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The Journal of Social Studies Research

The Journal of Social Studies Research 37 (2013) 221–238

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journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jssr

“Pay attention and take some notes”: Middle school youth,multimodal instruction, and notions of citizenship

Anthony M. Pellegrino a,n, Kristien Zenkov b,1, Nicholas Calamito c,2

a George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 4B3, Fairfax, VA 22030, USAb College of Education and Human Development, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Mail Stop 4B3, Fairfax, VA 22030, USAc Robinson Secondary School, 5035 Sideburn Road, Fairfax, VA 22032, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Available online 28 May 2013

5X/$ - see front matter Copyright & 2013, Thx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jssr.2013.04.007

esponding author. Tel.: +1 703 993 5253; faail addresses: apelleg2@gmu.edu (A.M. Pellel.: +1 703 993 5413; fax: +1 703 993 2053.l.: +1 703 426 2100; fax: +1 703 426 2197.

a b s t r a c t

The study of a middle school social studies and literacy project this paper addressesoccurred in the national capital region of the United States, where perceptions of“patriotism” and immigration policies were the subjects of frequent media reports. Withthis examination the authors considered one overarching research question: how domiddle school students describe and illustrate citizenship when given access to multi-modal texts and media (e.g., digital photography and slam poetry)? The authors called onyoung 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, identifyingfindings that might inform social studies educators' practices and curricula. Employingalternative and multimodal texts motivated students to engage with this project and tomore candidly share expansive perspectives about what they believe makes a “citizen”.Copyright & 2013, The International Society for the Social Studies. Published by Elsevier,

Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Pay attention and take some notes

Here we go

e International Society for the Social Studies. Published by Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.

x: +1 703 993 2053.grino), kzenkov@gmu.edu (K. Zenkov), NFCalamito@fcps.edu (N. Calamito).

3 A

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Our country is overrun by illegal immigrantsOverweight babies with rabiesNo cure for cancer…We need more answers…Corrupt politicians and lawyers argue over pointless pieces of informationAs war veterans oversee genocides in third-world nations…As Death drags people in with his cold, dark handsAnd spray paint artists are branded as dangerous graffiti monsters

The image and writing highlighted here were selected and crafted by Ryan3 as a part of a cross-curricular collaborativestudy of a “slam” poetry project conducted by this paper's authors; a university-based social studies educator, a university-based English educator, and a school-based middle level language arts teacher. We elected to employ slam poetry in thisproject for its active delivery and tradition as provocative expression often focused on social and political themes. In his slampoem that commands readers and listeners to “Pay Attention and Take Some Notes”, Ryan, a student in one of the honors-level language arts classes where we conducted this project and examination, offered a harsh critique of the state of U.S.society through his illustrated verses. As per the instructions for the final project of our unit, his poem was intended toaddress the question “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen’?”. But, like so many of the young adolescents in our classes, Ryandid much more than we anticipated and also something else entirely. And his sentiments were hardly unique amongst thecreative products our middle school students crafted. Called on to consider “citizenship” in early 21st century America,concern about our society's values, our nation's interventionist foreign policies, and individuals' indulgent tendencies wereprominent themes in these youths' writings and illustrations. Tellingly, Ryan's and his peers' pre-project survey responsesexhibited virtually none of this depth or revealed any of these themes.

Based on multimodal exploration, which utilized methods and media that reach beyond standard texts and products intodigital, image-based, and alternative text forms, we sought to discover just who do young adolescents think “citizens” are? Whatdo youth hold in their minds' eyes when they reflect on what a citizen looks like, and when they consider this question, literally,through digital images they choose and take? Based on these young adults' deliberations of these controversial questions ofcitizenship, and their illustrated “slam” poem responses, what might and should happen to our social studies pedagogies andcurricula? These civic instruction issues and our recognition of the importance of relying on the malleable, expressive text anddigital media forms with which our students are familiar motivated us to develop, implement, and research this unit of study.While conducted in a language arts class, we believe the results of this project and examination, as well as the lessons,instructional tools, and youths' concepts of citizenship, might have important implications for social studies education whereaddressing citizenship and related issues of national identity must be fundamental to meaningful civics curriculum.

The genesis of this project was our shared interest in innovative, multimodal practices in the service of cultivating andunderstanding students' notions of citizenship in an increasingly complicated global context and in our unique local setting.We framed our analyses of these digital and alternative text oriented inquiries into adolescents' concepts of citizenship withthe following research question: how do middle school students describe and illustrate citizenship when given access tomultimodal texts and media (e.g., digital photography and slam poetry)? The results of these analyses allowed us to exploreyouths' ideas and consider a range of social studies pedagogical implications of this type of activity including the potentialstrength of multimodal instructional practice and developing youth civic identity conceptualized through civic educationbeyond traditional curricula.

We examined the products of this project, including pre-project surveys and end-of-project youths' slam poems, inwhich young people articulated and depicted their notions of what it means to be a citizen, for data to address the researchquestion. We also gathered considerable additional data, including pre-writing activities, drafts and revisions of students'poems, and interviews of youth participants. For the results on which we report here, we concentrated first on contentanalyses of the project surveys and later, on young people's final poem products and the images they included to illustratethe ideas they described, which we frame with the pre-writing activities we utilized in this project. While these data sourceswere not designed as equivalent, a side-by-side appraisal of the themes we discovered yielded information about thedevelopment of youths' notions of national identity. The results of this project and study provided important insights intodiverse youths' perspectives on citizenship, suggesting a utility of multimodal text forms and instructional activities forpromoting young adolescents' engagement with complex, candid notions of an “American” national identity.

