Pixels, Prose, and Literary Knowledge Production: Cultivating Aesthetic Literacies Through Audiovisual Essay Composing

This article appears as part of a special issue series of CITE English Language Arts Education focused on digital texts and how to teach them (Volumes 25:4 to 26:3).

Despite concern about waning interest, enrollment, and funding in the humanities, there has been an explosion of communities, creators, and academics taking up digital and multimodal tools to explore scholarly topics on a range of platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, Substack, and TikTok (Pausé & Russel, 2016). More impressive still, some of these creators are receiving hundreds of thousands of views and downloads on the articles, videos, and media they produce. The popularity of this content in online spaces frequented by younger demographics complicates popular notions that young people are not interested in the humanities and knowledge production. The emergence of these para-academic discourse communities also serves as an excellent example of how multimodal composition can provide access to new tools and pathways for public scholarship and knowledge production.

In addition to granting more access to a wider audience, current scholarship suggests academics are leveraging tools like newsletters (Zilberstein, 2024), podcasts (Cox et al., 2023), social media (Rablais et al., 2024), and videos (Pattier, 2021) to accommodate shifting forms of academic authority and epistemic legitimacy in an age where institutional knowledge production is threatened by political bad actors and educational austerity. Though this shift is happening across various fields, particularly relevant to this study is the fact it is also occurring within literary studies and its growing constellation of paracademic organizations, outlets, and discourses (Seybold, 2023, 2025). Furthermore, there are also diverse communities of creators further removed from the academy using digital tools for humanities-oriented practices, like ideology critique (Kuznetsov & Ismangil, 2020; Sylvia & Moody, 2022), cultural production (Poell et al., 2022), and literary criticism (Younis, 2021).

Based on these examples, the lines between academic, digital, and multimodal literacies are becoming increasingly blurred. Content creators, themselves, corroborate this blurring — prominent YouTubers like Contrapoints and PhilosophyTube are PhD dropouts who frequently mention the formative role their disciplinary training plays in their content creation. Similarly, creators like FD Signifier and Zoe Bee are both former teachers with graduate-level degrees, who left education to create content full time and conceptualize their creation process in explicitly pedagogical terms (Aleo, 2022a, 2022b).

Despite the interest in and emerging scholarship on creating intersections between humanities scholarship and digital technology, secondary English language arts programs face hurdles ranging from digital inequity (Liu et al., 2024) to regimes of standardized testing (Tan & Guo, 2017) and lack of professional support (Chen, 2021) to deeply held beliefs about the purpose of the discipline (Poyas & Eilam , 2012). One of the most consistent themes across those barriers to implementation, however, is a tension between what Beavis (2013) refers to as literary English, or practices traditionally emphasized in English courses, and emerging digital, youth, and multimodal literacies.

Dressman and Faust (2014) corroborate this divide, asserting that canonical literature and literary forms are often taught in isolation from social justice and digital forms. In the face of these perceived divisions, however, Rainey et al. (2023) claimed that failing to synthesize new literacies with foundational disciplinary practices “would be to fundamentally misrepresent the contemporary field and fall severely short of apprenticing students into literary studies” (p. 12). Similarly, Hinchman and O’Brien (2019) said that hybridity approaches might be one of the only viable ways for researchers and educators to undertake forms of disciplinary thinking that can revitalize literary studies in secondary English spaces.

Drawing on sociocultural theories of literacy (Lewis et al., 2007), aesthetic education (Greene, 1995), and literary studies (Eagleton, 2013; Rosenblatt, 1938; Tyson, 2015), aesthetic literacies offer a promising framework for bridging this false binary. Storm (2023) defined aesthetic literacies as “the socioculturally shared practices of particular interpretive communities — ways of reading, writing, talking, and thinking — that focus on not only what a text means but also on how that text is written or constructed” (p. 36). Unlike approaches that view literary and digital literacies as separate domains, approaches that cultivate aesthetic literacies recognize interpretive and expressive practices across diverse communities — from literary scholars to graffiti artists — that engage with both the meaning and construction of texts.

In addition to the pedagogical benefits of this approach, cultivating students’ understanding of aesthetics allows students to see and critique the way social ills like racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia are portrayed and reinscribed in cultural texts. As Eagleton (1988) noted, undertaking forms of aesthetic inquiry serves as a prerequisite to political action by providing a “deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which political hegemony is maintained” (p. 12).

By adopting aesthetic literacies approaches, teachers can simultaneously support students’ ability to critique oppressive systems, grant them access to discourses of disciplinary power, and honor their existing literacies. The synthesis reported here contributes to an emerging body of scholarship attempting to renew what it means to do English in secondary spaces.

