack dresses that her Mum (a seamstress) made for her. Each dress has been carefully chosen for its colour and connection to phases of her childhood. After featuring images of her fractal habitus, she presents a succession of images of designers and fashion models threaded in with personal photographs of her and her friends and their own distinct fashion sensibilities. In this way, Patsy's film moves from the global world of high fashion to her local high school world. Patsy concludes her digital story by circling back to the present-day and her own journey to New York, as a fashion designer. If graded on direct connections to The Odyssey, the assignment would fall short when compared with other students’ work. However, the sophistication of her editing and her merging of modes alone gave her high grades. Patsy had lots of technology issues in the production of her story, but in the end she was impressed with the result.
FIGURE 7.5 Patsy's first slide
Patsy's film is so effective because there are meaningful, salient pieces of her and her innate dispositions combined with well-known people and popular culture images. In her words, ‘Well, I thought of some ideas that had to do with an odyssey and adventure stood out to me. I thought about fashion because that's an adventure to me. Some people may not take it seriously, but I do.’ Patsy had an intensity about multimodal composition that helped her find a place in the English Plus classroom during the digital storytelling semester.
Manuel is a tall and athletic young man, who can write well and contribute in English class when he is interested and feels confident about his understanding. When introduced to the digital storytelling unit, Manuel could not think of a strategy until I sat with him and brainstormed ideas. As soon as we talked about moving from struggles to success as an example of a journey story, he identified sports as a journey motif in his life. In charting developing skills in three of his core sports – soccer, basketball and football – he was probably more focused than any other student. Sports and his trials and tribulations with sports and bullies, sedimented fractal habitus that came out strongest in his voice-over.
He opened his story about soccer with Lionel Messi of Argentina and how he is an inspiration to him. Manuel used expressive language and humour to describe how he performs in soccer and then moved into basketball, a sport that he did not feel as confident in, admitting that ‘at first I was horrible at it...no one wanted to play with me.’ Manuel then talked about getting better at dribbling and how he is now on the high school freshman team. The final sport was football. Here, he used Kevin Curtis of the Eagles as an inspiration in football. Of all the students who completed digital stories, Manuel was the most adept at connecting his story to The Odyssey by linking a story about how his brother helped him do better in sports: ‘I think that the Athena in my life was my brother – he boosted my chances of reaching my goal, just like Athena did for Odysseus, even though Odysseus and I are different we are similar people’. In our interview, Manuel claims: ‘when I thought about the digital story, I thought about sports because I like to play sports all the time and sports are a big part of my life’. Manuel proceeded to talk about how he structured and sequenced content: ‘I have three main sports that I play which are basketball, football and soccer and there are eighteen slides in my digital story and that means six slides for each sport’. Manuel applied effective multimodal compositional practices along with written compositional practices in crafting his filmic narrative. Of all the participants, Manuel stands out for me because he found such success in digitally, multimodally replicating the story of Odysseus, which noticeably repositioned him among his peers.
Like Manuel, of all of the participant students, Brian stands out because he found such success in digitally and multimodally inter-relating the story of Odysseus with his own story. Brian is fourteen-years-old and moved to the United States from Israel in 2006. Brian is quiet, thoughtful, and usually wears a hat to the side, just above his eyes. At first, I figured that Brian was quiet because his first language is Hebrew, but I soon realized that Brian can speak English perfectly well and is an eloquent writer, he simply tends to be quiet. The voice-over that he composed is detailed and breaks down every moment in an average day in Israel. Interestingly, as detailed as his voice-over is, he opted to say only the first line of the digital story and let pictures and written text tell the story, which, to my mind, aligns with his quiet demeanour. Scenes in Tel Aviv coupled with visuals of statues in ancient Greece signal his design sensibilities.
Brian sits beside and chats with the least likely person in the group, Ted, who is the most talkative student in the class. Brian is well-liked by his peers and is seen as someone who is creative. When I interviewed Brian about the production of his digital story, he talked about his choices in modes: ‘I used simple pictures of Israel and then I found places in Israel but I got more specific and found the places where I lived and know exactly where they are.’ Brian used Google Maps to locate particular places and spaces and, like Esme, Google Maps served as a rhetorical device to depict the distance between Tel Aviv and Princeton.