Frameworks and relevant literature

Our study was perhaps most immediately influenced by geography and the demographics of our community. We live,learn, and teach in the national capital region in the U.S., where questions of “citizenship” are asked and answered everyday, including whether or not every de facto citizen should be entitled to attend K-12 public schools and colleges/universities and at what cost to individuals, taxpayers and communities. As evidenced by the 2007 introduction in a nearbycounty of one of the nation's first explicitly anti-immigration policies, our region has played a leadership role in what has

ll names are pseudonyms.

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become a deluge of such legislation of intolerance (American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU), 2012). Thus, one of ouroverarching goals as social studies and literacy teachers and teacher educators has been to create and study teachingpractices and curricula that challenge reductionist, xenophobic notions of citizenship.

The ubiquity of civic issues appearing in virtually every form of media in our community and the sheer number of spaces in ourregion honoring significant historical and current civic events might suggest that young people have innumerable opportunitiesfor robust engagement as citizens. However, through this project, we became very aware of our own and our students' thirst fornegotiating civic mindedness beyond traditional classroom experiences. With this objective in mind, we turned to a criticalpedagogy framework to serve our racially and ethnically diverse population of young people in our suburban mid-Atlantic setting.

Specifically, we have used this framework in an effort to explore the complex and entrenched aspects of these youngadults' experiences and understandings of citizenship as manifested through their challenges and critiques to traditionalnotions of civic identity (Burbules & Berk, 1999; Morrell, 2007). Aligned with this project, critical pedagogy explicitlyattempts to enhance society members' abilities to address the established, and often oppressive policies by which their livesand relationships to foundational institutions are circumscribed (Freire, 1998; McLaren, 2000) by “push(ing) them to collectinformation to support their beliefs” (Howard & Aleman, 2008, p. 167). This orientation is anchored in the conception thateducational practices should address how to construct institutional conditions in which the lived experience ofempowerment for students is a defining quality (Ayers, 2004; Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2002; Weis & Dolby, 2012).These critical perspectives found form in our multimodal social studies and language arts project and the use of alternative“text” examples, including non-traditional writing products (i.e., slam poems) and digital photography (Mitchell, Weber, &O'Reilly-Scanlon, 2005; Prosser & Schwartz, 1998; Rubin, 2010). We were guided, as well, by the belief that as educators, wehave a duty to help students become thoughtful, multi-literate members of society, capable of considering broad notions ofcitizenship and engaging as critical consumers of the visual media so influential in US adolescent culture.

Our project and study were also fundamentally influenced by our professional experiences and the assumptions of our fieldsof social studies and literacy education. Our combined more than four decades of experience as teachers and teacher educatorshave consistently revealed to us that adolescents in the United States have increasingly limited understandings of what it meansto be a citizen and a disconnected sense of civic identity (Galston, 2007; Walling, 2007). Too, we have witnessed generations ofstudents dismissing social studies education as merely a detached and event-focused march through time in whichmemorization is accepted as meaningful learning (Barton, 2012; Drake & Nelson, 2005; Ostrom, 1996; Wineburg, 2001). Whilewe have regularly faced such a negative orientation toward core elements of our social studies content, we are more than everconscious of the urgent concern for students to emerge from our classrooms able to navigate and communicate the complexitiesof the civic landscape in order to better make sense of today's global political climate (Knight Abowitz & Harnish, 2006).

Our students' time-honored rejection of our social studies content as irrelevant and anachronistic trivia sadlycorresponds to their documented, reliably negative conceptions of poetry (Connolly & Smith, 2003; Keil, 2005; McVee,Bailey, & Shanahan, 2008). Like so many teachers and scholars, we have found it troubling across our careers to hearstudents lament that they “hate” or, worse, just do not “get” poetry. How can we accept youths' summary dismissal of anentire genre of writing, especially when so much of the out-of-school text with which they are enamored and fluent(popular music in this hip-hop generation, just to name one) possesses the same traits as the poetry they claim to despise?Moreover, in our text-, Twitter-, and Facebook-dependent world, teachers and teacher educators have a responsibility andan opportunity to help youth appreciate poetry as a communication form that relies on the careful selection of words toexpress meaning, nuance, and complexity.

We also appealed to a substantial and growing bank of research on multimodal texts and their relevance to increasingly diverseyouth in an early 21st century context. Young adolescent students are ever more reliant on these multimodal forms of literacytools, and contemporary literacy theorists have described a reclassification of “literacy” that includes texts with which youth arefamiliar, including visual media (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004; Williams, 2008). Considerable research has demonstratedthat multimodal and image-based tools provide richer learning opportunities and insights into youths' perspectives than traditionallanguage-centered methods (Marquez-Zenkov, 2007; Zenkov, Harmon, Tompkins & van Lier 2009a; Harper, 2005; Streng et al.,2004; Zagora, 2011).

Several bodies of research literature facilitated the development and implementation of our citizenship-focused slam poetryunit and this study. In civic education, we focused on scholarship related to youths' general lack of civic engagement, as well aseducators' and researchers' efforts to challenge that detachment and enact the fundamental notion that youth should be viewedas constructors of their own civic identities. Knight Abowitz, and Harnish's (2006) review of citizenship and citizenship educationrevealed that instructional efforts focusing on civic engagement are most often ineffectual and disengaging. Worse, much of ourexisting citizenship education curricula favors frameworks that promote civic understanding from a myopically celebratoryperspective, discouraging critical exploration of civic ideas and transnational notions of citizenship (Lawy & Biesta, 2006).