Aesthetic literacies also offers a promising theoretical lens for examining how researchers and practitioners might overcome the artificial barrier between teaching youth-centered approaches and disciplinary approaches. To that end, this study examined how students in hybrid interpretive communities draw from both scholarly and youth literacies when producing literary knowledge with multimodal tools. To explore these intersections and the learning ecology that made them possible, this study explored the following research questions:

• How do students take up aesthetic literacies when producing interpretive and critical knowledge with literature in hybrid interpretive communities?
• What is the relationship between students’ use of aesthetic literacies and learning ecologies designed to support hybrid interpretive communities?
• What semiotic resources do students mobilize when composing audiovisual literary essays, and how do these resources support their interpretive work?

Theoretical Foundations

Unlike theories that view learning as an isolated cognitive process and knowledge as a static collection of facts, the sociocultural theories of learning that underpin aesthetic literacies recognize knowledge as inherently embodied, situated, and social. This perspective positions knowledge as generated by discourse communities that share particular beliefs, interests, values, behaviors, language, and social identities. As Gee (2007) argued,

An academic discipline, or any domain, for that matter, is… primarily a lived and historically set of distinctive social practices [wherein] content is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and often, reading and writing. (p. 22)

This socially situated and contextual understanding of learning and communication challenges flattened notions of literacy as an individualized and decontextualized cognitive skill, reframing it as a range of distinctive practices used by different discursive communities.

Situated within the broader category of discourse communities are what Fish (1989) referred to as interpretive communities, or groups, who read texts for the explicit purpose of responding to, writing about, and analyzing them in community with others. This perspective suggests that meaning emerges not from texts, themselves, whether written words or painted images, but through the collective interpretive practices of community members engaging with texts.

Jones et al. (2024) added a further dimension to this concept through their articulation of hybrid interpretive communities. Within these communities, educators encourage students to place different practices in dialog with one another, inviting learners to take up tools and practices from different interpretive communities to open new opportunities for communication, creation, and knowledge production. Through the cultivation of these hybrid interpretive communities, students can meaningfully participate in the production and circulation of knowledge across multiple discourse communities.

These spaces allow learners to draw connections between seemingly disparate interpretive practices, while developing meta-awareness of how meaning is constructed within and across different discourses. When engaging with texts through this hybrid approach, students do not simply acquire discrete sets of literacy skills; rather, they develop a dynamic understanding of how diverse aesthetic tools and practices can be strategically deployed to interpret, critique, and create texts. This metadiscursive understanding serves as the foundation for what Storm (2023) and Aleo (2024) conceptualized as aesthetic literacies.

A fundamental aspect of aesthetic literacies is its emphasis on form. Building on Eagleton’s (2013) expansive conceptualization of literary form, aesthetic literacies encompass the interpretation and use of aesthetic tools ranging from complex genre conventions to specific stylistic elements such as punctuation. This attentiveness extends across various interpretive communities, whether they engage with visual arts, cinematic discourse, or literary works.

Rosenblatt (1938) further emphasized that engagement with aesthetics transcends mere explanation of elements and requires adoption of an “aesthetic stance” that attends to both public and private aspects of meaning. Adopting this stance foregrounds the experiences, responses, and connections that emerge from students’ socially mediated aesthetic encounters and lead to a powerful integration of cognitive and affective ways of knowing (Street et al., 2014).

Kress’ (2010) social semiotic theory of multimodality provides additional theoretical tools for understanding the ways meanings are constructed and negotiated within these interpretive communities. While aesthetic literacies emphasize the socially mediated use of aesthetic tools and practices, Kress’ focus on design also emphasizes how designers actively select, adapt, and transform semiotic resources based on their affordances as well as their social context. This perspective emphasizes how different modes — visual, gestural, spatial, linguistic — offer distinct possibilities for meaning-making that extend beyond monomodal conceptions of literacy.

As Kress (2010) argued, design represents “a theory about communication and meaning, based on an equitable participation in the shaping of the social and semiotic world” (p. 6). This framing aligns with aesthetic literacies’ attention to the ways interpretive communities engage with form, while adding attention to the multimodal resources students use when designing literary knowledge in hybrid interpretive communities.

By supplementing aesthetic literacies with social semiotics, this research establishes a framework for examining the ways students navigate their design choices through dual influences: the inherent affordances and limitations of various semiotic modes, alongside the established conventions and socially constructed practices of their interpretive communities. This integrated approach illuminates the dynamic interplay between students’ individual meaning-making decisions and the collective interpretive frameworks that shape and validate those choices within specific social contexts

Literature Review

Drawing on foundational sociocultural perspectives (Heath, 1983; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1984), we conceptualized literacy in this study as a process deeply embedded within social and cultural contexts. This view represents a significant shift from treating literacy as merely a cognitive skill to understanding it as a complex social practice — what Gee (2015) termed the New Literacy Studies.

