Foregrounding Anishinaabek Culture and Collaborating with Children in their Multimodal Text Creation

Abstract

In this paper we examine young Indigenous children’s text creation and identity (re)formations, and the teacher’s multimodal scaffolding within the context of a literacy event that drew on Indigenous pedagogies and traditional land-based cultural practices of their northern Canadian Anishinaabek community. Multimodal interaction analysis methods were used to examine the interplay among the children’s and the teacher’s talk, nonverbal communication modes and use of various sign-making tools in the meaning-making and identity-(re)formation processes.