Bodies in Space/Bodies in Motion/Bodies in Character: Adolescents Bear Witness to Anne Frank.
Situated at the intersection of research on Holocaust education and embodied literacies this study examines how an arts based instructional approach engaged middle school learners in developing empathetic perspectives on the Anne Frank narrative. We addressed the research question: What can adolescents who are using their bodies to gain empathy with Anne Frank teach us about embodied literacies? Digital images and video were used to generate a multimodal analytic method that combined focus group interviewing with the Semiotic Photo Response Protocol and Visual Discourse Analysis. Analyses of performance and visual arts texts illustrated how students layered their understandings as they recast meanings across sign systems. As students engaged their bodies in space, in motion, and in character, they learned about the socio historical and emotional contexts in which Anne lived. These IJEA Vol. 17 No. 5 http:/www.ijea.org/v17n5/ 2 findings suggest that arts integrated and embodied learning opportunities may support students' sensemaking about complex narratives. The Anne Frank narrative has long occupied a prominent place in English language arts (ELA) and social studies curriculums in the United States. Anne's life and writing deserve even greater attention today as the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles and the last living testimonies cease to exist. Although a number of meaningful projects have sought to ensure that the voices of Holocaust survivors live on in perpetuity, the Anne Frank narrative is for many middle grades students the first and only exposure they have to the Holocaust (Magilow Silverman, 2015) It is likely also the only personal Jewish narrative they encounter officially in the ELA curriculum. Therefore, the ways in which classroom instruction frames this powerful topic shapes how students connect personally with Anne's narrative and the questions and meanings they construct about the Holocaust. We examined the use of an arts based instructional framework to engage middle school learners in developing empathetic perspectives on the Anne Frank narrative. Taking on another's perspective to empathize is a 21st century skill that can develop through relational literacy practices (Chisholm Keller, 2014) Middle school students today encounter the harsh realities of life in their local and global communities. For example, students in this project used the arts to grapple with socio political issues like rape culture, body image, and domestic violence. Students raised critical questions about the nature of such ethically and emotionally difficult topics in affective and cognitive ways. We conceptualized empathy as a relational literacy practice that places one's body and mind in the context of another, thereby affording the learner multiple perspectives on texts and the capacity to draw on those perspectives to act in the world. We asked the research question: What can adolescents who are using their bodies to gain empathy with Anne Frank teach us about embodied literacies? In this article, we examine two examples of multimodal literacy learning that were part of an embodied approach to ELA and social studies instruction. Our parallel multimodal analysis made visible the ways in which students used their bodies in space, in motion, and in character to learn about Anne Frank. This work contributes to the pedagogical and methodological literature about arts based literacy instruction by examining the multimodal processes and texts students used and constructed as part of learning about the Holocaust. 1 For example, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Institute for Visual History and Education, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's First Person podcast series and Echoes of Memory writing workshops for survivors of the Holocaust. Chisholm Whitmore: Bodies in Space/Bodies in Motion/Bodies in Character 3 Sociocultural and Multimodal Perspectives on Literacy and Learning This study is grounded in the sociocultural notion that all learning is mediated, or brought about through cultural tools of various sorts (Kozulin, 2003; Wertsch, 2007) and that issues of identity, agency, and power shape in consequential ways how and to what ends learners engage in literacy tasks (Lewis, Enciso, Moje, 2007) Vygotsky (1982) identifies the concept of mediation as "the central fact about our psychology" (p. 166) From a sociocultural perspective, mediation the process by which meaning is realized primarily although not exclusively through language is consequential to learning (Kozulin, 1998) In other words, signs mediate thinking "externally" and meanings mediate thinking "internally" (Moll, 2014, p. 34) Mediational means in instructional settings include not only tangible human and symbolic tools such as teachers, students, and texts, but also less obvious, and often overlooked tools such as images, bodies, and