Two scholarly trajectories emerging from this sociocultural perspective are particularly relevant to this research: disciplinary literacy and multimodal literacy. Disciplinary literacy approaches focus on apprenticing students into specialized academic practices through cultivating the cognitive processes and social practices used by disciplinary experts (Moje, 2007, 2015). As Spires et al. (2018) noted, this involves providing students access to a discipline’s tools, terms, and concepts. Within ELA, specifically, Rainey and Storm (2022) conceptualized literary literacies as the holistic practice of generating interpretive knowledge with literary works in community with others — acknowledging distinctive ways of reading, writing, and thinking that characterize scholarly literary engagement despite the discipline’s complex boundaries (Rainey, 2017; see also McComiskey, 2006).

Concurrent with these developments, multimodal literacy research has expanded our understanding of how meaning-making extends beyond traditional print texts. The New London Group’s (1996) seminal work on multiliteracies established that technological and social changes necessitate more expansive literacy frameworks. Social semiotic theorists like Kress (2010), Bezemer and Jewitt (2010), and van Leeuwen (2011) have demonstrated how composers strategically select and combine modes based on their interests and social contexts. Studies examining multimodal approaches to literary analysis have yielded important insights about how students engage with literature through different modes. Kang (2022) showed how students transfer rhetorical strategies across media when creating multimodal compositions, while McCormick (2011) found that transmediation across modes promotes engagement with macrostructural concepts.

Bruce (2009) noted how multimodal composition processes differ from print processes in representation, task setting, and students’ visualization approaches, with students’ brainstorming becoming less linear and more layered. McLean and Rowsell (2015) applied Rosenblatt’s (1938) transactional theory to analyze print-multimodal relationships, demonstrating how strategic technology use enhances student engagement and critical thinking across modes.

More specific studies examining students’ multimodal literary interpretations have revealed the rich potential of these approaches. Jocius (2013) demonstrated how compositional tool choices influenced modal usage and tone when students analyzed The Kite Runner, while Smith (2017) revealed how multimodal composition enables students to elicit affect through provocative sounds and images, layer design elements for analytical purposes, enhance audience experience through aesthetic choices, and express personal interests within academic contexts. Jiang and Gao (2020) corroborated these findings, showing that multimodality fosters affect, empathy, and identity understanding when secondary English students create digital videos.

Youth literacy research has further enriched our understanding by examining how young people engage with texts in digital spaces. Lammers and Marsh (2015) explored how fanfiction communities foster writerly identities, while Chandler-Olcott and Mahar (2003) theorized anime fanfiction communities’ multimodal composition practices. Anglin and Smagorinsky (2014) and Lammers et al. (2022) demonstrated the ways youth practices like hip-hop and fan-based literacies can scaffold sophisticated literary interpretation and multimodal composition, suggesting productive pathways for integration into ELA curricula.

More broadly, the literature reviewed aligned with Kirkland and Hull’s (2021) claim that, based on their evaluation of sociocultural literacy scholarship, hard and fast distinctions between in-school and out-of-school literacies rarely hold. This is consistent with Gutierrez’s (2014) articulation of syncretic literacies approaches that invite youth to integrate everyday and school-based practices.

Despite these scholarly innovations, a significant gap exists between youth-oriented approaches and explicitly disciplinary literacy approaches in both research and practice. Higgs and Kim (2022), Hicks et al. (2012), and O’Brien and Scharber (2008) have noted that multimodal literacies are frequently positioned as creative alternatives to academic composing, rather than as tools for producing critical and interpretive knowledge with literary works. None of the reviewed studies examined how students might integrate practices of literary scholars (such as applying critical theories, citing literary critics, or referencing secondary sources) with multimodal tools and youth literacies. Most research on students’ multimodal literary interpretations remains limited to reader-response approaches or New Criticism-style analyses typical in high school settings (Francis, 2008). This gap in the literature suggests there is much to be gained by examining how students might use literary and youth literacies in tandem when producing critical and interpretive knowledge with literary works.

Implementation barriers also exist at both institutional and individual levels. Loerts’ (2022) longitudinal research suggested that successful hybridization of traditional and multimodal practices requires comprehensive professional development that builds capacity with diverse modes and media while transcending “disciplines, space, and time while enriching identity formation” (p. 60). Poyas and Eilam (2012) demonstrated through interviews with experienced literature teachers that educators’ dispositions — including aesthetic preferences, attitudes, and prior knowledge — significantly impacted their ability to incorporate multimodal approaches within conventional English curriculum structures.