Representing some hope for our goal of complicating our civic education practices, over a decade ago the AmericanPolitical Science Association (APSA), under the guidance of Elinor Ostrom, created the Task Force on Civic Education. Ostromidentified “one of the core problems [of U.S civil society as]…the decline of civic engagement” and articulated the need to“think, develop, test, evaluate, and reformulate a diversity of educational tools that provide more effective forms of civiceducation” (1996, p. 756). In response to these current stances on citizenship and civic engagement, Banks' (2008) typologyof citizenship includes notions of “active” and “transformational” citizenship and details the extent to which the citizen as acultural participant seeks civic mindedness as a means to actualize “values and moral principles beyond those ofconventional authority” (p. 137).

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As well, Wyn and Dwyer (1999) have articulately argued for the extension of citizenship to include both adults and youth.Furthermore, Lawy and Biesta (2006) have detailed how the educational experiences of students regarding citizenship, whichhave largely been derived from a paradigm of citizenship-as-achievement where citizenship has most often been linked to theconcept of duty, has become irrelevant to 21st century learners. This paradigm, according to the authors, must shift to a morerobust alternative: citizenship-as practice. Fundamental to the conceptual framework of the project and study onwhich we reporthere, citizenship-as-practice, where individuals are involved in situational and relational experiences of constructing under-standings of citizenship, offers a democratic and empowering expression of this notion (Lawy & Biesta, 2006).

Further informing our perspectives were researchers including Dolby (2003) and McCarthy, Giardina, Harewood, and Park(2003), who identified diverse discourses of citizenship as potentially enhancing students' conceptions of national identity.We also appealed to the theoretical framing provided by Gutierrez (2008), who has utilized a constructivist, sociocritical notionof literacy and the concept of a “third space” to orient the foundations of curricula, emphasizing a learning ecology in whichstudents employ cultural and civic experiences as generative forms of learning. Relying on these bases, cultural citizenship, then,is “the popular site where youth are invested, where things happen, where identities and democratic possibilities are workedout, performed and negotiated, and where new futures are written” (Dolby, 2003, p. 276).

Together these scholars oriented us toward the future of citizenship by enmeshing culture as the new, primary civic space,and their schemes became an additional conceptual lens through which we formulated this project. And, in summary, thesecitizenship and literacy issues represented distinct pressures and realities for us as social studies and language arts teachers andteacher educators (Zenkov, 2009b; Morrell, 2007). Ultimately we posited that we and our students might most successfullytrouble the increasingly contracted ideas about citizenship with which our society is ever more fluent if we relied on some of thenew media with which youth are proficient to explore the nuances of notions of citizenship with which they are not.

Context

Intrigued by researching these citizenship awareness and multimodal literacy issues, we co-planned and implemented the“Slam Poetry and Citizenship” unit over the course of five weeks during the middle of the 2010–2011 school year. We conductedthe project in two honors-level language arts classes with 55 students, approximately 50% girls and 50% boys, all 12–14 years old,with widely varying ethnic backgrounds but residing in homogenously middle class neighborhoods. In these classes, studentethnicities included those who identified themselves as Caucasian (39%), Asian (25%), Hispanic (22%) and African American (14%).Youth participants were either native English speakers or had a sufficient English proficiency to have been assigned to an honors-level language arts class. Such immigrant, non-native, but highly competent English speakers are common in our context, whichincludes an English Language Learner (ELL) population of 18% (Fairfax County Public Schools, 2013).

Conscious of the potential utility of these multimodal texts for engaging youth in more candid and complex revelations oftheir ideas, we looked to “slam” poetry as our curricular medium. Again, such texts are commonly considered in language artsclassrooms, but perhaps underutilized in social studies contexts. Ultimately we chose this rich and accessible genre as themechanism through which we tasked these students to creatively express and interpret their understandings of what it means tobe an American citizen. We began by familiarizing participants with slam poetry through reading slam poems and watching slampoetry performances, followed by the introduction of a brief history and summary description of the nature of slam poetry,particularly as it contrasted with the poetic forms with which most students were generally and unfavorably familiar.

We explained slam poetry as a derivative of performance poetry first developed in the 1980s, noting that this medium differsfrom traditional forms of poetry in its confrontational nature and dual emphasis on writing and performance (Glazner, 2000).Slam poems rely on emotion and draw from authors' prior experiences to stir questions, identify controversies, and contributeinsights about topics ranging from the intimately personal to the distantly political (Gregory, 2007). Poetry slams are, in fact,competitive individual or team events with discernable similarities to MC performance competitions in the hip hop communitywhere rappers face off to gain audience approval. Slam poets share their provocative poems with participatory audiences offellow performers and interested listeners, which often include young adults. Thus, slam poetry became an ideal andfundamental component of our project and an intriguing tool for helping us to meet our objective of promoting students'creative and potentially more thoughtful, alternative explorations of “citizenship.”

To further enact this multimodal theory in our instruction, we also challenged students to visually illustrate their poemsto highlight salient themes related to the concepts of citizenship they detailed in these poems. These illustrations allowedyoung adolescents to creatively underscore what they believed were the most significant contents of their poems and tovisually synthesize the key ideas they were expressing in writing. Again, these visual/traditional literacy bridges arefrequently considered in language arts classrooms and seemed particularly promising for engaging our students with novelnotions of citizenship. Ultimately, the combination of slam poetry and these image-oriented activities—which includedstudents' eventual production of illustrated presentations using popular software (e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, or QuickTime)—meshed quite seamlessly into artful, contemplative, and even controversial explorations of citizenship.