Brian's film begins with his voice saying, ‘Hello, this is my typical day in Israel’ and that is the only voice-over in the film. From there, he moves from his daily bus journey as seen in Figure 7.6 to hanging out with friends before school (using actual photographs of his friends).
What Brian claims he wanted his viewers to experience most of all is ‘that there are a lot of interesting places in Israel and just knowing the culture is different.’ As a viewer, I sensed his desire to represent the distinctive character of Tel Aviv in images of bus scenes and of the shawarma he often purchased from street vendors, as seen in Figure 7.7
As a producer, Brian likes to combine literal images like Bus 157 with figurative images. For example, to express the boredom he felt while waiting with friends for buses and trains, he presented a statue of a yawning man. Fractures and fragments of Brian's habitus can be seen in images of bus lines that he took and in childhood hubs and familiar scenes such as the local shawarma stand. It was a twist on the story of Odysseus and his epic journey that allowed Brian to reflect on his own epic move from Israel to the United States and how and what he carries with him in a new, foreign context.
In Table 7.1, I feature each participant with examples of ways in which they sediment fractal habitus and what fractal habitus is elucidated in terms of literacy practices.
FIGURE 7.6 Bus 157 in Tel Aviv
FIGURE 7.7 Shawarma off Line 20
Looking at the case studies, Table 7.1 displays fractal habituses that I found in digital stories and literacy skills that these material properties exhibit.
The table shows the relationship between fractal habitus, bits of every day, and literacy practices prominently displayed in students’ multimodal compositions. By offering examples of fractal habitus, it is a way of demonstrating how their creativity and innovation led to a composition (and new compositional skills). As seen in the table, there are contrasts in how students sediment fractal habitus. Caspian focuses on agents in photographs through camera angles and figurative devices, whereas Patsy applies visual and technical effects through a fusillade of personal and pop culture images, and Manuel is more literal with pictures of sports figures, juxtaposed with actual characters in The Odyssey – relying on audio to connect effects. Not all participants in the larger study succeeded in completing their digital story. Students such as Daniel, who has been retained in ninth grade, began his digital story with keen interest, focusing on the role of dance in his life, but the final text never came to fruition. Daniel's story of incompletion of the digital story has as much to do with technology constraints as it does with an incommensurable gap between a doxaruled pedagogy and fractal habitus. That is, Daniel found it hard to surmount a gap between his own interests and an interest in canonical texts and expository writing. The study is therefore not utopian in its findings because there were students who were not interested in the project and some that did not even finish. Yet, the five student compositions represented below are telling examples of how multimodality opens a space for more sedimenting of fractal habitus.
TABLE 7.1 Fractal habitus and literacy practices
| Name | Fractal habitus (evidence of student's dispositions) | Literacy practices |
| Caspian | Collage of family photos; use of symbols with the end of the rainbow; captures emotions in images such as photo of his Dad making a funny face or his grandmother smiling. | Structured story well with opening, logical sequence, and concluding structure; awareness of figurative devices; and, salience of journey motif. |
| Esme | Uses technical and rhetorical skills such as Google Earth to locate her childhood home; uses colour to signal mood; her visuals are sequenced well with her voice-over; displays her tie to friends through childhood and present-day photographs. | Voice-over is well written and executed; ability to interweave her own story with Odysseus’ story; she thinks in terms of design. |
| Patsy | Begins with a succession of childhood rick-rack dresses; embeds the story of her own ‘sweet fifteen’; features her best friends; talks about her Mum; relates her world to New York high fashion and moves from local to global with photos of her friends in high school and photos of Coco Chanel and Valentino. | Voice-over is well written and executed; has a sense of layering the story and sequencing it well with a beginning, middle, and ending. She is adept at choosing and threading together photos. |
| Brian | Constantly goes back to the bus he took in Tel Aviv; uses symbols and images to express mood; uses camera angles to set a mood and characterize his friends’ personality. | Has a strong sense of story sequence; relates his story well and consistently to Odysseus’ story. |
| Manuel | Effectively relates his story with Odysseus’ story; features his favourite sports heroes such as Lionel Messi and Kevin Curtis; talks about his brother; uses colour to express meaning. | Strongest example of relating his own journey into sports in relation to challenges that Odysseus faced during his epic journey; exhibits a sense of story structure and story tropes. |
Caspian, Esme, Patsy, Manuel, and Brian let me see them in ways that I could not possibly have seen them through alphabetic print. Whether it is a lack of competence on their part or a lack of acknowledgement of their other, complex competencies, we could not reach them through a more traditional route, so we worked on multimodal properties that provided them with more comfort and confidence and ultimately, more choices for expression. What can be said in light of the research is that each case study student found success in their assignment.