At the preservice level, Hundley and Holbrook (2013) identified that print-based compositional paradigms became so deeply embedded in teacher candidates’ practices that “they no longer saw it until compelled to consider alternative ways of organizing their thinking” (p. 504), with resistance stemming from limited digital tool proficiency, authorial control concerns, and insufficient knowledge of diverse semiotic modes. These hurdles suggest the field would benefit from a closer examination of preservice and early career teachers who can effectively weave together aesthetic literacies from disparate discourses in their own practice and pedagogy.

This study addressed these gaps by exploring how educators can cultivate hybrid interpretive communities that meaningfully integrate youth literacies with disciplinary practices to design literary knowledge (Aleo, 2024; Jones et al., 2024; Storm, 2023). This reframing went beyond having students use digital tools for traditional tasks, instead encouraging authentic engagement with both academic disciplines and digital discourses in ways that reflected emerging practices in contemporary academic spaces. Such approaches have the potential to provide insight into ways preservice teachers can bridge disciplinary and youth-centered approaches to reimagine what literary and aesthetic inquiry looks like in secondary English classrooms — revitalizing literary studies for a generation of students who actively participate in digital interpretive communities outside of school.

Methodology

This exploratory single-case study combined ethnographic and social semiotic methodologies. Following Weinstein’s and Weinstein’s (1991) bricolage approach, data were collected through multiple tools and methods based on emergent research needs. This multiperspective data collection enabled a deeper understanding of the phenomena, supporting stronger theory building and future research. The study took place at an independent college preparatory school in New England. It was conducted in a 10th-grade American Literature class toward the end of the course.

Over the course of the study, the cooperating teacher rolled out an audiovisual essay project asking students to select two novels they had read and form an interpretation comparing their themes based on literary theory or theories of their choosing. I hoped to understand how students took up the practices and tools of literary scholars and digital discourse communities to produce audiovisual essays about literature. I also hoped to understand the relationship between those practices and the learning ecology cultivated by the cooperating teacher.

Recruitment and Participants

The cooperating teacher, Finley (pseudonym), identified as a queer Caucasian cisgender female teacher with 1 year of full-time teaching experience, holding an undergraduate degree in English literature and pursuing a master’s degree in English through an online program. These demographic details are relevant, given the role of identity and educational training in shaping disciplinary and pedagogical perspectives. Additionally, the teacher’s comfort with literary studies, literary literacies approaches, and multiliteracies pedagogy was essential for creating the learning environment needed to investigate the research questions, particularly given these fields’ emerging nature.

Following Gutierrez et al.’s (2016) participatory design research framework, this study moved beyond traditional subject/object binaries to position the teacher as a codesigner and research partner.  As outlined by Jurow et al. (2016), this approach adhered to three core principles: focusing on partners’ evolving priorities, acknowledging diverse forms of participation, and grounding partnerships in understanding and vulnerability (p. 281). In keeping with the three core principles, the participating teacher designed the parameters and framing of the audiovisual essay project, shared insight into trends emerging from the coding process, and collaborated on a reflection and revision process that would inform future iterations of the project as well as similar invitations for multimodal composing in the 10th- grade American studies curriculum.

As the project design demonstrates, she was particularly interested in using the project to place different authors “in dialog with one another” and provide students with an opportunity to use literary theory to weave connections across texts. To that end, the teacher served as cocreator of all instructional materials, curriculum, and assignments used during the study. Furthermore, both the teacher participant and I were committed to designing a project that invited students to problematize romanticized notions of the American dream by revising a prior version of their curriculum to include more literature written by foundational authors from marginalized communities. The inclusion of more female and queer authors was of particular importance to the cooperating teacher and were prominently featured in the participants’ audiovisual essays. The end-of-year audiovisual essay project served as the culmination of that ongoing social justice work and invited students to reflect across the diverse perspectives that populate the new, emerging version of the American literature course.

Five student participants were selected from an initial pool of eight participants, with two declining participation. The final cohort included four students who identified as cisgender females and one who identified as a cisgender male. It also represented diverse ethnic backgrounds: one Caucasian, one White-Hispanic, one African American, one Hispanic, and one biracial student. One additional nonbinary student’s data were excluded from the corpus due to incomplete submission of both the video essay and think-aloud protocols.