Methods

To implement and study this unit, each university investigator attended two sessions of the language arts classes taughtby our middle school teacher co-author each week over the course of the five-week study. Prior to commencement of theunit, we asked students to complete a brief survey (see Appendix A) with demographic questions as well as those related to

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their conceptions of citizenship, notions of poetry, and the use of visual images as communication. The surveys provided asense of youths' beliefs about the various aspects of the project including poetry, notions of national identity, and therelationship of images to both, and thus served as the first major data set of our study. We then introduced the unit byoutlining the steps students would undertake over the course of the project. Within those informational discussions, weintroduced slam poetry and, as noted above, called on participants to create slam poems using images to highlight themesfrom their writing, addressing the question “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen?”.

In their alternating block schedule, these young adolescents attended their language arts classes two or three times perweek and completed pre-writing activities, and draft, revised, and final versions of their poems during class and forhomework. After writing the first drafts of their poems, each student took or collected a pool of photographs to illustrate asmany concepts of citizenship appearing in their poems as they could identify. Following in-class discussions and 1:1interactions with peers and us, each youth settled on three images that were included with computer-based presentationsof the final drafts of their poems, using digital production and presentation software. These poems and correspondingpresentations became the second data set we considered for this paper. Again, although these two primary data sourceswere not designed to be equivalent, we believed that a comparison might offer potentially compelling and contrastinginsights into youths' ideas about citizenship.

To gather additional perspectives, and in an effort to trouble the stark contrasts we were noting between our survey resultsand illustrated slam poem findings, the classroom teacher selected six students representing a range of academic performancelevels and ethnic diversity for the university faculty investigators to interview at the conclusion of the project. The researchersconducted these interviews employing a standard open-ended interview model in which questions were fully formed prior tothe interviews to ensure “that each interviewee gets asked the same questions—the same stimuli—in the same way and in thesame order…” (Patton, 2002, p. 344). The interview questions were, in large part, oral presentations of the survey questions towhich we asked students to respond at the beginning and end of the project. In these audio-recorded sessions, students wereagain asked about their ideas about citizenship, their impressions of poetry, and the impact of our multimodal instruction anduse of visual media on their understandings of citizenship and appreciation for poetry. The interview data would ideally serve totriangulate the findings discerned from student poems and presentations.

Data analysis

In our initial reviews of the project data, we compiled and analyzed students' pre-project survey responses as theycorresponded to our emphases on youths' notions of citizenship, their feelings about and experiences with poetry, and theirperceptions of the relevance of images as a means of communication. We then organized students' Likert scale anddemographic responses on these surveys to generate descriptive statistical data, and examined their narrative surveyresponses for themes related to the full range of our original research questions, eventually focusing on the question aboutstudents' notions of citizenship on which we concentrate in this article. We were impressed—troubled, really—by the dearthof both the quantity and range of ideas about citizenship these young adolescents shared through these simple surveys. As aresult of this straightforward review and the limited notions youth shared (described in more detail in Section 6), ourspeculation that a comparison of concepts of citizenship elicited through this traditional method and our moreunconventional multimodal poetic means might offer intriguing insights was confirmed.

At the conclusion of the project we content analyzed 49 youths' poems and the approximately 170 images in thesepoems (shared via their presentations) for prevalent and outlying visual and descriptive topics and themes (Creswell, 1998;Rose, 2006), concentrating on the concepts of citizenship our students were sharing with their writing or representing withtheir photographs. In our content analysis, we extracted each line from the poems which addressed the topic of “citizenship”in some way and arranged them on a spreadsheet for coding and analysis (Frankel & Wallen, 2003; Patton, 2002). To further“identify core consistencies and meanings” (Patton, 2002, p. 248) we also crosschecked these themes with the images thestudents included to highlight the important sentiments they noted in their poems. This process resulted in severaliterations of findings—each resulting in an increasingly honed data set.

In addition to these sources, we also collected and reviewed additional data, including the transcription and coding of thesix interviews we conducted. Initial and focused coding allowed us to connect these data with the other data sources(Bogden & Biklen, 1998). Inspired by the initial, disquieting findings related to youths' concepts of citizenship we discoveredin their surveys, we focused on the notions of “citizenship” emerging in these poetry projects, images, and interviews, whichwere confirmed in the post-project surveys and interviews. The results and conclusions we describe below relate to thesevarious conceptions of citizen, as identified in the survey findings and compared with those most frequently drawn fromyouths' poems and illustrations. Our findings also suggest an apparent utility of those language arts-based multimodal textsfor encouraging young people to engage with more complex ideas about citizenship. Finally, in the conclusion of this article,we discuss implications of this project for social studies education.

Results

The labor of gathering and analyzing the data drawn from this project, including student surveys, interview transcripts,and final poetry projects, provided considerable insights into how youth are able to utilize multimodal texts and media (e.g.,digital photography and slam poetry) to address citizenship. We must note, of course, that we are not suggesting causality

Fig. 1. Wordles image of common student responses to the pre-exercise survey question, “What does being a citizen mean to you?”.

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here: we cannot yet determine if the use of multimodal and visual methods results in different, more complex conceptionsof citizenship. As indicated above, we began our analyses with a review of students' answers to our pre-project surveyquestions. We followed these relatively straightforward examinations with robust explorations of student poems and theimages they chose to represent the salient themes therein, which were confirmed by data from our post-project surveys andinterviews. We illustrate many of our findings below with poem lines and images, as well as with relevant interview data.

