Mediating Identities: "Doing being global" in a study abroad media literacy course

Abstract

This study reports on findings of a complex, contextualized blended education world. It is a blend of modalities, technologies, media, languages, countries, cultures, and literacies. The nature of this blend facilitates observation of what happens as learners transform formal, informal, and digital learning contexts into their own agentive spaces for auditioning global identity repertoires (Lechner, 2007). Using tools of Nexus Analysis to analyze filmed observations, interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this study describes how translingual youth select and incorporate available semiotic resources to display symbolic competences (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008) to negotiate and co-construct global identities across multiple sites of engagement. Drawing upon Mercer’s (2011a, 2011b, 2012) work on learner agency as a complex adaptive system, I explore how multilingual students’ identity performances can be conceived as nested complex adaptive systems (CAS). Specifically, I focus on how students deploy symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006) as a discursive adaptive system of meaning-making and intercultural competence (Kramsch, 2009b) in the mediated actions of “doing being global.” Findings indicate that “emergent teaching” (Crowell & Reid-Marr, 2013) plays important roles in constructing collaborative agency even in spaces that materially and discursively are quite constraining. This ethnographic study addresses interdisciplinary gaps in global education, semiotic landscapes, multilingualism, and complexity education research while contributing to methodological approaches of multimodal action-oriented research and holds implications for teaching practice and approaches to fostering global teaching dispositions.