Participant selection was conducted collaboratively with the cooperating teacher to ensure representation of diverse positionalities and academic abilities. This purposeful sampling approach aimed to capture a range of student experiences and capabilities within the classroom context. All participants were assigned pseudonyms to maintain confidentiality, which are used in all subsequent references throughout the study. Detailed contextual information for each student was derived from demographic surveys and initial classroom observations, providing insights into their backgrounds, academic histories, and classroom engagement patterns.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Table 1 provides an overview of each of the student participants.

Table 1
Student Participants Demographic Data and Digital Community Membership

Due to the limited timeframe and scope of this exploratory study, students were not directly involved as codesigners in the initial development of the audiovisual essay project. However, the project itself emerged as a response to the school’s strategic initiative to increase project-based learning opportunities — an initiative shaped by ongoing student feedback and participation in curriculum development forums. While formal student codesign was not feasible within the study parameters, student perspectives indirectly informed the project through their prior engagement with the school’s curriculum development process, and their work and responses throughout implementation provided valuable insights that would shape future iterations of the project. This approach acknowledges the practical constraints of classroom-based research while still honoring the importance of student voice in curriculum transformation.

Data Collection

To document and analyze students’ design processes when composing audiovisual literary essays, the study was divided into three phases. In Phase 1, survey interviews were conducted to assess students’ knowledge of multimodal composing and literary literacies. Additionally, a semistructured interview was conducted with the cooperating teacher to understand her knowledge of and experience with these practices, as teacher beliefs about disciplinary content significantly shape instructional approaches (Beswick, 2005). Teaching documents, lesson plans, and curated mentor texts were also collected to provide context for the unit’s implementation and allow for data triangulation (as recommended in Yin, 2014).

Phase 2 focused on capturing students’ design work through screen recordings and think-aloud protocols that documented their composing processes during and after composition. Think-aloud protocols were selected because they provide insight into “what people think they are doing” and reveal “how they use words [and other modes] to accomplish things” (Bazerman, 1988, p. 4). Screen recordings using Screencast-O-Matic software were employed, as they offered a “powerful tool to capture and document situated and complex processes of composing texts online” (Yi et al., 2022, p. 3). Classroom observations provided evidence of  how the teacher introduced literary literacies and supported students’ multimodal composing. This combination of methods aligned with what Rowell (2022) conceptualized as a multimodal process interview approach.

Phase 3 involved collecting and analyzing students’ completed audiovisual literary essays using a multimodal content analysis method (Serafini & van Leeuven, 2022). A final semistructured interview was conducted with the cooperating teacher to gather her impressions of students’ compositions and overall experience with the unit. According to Lim’s (2015) research with secondary English teachers, understanding educators’ perspectives on the discipline can yield valuable insight into both their practices and students’ experiences. This three-phase approach allowed for examination of the full arc of students’ design processes — from initial preparation through final reflection.

Data Analysis

The initial phase of data analysis focused on understanding the relationship between the cooperating teacher’s personal, pedagogical, and disciplinary identity and the learning ecology she cultivated for her students. Following Flick’s (2014) framework for analyzing linguistic data, I examined material from semistructured interviews with the cooperating teacher, classroom observations, and collected teaching materials. Throughout this process, analytic memos were maintained to document emerging insights and support ongoing analysis, serving as what Saldaña (2013) described as a space to recursively process and reflect on the data.

The analytical process began with open coding of the semistructured interviews with the cooperating teacher, analytic memos from classroom observations, and collected teaching materials. This phase employed eclectic coding (Saldaña, 2013) to capture the range of pedagogical moves and practices observed in the learning ecology. The ability to analyze data across multiple sources, from interview transcripts to classroom observations to instructional materials, provided a robust foundation for understanding how the teacher conceptualized and implemented the audiovisual essay project.

This initial coding process generated 41 unique codes that were subsequently organized into five thematic categories, as shown in Table 2. While not all these themes are explored in equal depth in the findings section, they collectively informed the analysis of how the teacher created conditions for the type of hybrid interpretive community required for students to place literary and youth literacies in productive dialog. The table provides representative examples of each category.

Table 2
Axial Codes From Teacher Data

The next phase of analysis examined student participants’ think-aloud data and essay scripts through eclectic coding, employing both descriptive and process codes to analyze their interpretations and design processes. This analysis yielded 70 unique codes that were organized into five themes reflecting different aspects of students’ work: noticing literary forms, posing literary puzzles, leveraging literary theories, design tools/practices, and youth literacies. These codes were then examined through the lens of key literary literacy practices established by Rainey and Storm (2022) to ensure alignment with the research questions. The findings from this analysis are detailed in Table 3, which shows the axial codes alongside relevant quotes from screen recordings, think-aloud protocols, and observational notes.

