Systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis: multimodal composing and civic agency of multilingual youth

ABSTRACT In our civic engagement afterschool program in the southeast of the United States, our youth and adult participants used a wide range of modalities including mapping, rapping, drawing, and performance to construct and convey their unique visions of school and community spaces. The purpose of this methodological paper is to explore systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF MDA) as a potential resource to gauge the effectiveness of such humanizing and multimodal spaces in positioning youth as civic leaders. Data collected for this study included curriculum materials, descriptive field notes, and video recordings of the multimodal processes of focal youth across five program modules. Informed by an SF MDA perspective, our multimodal transcriptions illustrate how youth participants engaged in an intersemiotic complementarity of modalities and languages to share their insights and enact civic identities.