Survey findings

Responding to the one question about citizenship we posed, students' survey answers elicited a strikingly narrow rangeof responses regarding the notions of civic roles with which they were familiar or in which they believed (see Fig. 1). Termsused to describe a “citizen” in these surveys were decidedly positive and moralistic, adhering to the notion described byLawy and Biesta (2006) of citizenship-as-achievement. Most prominent in these survey responses were the terms “pride” and“patriotic,” featured in nearly one-third of responses (31%). Notions of responsibility and obedience were also common intheir responses. Terms such as “loyal,” “obey”, and, surprisingly to us, “manners” were included in a total of 29% of surveys.And, most disappointing but perhaps not surprising, more than 10% of the students answered “I don't know” when askedhow they would describe a citizen. In part in an effort to parallel our pedagogical commitment to multimodal text, we choseto depict student survey responses through a Wordles, a tool that provides a visual illustration of information.

These results represented the fairly simplistic understandings of citizenship that we anticipated. We had hoped to find amuch wider range of more nuanced ideas, given the era and contexts in which our students and we were living andlearning. At this point in our project and study it seemed painfully obvious that the use of multimodal texts to exploreyouths' ideas about citizenship could not possibly further delimit these ideas. That is, from an instructional standpoint andwith our social studies focus, our integration of multimodal tools seemed a worthwhile and even necessary instructionalrisk to take. Still, we were concerned that perhaps this restricted assortment of definitions of citizenship was all that weshould expect to see in the follow-up poetry activities—that perhaps these represented the complete bank of notions ofnational identity with which our students were operating. To our considerable surprise, the responses youths generatedthrough these multimodal activities demonstrated otherwise.

Slam poetry and interview findings

Fortunately, we think, for us, our students, other educators, our readers, and even the U.S. and perhaps the wider world,we discovered in these young adolescents' slam poems much more nuanced, expansive, complicated, critical, hopeful, andoccasionally troubling conceptions of citizenship. As well, our interviews of six students revealed ideas that echoed manythemes we discovered in participants' creative written and visual illustrations. In their slam poems students consistentlyboth elucidated some of their seemingly superficial thinking expressed on the surveys and disclosed dramatic changes intheir thinking about citizenship. Based on our analyses, it is clear that the participants in this project were able to use thisproject as a means to develop what Lawy and Biesta (2006) describe as citizenship-as-practice. As we describe and illustratein the three findings sub-sections below, through their illustrated poems these young adolescents offered rich descriptionsand depictions of the themes in their writings, frequently introducing and clarifying abstract notions. Notably, althoughnearly two weeks passed between the completion of these poetry projects and our interviews, we were struck by the levelof recall youth exhibited when sharing specific elements of their poems. To an extent almost any teacher would envy,students recalled entire stanzas of their poems and vividly remembered the contents and contexts of the images they used.

One of the primary activities we used to help students generate their ideas about citizenship, and to begin to makeconnections between their notions and visual representations of these, was through a tool we called the “Slam PoetryCitizen Body Diagram” (see Appendix B). This tool also served as the final analysis lens through which we considered thesepoems and themes, given that it explicitly revealed, via words and images, how their use of these multimodal texts inspired

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their consideration of very different notions of citizenship than those shared in the pre-project surveys, or at least supportedtheir articulation and illustration of these richer, alternative concepts.

We opened our second class of this project by calling on students to refer to their completed “What It Means to Be a Citizen”“Slam Idea Generator”worksheets (see Appendix C) and choose one-word answers from at least three of the eight questions thatthey then posted on question-specific chart tablet papers. We encouraged youths to consider answers and questions that theyfelt were intriguing, controversial, or absolute. These choices also helped students to identify the most important elements oftheir citizenship definitions. We then used the “Slam Poetry Citizen Body Diagram” to transition youth to illustrating theirconcepts through specific characteristics and identifiable attributes. During this second class session, we assigned students tosmall groups to create collective body diagrams on chart tablet paper by sharing their individual worksheet responses using around-robin approach. Such a straightforward method allowed students to describe and illustrate an approximately equalnumber of ideas. More importantly, this strategy ensured that young adolescents saw, heard, and inquired about a range ofothers' perceptions and pictures of what it means to be a citizen, helping them to refine and expand their own thinking. Werecognized that while some students might find the task of exploring the idea of citizenship daunting, especially when thisconcept is increasingly more narrowly defined in public circles, others were able to generate ideas quite easily. Peer interaction atthis juncture clearly served to expose participants to new conceptions and draw out ideas from reticent youth. Finally, studentsshared their collective body diagrams, again using a round-robin method, with each individual participant describing one idea orillustration suggested by another member of their small group, rather than one of their own notions.

During the content analysis of youths' poems, and while paying attention to the ideas about citizenship in their poems,identifying relevant lines in these verses, and highlighting the images they took or selected to illustrated these concepts, werecognized that this diagrammight offer one of the richest and most candid means to share our findings. Thus, we organizedthe findings below into three categories that align with this drawing: (1) what youth think citizens say; (2) what our middleschool students suggest that citizens do; (3) what young adolescents believe citizens think. Our findings therefore are drawnfrom the final slam poems developed by these youths, but were crafted based in large part on their efforts to considernotions of citizenship in terms of these three categories.

While on their surface these categories, too, seemed to echo the simplicity we found so troubling in the survey answers,a closer look at these themes reveals that the actual notions these young people identified, which we illustrate below withsample slam poem lines and selected images, are compelling, surprising, and instructive. We offer the detailed findings thatfollow as answers to our research question regarding how middle school students describe and illustrate citizenship whengiven access to these traditionally language arts-focused multimodal texts and media. These appear to be almost infinitelymore personal and honest, moving almost entirely beyond the clichés and platitudes shared in their survey responses, andsuggesting that young people do have and can share complex notions of citizenship that might challenge the narrow ideasand punitive policies that are proliferating throughout our nation.