Table 3
Axial Code From Student Data

Students’ audiovisual essays were analyzed using a modified multimodal content analysis framework adapted from Sekar’s (2024) scholarship interpreting audiovisual essays. This methodological approach systematically examines how different semiotic resources function together to create meaning across temporal, spatial, and modal dimensions. The analytical instrument documented the following:

1. Timeline: Precise timestamps for significant compositional moments, enabling analysis of how meaning evolves throughout the text.
2. Modes/Semiotic Resources: Documentation of semiotic resources utilized (speech, gesture, image, text, sound, etc.).
3. Transcript data: Verbatim transcription of spoken content aligned with timestamps.
4. Visual Artifact: Screenshots of key visual compositions to capture spatial arrangements and multimodal ensembles.
5. Modal interaction analysis: Analytical notes on how different modes interacted, complemented, or complicated each other.

Following Jewitt and Oyama’s (2001) social semiotic approach to visual analysis, particular attention was paid to how participants orchestrated different modes to create meaning beyond what individual modes could achieve in isolation. The instrument’s flexibility accommodated the diverse stylistic approaches observed in participants’ compositions — ranging from traditional video essays to podcast-style dialogs — while facilitating cross-case analysis of ways different semiotic resources were deployed to support literary interpretation.

The analysis also incorporated Kress’ (2010) concepts of transduction and transformation, examining ways students moved meanings across modes and repurposed semiotic resources from various discourse communities. This approach allowed for deeper understanding of both the compositional choices students made and the ways these choices reflected their participation in hybrid interpretive communities.

After examining data from the cooperating teacher, student design processes, and multimodal content analysis, significant areas of overlap emerged across categories. To better understand the interrelationship between teacher, task, and student within the learning ecology, I conducted an additional round of axial coding. This process helped establish a unified coding scheme applicable to both data sets. To ensure the axial codes would effectively address my research questions, I consulted contemporary research on learning ecologies and based the subsequent coding scheme on the fundamental components outlined in Jackson’s (2016) learning ecology model: pedagogic context, design work, semiotic resources, and relationships.

The pedagogic context theme emerged from analysis of Finley’s design choices within the learning ecology, while the relationships theme was derived from examination of interpersonal classroom dynamics and participants’ engagement with literary studies as a discipline. The design work theme, comprising most of the findings, was identified through analysis of ways students used literary literacies to develop interpretations and, subsequently, utilized youth and digital literacies to create their audiovisual essays. The semiotic resources theme captured the diverse digital and material tools participants employed during their design process. This framework enabled an examination of the contextual factors surrounding students’ design work, their multimodal composition processes, and their final products.

Figure 1
Learning Ecology Model Components (Adapted from Jackson, 2016)

This final phase of axial coding facilitated the development of the study’s overall themes. The following section employs the learning ecology model that informed these selective themes to explore the connections between students’ learning context, their interpretive design processes, and the content of their completed audiovisual essays.

Findings

This study’s findings reveal the complex interplay between literary practices and youth literacies that emerge when students compose audiovisual essays in hybrid interpretive communities. To understand how students navigate between these different discourses and aesthetic forms, I employ Jackson’s (2016) learning ecology framework in the following sections, analyzing the relationship between pedagogic context, relationships, design work, and semiotic resources that shaped students’ compositions. This framework illuminates how the learning environment cultivated by the cooperating teacher supported students’ ability to produce sophisticated literary interpretations while also empowering them to leverage aesthetic tools from their lifeworlds to communicate those interpretations in dynamic new ways. The findings demonstrate that fostering hybrid interpretive communities not only democratizes literary knowledge production but also creates conditions where students can authentically participate in both academic and digital discourse communities.

Relationships and Pedagogic Context

Considering the sociocultural theories of learning underpinning this study, the relationships that structure hybrid interpretive communities are regarded as a vital part of a thriving learning ecology. The data revealed that Finley’s relationship with literary studies significantly shaped the classroom environment. Having once felt alienated by the discipline’s gatekeeping practices, Finley cultivated a space where she could “carve out her own space” within English and help students do the same. This aligns with scholarship on ways teachers’ disciplinary views influence their pedagogy (Hall & Goldman, 2018; Howell et al., 2021).

Finley’s classroom environment physically embodied this hybrid approach — student artwork alongside critical theory texts and literary figures next to personal elements like an LGBTQ+ pride flag. Her pedagogical strategies consistently democratized disciplinary practices through multimodal and affectively engaging experiences, including embodied activities for teaching complex concepts like intersectionality and using class jam sessions to introduce Romanticism. As she explained, “My philosophy with my kids is that we’re going to be human together.”