Looking across case studies, not everyone responded to the assignment, and some did not even complete it. Some had technological difficulties and lost their work, while others lost inspiration mid-way through the process. For those who completed their digital stories, certain participants were natural, tacit multimodal meaning-makers. On the whole, more meaning, relevance, motivation, and understanding arose from digital storytelling than not. Admittedly, there were some limitations to the study: we did not have proper equipment; we lost files; some students did not complete their assignments, and some students did not find success in the assignment, but the intensity of their work during the six weeks of production spoke volumes to me and the teacher-researcher.
Producing digital stories gave students an opportunity to reposition self because they could relate their own stories with Odysseus’ story of his long journey back home to Ithaca. Whether it is Manuel's touching description of his brother being like Athena in his life or Brian taking us back in time to the bus that he took around Tel Aviv – these are imprints, fractures, shards of habitus. In the end, the introduction of multiple modes increases achievement for some students; and a more democratic, two-way, flattened hierarchical teaching approach and pedagogy breeds success. Allowing students to experiment and improvise with audio, visual, interactive texts made them naturally more engaged. Working alongside students and having them relay feedback and permit peer involvement lessens a power dynamic in classrooms and supports them in conveying who they see themselves to be; that is, reveals their habitus, at least in part.
In 2001, a year before his death, Bourdieu wrote a response to what he regarded as capitalist globalization or, in his words, ‘the European social movement that is currently forming’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 11) in Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market. In this compilation of writings and public talks, he addresses two issues that correspond well with findings from my modest study of respositioning identities through multimodal compositions. The first issue Bourdieu raises is that multimodal communication and information technology are for the dominant and for the privileged, ‘the modal information technology user is a thirty-five-year-old highly educated English-speaking urban male with a high income’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 32). This ‘modal information technology user’ is the elite, young, savvy professional and not, necessarily, what he calls ‘the under-paid, underskilled worker’ often cut off from multimodal composition. The germane point to my study is the paradox of observing how five teenagers learn best through alternate modes, yet they are cut off from them, maybe even penalized for their understandings of and practices with them, because they cannot succeed with more traditional, mono-modal texts and practices. By alternate modes, I am referring here to effects such as camera angles, use of photographs, sounds in audio clips, to remixed texts. The larger point here that relates to Bourdieu's discussion of the young elite is that there is an unequal distribution of cultural capital, and it starts early, through events and practices like studying mono-modal, canonical texts and an over-emphasis on the expository essay.
The second issue that Bourdieu raises did not feature as prominently as it might have in this digital story-telling project and that is: critiquing multiple genres of texts. What would strengthen our study would be, as educators, to teach students to frame, conjecture, analyse, and critique multimodal texts and designs so that students have a language and meta-awareness of how modes represent and express meanings. As Bourdieu contends:
The intellectual world must engage in a permanent critique of all the abuses of power or authority committed in the name of intellectual authority or, if you prefer, in a relentless critique of the use of intellectual authority as a political weapon with the intellectual field.
(2001: 19)
It is not enough to ask students to create a digital story about a journey tied to their study of The Odyssey, they also need language and epistemic models for thinking about designs and modal choices (Sheridan and Rowsell, 2010). Students involved in the research already know what story to tell and maybe even how to tell it, but they need to know how to improve the text and how to think about it in relation to more traditional forms of communication. I hope I have shown that opening the teaching of literature to multimodality is one way of recognizing and redistributing such cultural capital.
1 Pseudonyms are used throughout the chapter to protect the identity of student and teacher participants involved in the study.
2 The research study alluded to is a longitudinal, ethnographic, ecological research study conducted with Sue Nichols, Helen Nixon, and Sophia Rainbird of the University of South Australia on Parents’ Networks of Information about Literacy and Children's Development. The research is funded by an Australia Research Council Discovery Grant.
3 The research reported here is a study of 30 producers of new and digital media with Mary P. Sheridan (Sheridan and Rowsell, 2010).