What citizens see and say

We have seen people starve so badly that it looks as if the wind could blow them down

In his poem entitled “Are We Part of the Puzzle of Human Existence?” from which the line and corresponding imageabove were taken, Nicholas shared one of the common but troubling examples of what our middle school students witnessas citizens in our society—a suffering amongst a certain segment of the US population that too many people ignore. In theseyouths' eyes, a real citizen is someone who is not only aware of these difficulties, but is willing to address the pain andinjustice too many of us just pass by. Perhaps even more importantly, Nicholas and a significant number of his classmatesillustrated with their pictures and words a more complex notion of “seeing” than we initially introduced to them: theyappreciated that vision was about more than what our eyes do and actually involves a mindfulness of the realities of society,the challenges others face, and the justice with which the US should be functioning.

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With lines from his poem, “The Two Faces of America,” Ishwaak echoed both this notion of consciousness—seeing—andthe focus on “ugliness” to which Nicholas introduced us:

And to walk outside and look around to the ugly, unsightly, ubiquitousYellow tapeEverywhereEveryone pennilessThe weight on people's shouldersThe weight was made of starvation.

It could be easy, and may be even reasonable to dismiss these youths' emphases on the suffering they were witnessing.After all, they were living and attending school in one of the largest, most diverse, wealthiest, and highest performing schooldistricts in the United States. But we found it instructive and hopeful that given a new, if not blank, slate on which to paint inpoetic words and digital images their perceptions of the state of citizenship in our nation that they paid so much attentionto these everyday concerns of equity.

In their poems these middle school students also consistently emphasized, with often harsh, descriptive terms followed bymany exclamation points, that they were not addressing merely the appearance of injustice or the fact that “true” citizens shouldmake more than token efforts to tackle the suffering around them. And the young people we interviewed repeated this theme;for example, CeCe commented that the expressive nature of the slams they were tasked to create empowered her to exploredeep-seated frustrations with the injustices she saw (personal communication, 18-January-2011). Students were also concernedwith our society's flawed focus on appearances, as Graciela's poem entitled “A Citizen's True Colors” revealed:

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An American citizen is someone who looks beyond the layers

And layers of skin

And that Christopher's poem (“What's a Citizen?”) echoed:

America has changed a lot

Realize that there is still discrimination

If you opened your eyes to what I'm saying, shout out with me

I'm an American Citizen!

But in this concentration on the superficial aspects of human beings, race, in particular, they repeatedly made a case thatcitizenship has nothing to do with skin color, clothing choices, or anything related to the surface of our selves. In fact, theywere angry that any notion of “citizenship” would ever be reduced to such traits. One youth, Reid vented:

I am tired!…

Of seeing the “good citizens”…Of this country…

Disrespect others…

Based on skin color or religion

Finally, again, while we called on our students simply to illustrate their ideas about citizenship with images throughwhat we imagined would be a quite straightforward exercise involving literal depictions of what citizens, “good” and “bad,”legal and illegal, look like and do. These middle school youth consistently challenged us with their metaphorical take on“seeing,” as illustrated by Paige's words and images from her poem “I Want to See…This America”:

I want to see

Risk takers and peacemakers…

I want to see

People who understand

People who care…

I want to see shoes

For the man with bare feet

What citizens do, don't do and “Do unto Others”

Through their poems the young people in our study revealed considerable emotion—and some only mildly temperedvitriol—not only when describing their reactions to the inequity and poverty that they were witnessing and the connectionsbetween these realities and citizenship. Perhaps just as consistently—and with as much passion—they detailed how theybelieved that citizens should have an environmental awareness and should not waste our planet's precious resources.Sydney's poem, entitled “World as One,” was just one of the dozens of poems that depicted and described these

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Earth-conscious actions:

Somehow

Someone

Told you it was ok

To pollute this world by driving around all the time

Wasting gasoline

We originally expected these young people to provide a laundry list of actions in which they thought citizens shouldengage; we assumed, wrongly, that our students would stay mostly on the level of the literal with these poetic descriptionsof citizenship. Of course, this assumption was borne out in the small quantity and narrow range of types of activities youthshared in their survey responses. But in our review of their poems and images we were struck by how often they shared andillustrated ideals that should guide citizens' efforts. These ranged from cautions about the limits of freedom, as described byNinamarie in her poem “Appreciation to Our Nation”:

We have freedom

But that doesn't mean we can do

ANYTHING

And echoed by Nicholas, and many other students in too many poetry lines to count where they emphasized theimportance of the “golden rule”:

A true American citizen treats others

The way he would want to be treated

While many cases our analyses of what these young adolescents suggest that citizens do revealed what could easily becharacterized as some of the most clichéd ideas, we also discovered a number of examples of our roles as global citizens,with responsibilities to aid less fortunate others around the world. The lines and image from Jude's poem, “The Fight for Our

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Names,” illustrated this concept:

We just became the father

always taking care if that country has an earthquake

Americans are just like the wind beneath other countries' wings

always helping them to their feet

And this notion was reiterated in our interview with Jude, in which he shared that, to him, being a citizen includes aglobal role in which one would “do anything” to help people regardless of national origin and status (personalcommunication 18-January-2011).

