This paper examines how elementary children develop voice in a classroom where art and language have equal import from four different contexts: group, guided, table, and independent shares. Specifically, this paper highlights one child in particular: Rebecca, a writer who discovers art as a way of knowing and develops a greater appreciation for her love of writing.  My dissertation study took place in a second grade classroom, a ripe context to study a multimodal approach to learning, since many modes of knowing often lose their status (e.g., art) to more privileged ones (e.g., language) as learners progress in the elementary grades. This article investigates how one child develops voice through art and language and serves as an exemplar of how multiple ways of knowing and contexts in which to learn can positively influence children’s sense of self as artist, writer, and meaning maker.

In this three-month qualitative study, 36 pre and in-service teachers were invited to create and write poems from four idea bundles (e.g., the mixed bundle, the verbal bundle, the visual bundle, and the arranged bundle) in response to four picture book read alouds that address themes of abandonment (Wild, 2006), homelessness (Wild, 2007), togetherness (Woodson, 2015), and renewal (Tan, 2010). Bundles included a variety of visual and print media (e.g., photographs, art, magazines, newspapers, sheet music, books, greeting cards), used to enhance literacy experiences in writing poems. The purpose of the study was to investigate how different visual and verbal media support students in their efforts to write poems.  Analysis of 136 idea bundles, poems, questionnaires, and class discussion on read alouds as they related to students’ writing suggest that idea bundles provided a meaningful pathway for supporting students’ efforts to write vivid and descriptive poems.

This eight-week study supports the view that literacy learning is multimodal (Berghoff et al., 2000). It contributes to existing research (Dyson, 1986; Gardner, 1980; Hubbard, 1989; Hubbard & Ernst, 1996; Olshansky, 2007, 2008; Skupa, 1985) on the communicability of drawing and writing as vehicles through which children make and share meaning. In the traditional classroom where language is privileged over other ways of knowing, opportunities to construct meaning through art diminish as learners progress to higher grades and reading and writing therefore shift to the more common curricular resources of the classroom. While some learners are ready for the new shift, many comfortably linger in other forms of expression such as drawing to show their comprehension (Eisner, 1998a).

In first grade, varying abilities in writing abound. Exposure to and the personal construction of visual text may provide young writers opportunities to develop and reveal some of their own literacy strategies (Albers, 2007). Simply put, there is power in children’s use of art and, when it is valued as a conduit for understanding how children construct meaning, understanding children’s literacy processes is also expanded.