This intentionally hybrid space directly influenced students’ engagement with both literary and youth literacies. Participants frequently referenced how this environment bolstered their confidence, with Lana noting that Finley’s approach helped her feel like she “actually knew what [she] was doing in English,” despite struggles in previous courses.

The consistent subcode of positive affective responses — students using words like “interesting,” “deep,” “fun,” and “exciting” about their work — suggests that the learning ecology successfully bridged disciplinary learning with students’ identities and interests, creating ideal conditions for their subsequent design work. While extensive teacher data were collected and analyzed (including semistructured interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis), this section focuses primarily on the aspects of Finley’s approach that most directly influenced student design processes. The primary emphasis of the findings that follow will be on students’ interpretive and expressive design work, which constitutes the core focus of this study’s research questions.

Students in Focus: Design Work and Semiotic Resources

Students’ design work can be understood as occurring within two distinct but overlapping phases. The first phase entailed students taking up the practices of literary scholars to form the content of their interpretations. In the second phase, students leveraged their knowledge of digital platforms, aesthetic tools, and youth literacies to communicate their interpretation in the form of an audiovisual essay. The eclectic coding process used to analyze the data generated during the classroom observations, think-aloud, and multimodal content analysis all suggest that students’ use of these tools is shaped by the learning ecology in which they occur and exemplified how literary literacies approaches can scaffold students ability to pose literary puzzles, notice use of form, and theorize using concepts from critical and literary theory.

Students’ Interpretive Design Work

The analysis of students’ interpretive processes revealed sophisticated engagement with the key practices of literary scholars, particularly when posing literary puzzles that would drive their analysis. For example, when brainstorming potential topics, Gina asked, “Did Hella really want to settle down? Who else would be like that?” Topher wondered, “Emerson was a nonconformist, so I could maybe talk about conformity?” These questions demonstrate students’ ability to identify productive interpretive problems spanning issues of form, criticality, and humanity that Storm and Rainey (2024) identified as central to contemporary literary studies. The prevalence of such questioning across participants suggests that Finley’s ability to challenge her students to do meaningful intellectual work in a supportive environment created conditions where students felt empowered to pose and pursue authentic disciplinary questions.

Beyond posing interpretive questions, students demonstrated sophisticated engagement with literary forms and conventions throughout their analysis. Participants consistently identified and analyzed specific textual features that supported their interpretations. For example, Gina noted how “the book is structured like a bildungsroman for Sula,” demonstrating her ability to recognize and apply genre conventions to support her analysis. Patricia’s attention to narrative perspective was particularly notable, as she explained that “he’s using that first-person perspective to unveil the unrighteousness of slavery.” This close attention to form aligned with practices modeled by Finley during class discussions and revealed students’ growing facility with disciplinary ways of reading.

Finally, students’ theorizing practices reflected sophisticated engagement with critical and literary theories introduced through Finley’s instruction. Their analysis frequently moved beyond tending to elements of form to explore broader social and theoretical implications both within and beyond the texts. For instance, when analyzing gender dynamics in Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin, 1988), Gina observed that “even though [Hela] attempted to subvert gender roles … the constraints of classical heterosexual love prevented it.”

Similarly, Patricia’s claim that “there’s always forms of systemic oppression based on identity [in America]” from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass et al., 2005) and Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin, 1988) demonstrated her ability to connect textual analysis to broader theoretical frameworks about race, power, and marginalization. Whereas Tina, Lana, Gina, and Patricia leveraged concepts from critical theory, Topher’s work emphasized humanistic themes like authenticity, truth, and individuality. He also considered how those themes manifested across different literary periods in American history.

These examples suggest that the hybrid interpretive community fostered by Finley supported students in taking up critical and literary theories in ways reflective of work done in the field. Furthermore, students’ confidence using the practices of literary studies to generate critical and interpretive knowledge was also reflected across the wider think-aloud data set, with each participant voicing sentiments of self-efficacy and positive affect throughout the think-aloud protocol. The positive impact of this learning was further corroborated by the depth and quality of the literary interpretations noted during the multimodal content analysis.

