Building the Foundations of Critical Literacy: Collaborative Engagement With Interactive, Multimodal Narratives

ABSTRACT New literacies are not defined by their medium, but by broader shifts in how literacy is practiced. Offline, role‐playing games, tabletop games, and interactive narratives are becoming more and more popular, affording students the ability to engage with and change storylines. Online, readers today are able to pick and choose what kinds of texts they encounter online, and texts themselves are now more interactive, shifting based on available information about readers' web histories. To read critically today, readers need to understand the degree to which meaning in all texts is not fixed, but subjectively constructed by socially‐situated individuals as they read. Supporting students in developing nuanced understandings of how meaning arises through reading remains a challenge, however, particularly given the number of overlapping concerns literacy educators face. Responding to the need to explore how readers construct meaning interactively and multimodally while still incorporating literary texts, this study examines the ways in which undergraduate students collaboratively read a multimodal, interactive, graphic novel. The study focuses on how partcipants' reading experience helped them shift their paradigms regarding reading, understand their own subjective positionality as readers, and develop new theoretical and pedagogical understandings regarding critical meaning‐making.