Aboriginal Students Engaging and Struggling With Critical Multiliteracies

This article reports on findings from a school‐based action research project with aboriginal adolescent students attending an alternative school in Canada. As a Freirean response to these marginalized students' school failures, the researcher engaged students in a critical multiliteracies approach to language and literacy learning. Based on participant observation, video recordings, teacher journals, and field notes, key findings from this study indicated that (a) students were more likely to engage in school literacy projects when rules about how to speak in school and what topics could be discussed in school were suspended, (b) students' literacy levels benefited from a critical multiliteracies project that asked to them to draw on their own cultural funds of knowledge and use and develop the computer technologies skills they were interested in, and (c) students were more likely to engage in critical discussion of social issues when they chose the topic for study.