The simultaneity of experience: cultural identity, magical realism and the artefactual in digital storytelling

This paper explores how students, as multimodal storytellers, can weave powerful narratives blending modes, genres, artefacts and literary conventions to represent the real and imagined in their lives. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of student writing in a middle years class for immigrant students learning English as an additional language, the research featured in this paper is framed by a theory of artefactual literacies, narrative theory – particularly the genre of magical realism – and cultural studies, specifically notions of representation and cultural identity. The theoretical emphases on the artefactual, structural and representational aspects of multimodal narratives informs a multilayered, fine‐grained approach to analysing students’ digital narrative poems using the tools of critical discourse analysis, literary analysis and a visual analytic framework developed for analysing student‐produced digital photographs. This process is applied to a selected example, Gabriel's ‘My Name Is’ narrative, a story that plays with elements of magical real‐ism to explore the simultaneity of his experience as an immigrant youth. The illustrative example speaks to the power of the ‘fantastical’ in literacy pedagogies that seek to take seriously students’ cultural identities and their visions for new realities.