And, finally, we discovered countless examples of youths' impatience with adults' ineffective and misguided attempts toact as responsible, and responsive, citizens. Thus, one of the primary activities in which adolescent citizens engage is simplywaiting for these adults—their parents, teachers, political leaders, and so on, to cede power to them. While Wesley's poem“Expiration” offered a particularly dramatic and frustrated perspective on the extent to which young adolescents feelpersecuted by their adult guides' failed citizenship efforts, his sentiments about young adults' anticipated actions wereshared by many of his peers:

So we punch our pillows

And wait

When we

Can tower over those

Who don't yet know

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These young people not only differentiated adult citizen actions from youth citizen activities, and “good” or “real”citizen efforts from “bad” or “fake” citizen pursuits. They also perceived their own adolescent demographic as a body ofcitizens, distinct from a national identity, and thus capable of and committed to particular actions, including wrestingpower from adults, in the interests of their notions of justice. This age-oriented definition of citizenship was not onlyinteresting to us as teachers and scholars but also potentially instructive for our work as social studies and literacyeducators.

What citizens think, believe, and feel

In our review of these youths' poems and related images we were repeatedly impressed, and disappointed, by theextent to which we simply had underestimated our students and their abilities to describe and their interests in detailingcomplex notions of citizenship. As an example, we imagined that youth would offer a very technical, concrete definitionof citizenship, with almost exclusively tangible examples of what citizens say, do, wear, and think. Of course, thisexpectation was largely borne out in our collected and analyzed survey results. However, we were perhaps most surprisedby the complicated ways in which these youth understood citizenship when we paid attention to what they believecitizens think. They challenged the limits we had set for them, focusing most often not on the ideas in citizens' headsbut on their deepest beliefs and their core feelings. As illustrated by the following line and image from Annie's poem,“Give a Little”, one of the primary sentiments by which young people believe citizens should be guided is a commitment toequity:

I imagine an America where no one is rich because no one is poor

In their illustrated poems, numerous other students identified fairly traditional notions of what citizens think, believe,and feel, including patriotism, empathy for those less fortunate, gratitude for our freedoms and opportunities, and a senseof responsibility for ensuring the survival of the human species and Earth. Similarly, in our post-project interview,Zoe told us about her newfound recognition that citizenship is rooted in a belief in the “power to change things”(personal communication, 18-January-2011). Two examples of what these young people believe that citizens should think orfeel appeared most consistently and also impressed us as particularly important, largely because of the fact that theyseemed almost contradictory. Nicholas addressed the first—a passionate independence—with the following lines fromhis poem:

A true American citizen has passion

In what he believes in

He will do anything to share his ideas

And does not worry about what people think of him

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And in her poem, “Respect,” Rebecca illustrated with words and an image another perspective on what citizensunderstand about the very nature of a unique American nationality:

This is a poem about imagining

Imagining a world where there is no

Individual

Our students did not seem to recognize these tensions between being an absolute individual and subsuming ourindividuality for the good of the larger society. But they did appreciate that the benefits of citizenship were, largely, a matterof perception. They consistently articulated and illustrated how wealthy members of US society uniformly perceive thedistribution of citizenship advantages as equal, while those individuals on the bottom end of the economic scale recognizethat their status as lower income Americans means that they are less than citizens. A similar notion was illustrated throughattention to race and ethnicity as well; those outside of white middle class culture feel marginalized. Interestingly, andhopefully, these young people suggest that they share in the responsibility to shift this perception and to address theentrenched inequities in our society.

Implications and conclusions

As the images, text, and themes we have shared reveal, the illustrated slam poems that resulted from our project becamemeaningful products for these young people and unique data for us as teachers, teacher educators, and scholars longing tointelligently complicate our students' concepts of citizenship. These data provided us with important and novel insights intoyouths' understandings of and appreciation for concepts of citizenship, and we believe this project answered Ostrom (1996)cry for teachers to seek innovative ways to engage students in civic education. We see this project, study, and these studentdata as extending Banks' idea that “(a) major problem facing nation-states throughout the world is how to recognize andlegitimize (cultural) difference and yet construct an overarching national identity that incorporates the voices, experiences,and hopes for the diverse groups that compose it (Banks, 2008, p. 133). Our comparisons of pre-project surveys and thepoetry projects demonstrated the potential for young adolescents to articulate notably sophisticated ideas about citizenship,when they are called on or enabled to do so through the multimodal approaches that remain largely absent from today'scivics classrooms (Banks, 2008; Knight Abowitz & Harnish, 2006).

This research study and curriculum project was not without its limitations, however. While we were pleased with thediverse group of students with whom we worked on this project, the relatively small number of youth who had longbelonged to a diverse school culture prevented us from findings discernable patterns of civic-mindedness based ondemographic data. Future studies of civic education employing multimodal instructional methods might seek larger samplesand focus analysis on various groups of students in settings where diversity is less embedded in the school culture. Futureresearch may also attempt to study the extent to which efforts at more sophisticated notions of civic mindedness mightextend for periods beyond a short-term project. Exploring whether youth can consistently apply their understandings invarious social studies and literacy settings would be extraordinarily valuable to teachers and teacher educators, but wasbeyond the scope of this project.

More broadly, we cannot suggest that the means through which we asked students to consider and articulate notions ofcitizenship were equivalent, but we believe the descriptive findings of our study, based on these comparisons, are stillinstructive for those of us concerned with youths' ideas about national identity. The implications of such student investmentreach deep into social studies curricula and include promising possibilities to diversify pedagogy and activate studentlearning (Wyn & Dwyer, 1999). Fundamentally, we believe that this project has implications for what we understand about

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youths' ideas of citizenship and for efforts toward developing civic education pedagogies that are more relevant andmeaningful to students.

