Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates how incorporating multimodality, agency, and imagination within pedagogical approaches that center and integrate students’ funds of knowledge and identity in classroom learning concomitantly serve as means to advance a social justice orientation in praxis and methodology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper illustrates how incorporating multimodality, agency, and imagination within pedagogical approaches that center and integrate students’ funds of knowledge and identity in classroom learning, concomitantly serve as means to advance a social justice orientation in praxis and methodology. This paper explores the specific elements, processes, and results of classroom-based approaches that invited students’ funds of knowledge and identity in alternative multimodal ways, beyond print and oral narratives, which also created a safe space for students to enact agency and choice in their own learning while encouraging imaginative future visioning that reconstructed current realities of inequity. A group of four educators in a rural school district in the U.S., which serves a large population of Latinx/e families from immigrant backgrounds, and three researchers co-designed an established culminating project that all 5th graders complete to intentionally integrate multimodality, agency, and imagination. This case presents insights that illustrate the connections between theory, methodology, and praxis of these elements within a Funds of Knowledge/Identity approach. The purpose of this analysis is to gain better understandings of the practical implications and ways that educators and school leaders can leverage such approaches to be most effective and disrupt inequities in their contexts based on their own students’ voices and creations.