spatial relationships. In fact, Moll (2014) synthesizes Vygotskian theorists' work on mediation to categorize the concept according to five classes of mediators, two of which we pay particular attention to in this study: "[s]emiotic mediation: the use of symbol systems, such as language, writing, art, and mathematics [and] [a]natomical mediation: the use of the body, such as the hands and arms, which permit manipulation of the environment and representation of self in social life" (p. 31) We recognize the power of mediation for making distant historical, literary, and cultural content more concrete for youth. We consider the ways in which learners use art and language (semiotic mediation) and their bodies in space, in motion, and in character (anatomical mediation) to learn about Anne Frank. For this study, we foreground the mediating affordances of diverse sign systems. Gestural, musical, sculptural, visual, and other modes are ways students make and transform meaning with others in addition to verbal communication. Multimodality, which is the combination of different modes, increases learners' access points to the curriculum (Albers, 2006) generates insights into texts and students' own lives (Berghoff, Egawa, Harste, Hoonan, 2000; Pahl Rowsell, 2005) and offers additional means for students to demonstrate understanding. In particular, we leverage for analytical purposes the semiotic concept of transmediation (Siegel, 1995; Suhor, 1984) Transmediation occurs when students interpret texts that originate in one sign system and recast that meaning into another sign system. In our study transmediation refers to variations on "the process of taking what one knows in language and representing it in art" (Harste, 2014, p. 88) and, vice versa, by putting words and verbal expression to visual images. As Albers (2006) argues, "meaning is not located within any one mode, but in how the modes are interpreted in relation to each other" (p. 77) Transmediating understandings across IJEA Vol. 17 No. 5 http:/www.ijea.org/v17n5/ 4 semiotic systems is shown to expand students' perspectives (Cowan Albers, 2006) and extend the interpretive potential of texts (Zoss, 2009) "Simultaneously tapping the nonredundant potentials of talk and visual representation extends the generative and reflective power of transmediation" (Whitin, 2005, p. 392) The importance of this concept cannot be underestimated. In fact, literacy, according to some scholars, is reflected in a learner's ease with which he or she can transmediate (Cowan Albers, 2006; Harste, 2000) The ability to mediate the actual world and the perceived world through multiple sign systems promotes the power of students' voices, and quite possibly the critical consciousness of our society, resulting in potentially more democratic interactions within and among cultures (Harste, 2000, 2014) Review of Literature We situate this study in two areas of the research literature research on teaching and learning literature about the Holocaust and research on embodied literacies. Our study fits in the intersection of these areas to particularly attend to what students taught us about embodied literacies as they drew empathetic connections between their contemporary lives and the life of Anne Frank and grappled with incomprehensible content that can only be "worked through" and never "comprehended" (LaCapra, 1996; Simon et al. 2014) Research on Teaching and Learning Literature about the Holocaust Research on Holocaust education in K 12 ELA and social studies classrooms continues to emphasize the complexities and controversies surrounding the design, implementation, and evaluation indeed the larger purpose of instruction about this topic. Among the complexities and controversies that have arisen within educational studies of the Holocaust, scholars consider the unintended consequences of teachers' unexamined assumptions about the moralistic, didactic, and authoritative messages embedded in the study of texts with "disturbing pasts" (Juzwik, 2013; Schweber, 2004) Text selections that sensationalize and trivialize individuals' experiences during the Holocaust (Spector Jones, 2007) and problematic ways of framing the historical facts of the Holocaust have led to student misconceptions and a tendency to produce gross generalizations that distance the persons and events of the Holocaust from contemporary life (Gray, 2010; Schmidt, 2009) In reflecting on her experiences teaching a unit on Anne Frank as an early career English teacher, Juzwik (2013) identifies the tension that emerged as she sought to maintain her transactional literacy goals for her students while also attempting to "engage the detailed particularity of the Holocaust" (p. 291) Anne Frank's writing connects with many readers and such connections are often held up as "best practice" in ELA classrooms. However, an ethical treatment of Anne's diary, Juzwik argues, contextualizes Anne's writing using historical facts Chisholm Whitmore: Bodies in Space/Bodies in Mot