Crafting these slam poems, and illustrating themes they selected with images they took or chose, allowed young peopleto explore familiar yet often unexamined notions of what it means to be a citizen, what active involvement in the civic spacemight encompass, and what it means to be a young person reflecting on her or his surroundings. Through their slam poemsand presentations, we noted increasingly close connections between our students' evolving ideas and what Banks (2008)referred to as “active” and “transformative” citizenship. Moreover, we discovered a manifestation of citizenship-as-practice inthat these youth were able to articulate, “problems and issues of culture and identity…draw(ing) these different dynamicaspects together in a continuously shifting and changing world of difference” (Lawy & Biesta, 2006, p. 37). Specifically, ourproject participants consistently suggested that citizens should work spiritedly to articulate, discuss, and solve societalproblems. They also frequently lamented what they saw as a lack of initiative to do so in a world powered by greed andexaltation of material wealth. Ideas expressed in these multimodal poetry projects reveal that these young people were ableto ruminate on the meaning of citizenship in ways they previously had not seemed capable.

The students involved in this project also often included aspects of citizenship that were simultaneously personal andcultural, suggesting that mining the space our young people inhabit, and incorporating media with which they are familiar,can become important and informative components of effective social studies practice. We believe that the curricularoutcomes and the findings of this study confirm the controversial idea that classroom teachers and P-12 students are expertson these topics, a notion that many implicit assumptions in both our pedagogical structures and our educational researchactivities ignore. While the youths' voices have historically been almost non-existent in debates about schools, curricula, andteachers' instructional practices (Easton & Condon, 2009; Joselowsky, 2005), the past decade has produced a considerableliterature on youths' points of view on school (Cook-Sather, 2009; deFur & Korinek, 2009; Goodhart et al., 2006; Yonezawa &Jones, 2009). Mirroring our own study's methods, these examinations frequently involve teachers and community memberswho collaborate with researchers to provide authentic access to young adults in in- and out-of-school settings (Zenkov &Harmon, 2009c; Beuschel, 2008; Doda & Knowles, 2008; Streng et al., 2004).

These inquiries suggest that adolescents can serve as informants for how curricula should be revised and schoolstructures reformed to better suit their needs (Ayala & Galletta, 2009; Mitra & Gross, 2009; Rudduck, 2007; Stricklan, Keat, &Marinak, 2010; Thiessen, 2007). Thus, diverse youth in our global society may be the best source for ideas about how toconfront prejudices in their schools and the wider world. Or, more accurately, perhaps they are the only source with thepotential for making changes to a system that they, we, and many other members of our society, find increasingly lesstolerant.

This project and report appealed to a range of perspectives on what is “known” about citizenship, social studieseducation, and the literacies of today's young adolescents. And the multimodal tools through which young people exploredthe concept of “citizenship” moved what we—their teachers—thought we knew about them and their ideas from words wemight not hear to illustrations we could not help but see. One quality of these youths' poems that we found intriguing andthat we have yet come to fully understand is the fact that our students so often answered our positive question of “Whatmakes a citizen?” with negative replies about what does not constitute one's civic identity. In fact, these young adolescentsoften seemed to connect our materialistic, self-serving culture and current forms of “citizenship” with the increasingnumber of xenophobic policies and partisan pundits as bound elements of our modern dystopia. Such awareness of andattention to what a citizen is not may provide opportunities for educators to facilitate sophisticated concept formationthrough exploration of attributes and non-attributes of citizenship based on youths' existing knowledge and priorexperiences (Larson & Keiper, 2011).

The potential impact of this project on social studies classroom instruction and teacher education is thereforeconsiderable. Teachers and teacher educators might be consistently empowered to seek out, explore, and employ students'perceptions of and experiences with sophisticated and controversial concepts, moving with youth well beyond the all-encompassing and “definitive” explanation provided in a textbook or the often problematic notions proffered by reactionarypolicies. Recognition of students as experts, in terms of their own conceptions and experiences, allows for a more personal,and thus more meaningful, appreciation of, in this case, citizenship, and potent means to communicate that understanding(Lawy & Biesta, 2006). Finally, we believe this project allowed us and the students opportunities to explore Gutierrez' (2008)“third space”, by encouraging expression of personal experiences as a valid and significant means to understand citizenshipat a level far deeper than through traditional civic classroom pedagogies and practice.

In addition to presenting the findings of the research, in this article we have also introduced a handful of the toolsand daily pedagogical practices we developed to enable our middle school students to explore notions of citizenshipwith these multimodal texts. While the guiding questions of our project were oriented around our concerns as socialstudies educators, these tools and practices were largely based on the broad notions of literacy with which language artseducators currently operate. It is clear that such strategies and mechanisms are vitally important starting points forpedagogies and curricula that allow youth to explore more complicated concepts of citizenship. Ultimately, though, ourfocus is on these practical realities in the service of developing young people as complex thinkers and even activist membersof their communities. Projects and studies that explicitly rely on the integration of ideas, tools, and practices from onesubject area (e.g., language arts) into another (e.g., social studies) may be some of the most promising for engaging ourstudents in broader considerations of important concepts like citizenship in our increasingly global, technology-oriented world.

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Recognizing and responding to ever more complicated concepts of citizenship has obvious significance for us and ourstudents, near our nation's capital and in an extraordinarily diverse, immigrant-rich region. But even a glance at populationgrowth trends suggests that ours is only one of the first of many communities that will eventually know this diversity,where we will not just hope young people think more broadly about who a citizen is but where they will need to do so, fortheir own good and the well-being of our democracy. Where perhaps the sparse words of a poem, expressed in manylanguages, illustrated by universally understood images, might allow for the authentic, respectful communication thatrepresent the shared and highest ideals of our social studies and literacy instruction.

Appendix A. Poetry survey

Poetry Survey

photography

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Appendix B

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Appendix C

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