Students’ Expressive Design Work

Based on the analysis of data generated from the think-aloud protocols and multimodal content analysis, the participants’ design choices were largely influenced by three factors: their understanding of audiovisual essays as a form, their membership (or lack thereof) to digital interpretive communities, and the affordances of the platforms they used when producing their audiovisual essay. Understanding the way these distinct but interwoven elements shaped the participants’ design choices can yield a deeper understanding of the ways students conceptualize and apply a diverse range of aesthetic literacies when composing multimodal audiovisual essays

Taking Up Aesthetic Literacies From Digital Discourse Communities. While emerging scholarship has examined the ways students leverage the affordances of digital and multimodal tools to produce audiovisual essays about literature, there is less research emphasizing the ways students’ understanding of these tools is mediated by digital communities they participate in outside of school. For example, after brainstorming and planning her topic, Gina began her second screen-recorded think-aloud session by logging onto her YouTube account and clicking through her favorite content creators’ videos to “take some inspiration from a couple of creators I like.” She described the creators whose content she consumes as “video essayists,” whose work covers topics from social justice, media analysis, current events, to politics. Gina cited two video essayists in particular — Zoe Bee and The Book Leo — whose work influenced her design choices, describing the aesthetic of their videos as “using a mixture of different images or clips, but mostly shots of people” in ways that create a “cozy vibe” she hoped to emulate:

My filming setup is probably going to be downstairs in the living room. I’m just going to set up my phone sideways.… I’ll have the books, a nice outfit, and probably a glass of water or tea or something. It would be very aesthetic!

Appendix A demonstrates how Gina used the aesthetic tools and semiotic resources of video essayists to design her audiovisual essay.

While Gina’s use of objects (e.g., glasses and physical copy of books), space (e.g., landscape painting and set in living room), and appearance (e.g., beige turtleneck and seated in chair) had some explanatory utility, the think-aloud data collected suggests she saw their primary function as a means to recreate the “cozy” and “academic” aesthetics of her favorite video essayists. Each of these aesthetic tools aligns with Hartman’s (2020) analysis of a particular video essay style popular in politically progressive online spaces:

Most videos within the broader leftist video essay sphere are shot in a bedroom, office, or living room, bringing the viewer into the creator’s personal space and epitomizing the conversational, unpretentious air that is either organically or deliberately present in many YouTube videos. (p. 24)

Figure 2 offers a comparison of the video essays Gina viewed during her screen-recorded planning sessions and a snapshot of her final video.

Figure 2
Comparison Between Gina’s Mise-En-Scene and Video Essayists From During Screen Recording

Gina’s willingness and ability to recognize and remix the visual codes and aesthetic cues of video essayists demonstrates her sophisticated understanding of the genre conventions she marshaled to form her audiovisual essay. Her design work did not simply port a written essay into a new multimodal format or take advantage of digital affordances. It used the project as a way to engage actively with and participate in an interpretive community. Furthermore, her design work juxtaposed those youth literacies with the practices of literary scholars, including the use of direct text evidence, contextualization of her analysis, and the use of concepts from feminist theory.

While Gina adopted the aesthetic conventions of YouTube video essayists, Lana and Tina structured their composition in a style similar to their favorite video podcaster. Although their specific choice of form was unique among the participants, their approach adds further data to support the finding that students working in hybrid interpretive communities will appropriate aesthetic tools and practices from their digital discourse communities to produce academic interpretations. This finding extends existing scholarship on ways students remix semiotic resources from their lifeworlds when engaging in multimodal composition (Aleo, 2024; Jones et al., 2024) and offers further insight into the ways audiovisual essay composing might democratize literary knowledge production.

The most significant influence on Lana’s and Tina’s audiovisual essay design was their engagement with video podcasts before the project. While their composition aligned with the project requirements, it is important to note that video podcasting represents a distinct aesthetic form from traditional audiovisual essays similar to the one Gina and Patricia produced. Sharon (2022) conceptualized podcasting as both a specific aesthetic format and a complex assemblage of practices, interactions, and discourses that emerge from producer and consumer communities.

Although Tina’s and Lana’s composition incorporated certain conventions typical of audiovisual essays, their design choices were predominantly informed by their experiences as podcast consumers and their understanding of that medium’s aesthetic practices. This became evident in their explanation of their creative process, where they frequently referenced podcasting conventions and styles they had observed through their engagement with the form. As they explained, “The podcast, Anything Goes, by Emma Chamberlain” was one of their key aesthetic inspirations. Lana continued,

They [Alex Chamberlain and her guests] have like all the gear and stuff, and they’re just sitting and talking. It’s like, just a conversation. It’s not like something that has to go in a particular direction. It was very low-key and very chill and not very formal.

Analysis of the screen recording and think-aloud data revealed that, like Gina, Tina’s and Lana’s design choices were both influenced by the styles and aesthetics of the digital discourse communities they participated in. While Gina meticulously constructed her mise-en-scène to align with the scholarly aesthetic of her preferred video essayists, Lana and Tina intentionally cultivated a more laid-back atmosphere characteristic of their favorite video podcasters.

These contrasting stylistic choices support Smith’s (2018) research on adolescent multimodal composition, which demonstrated that students’ semiotic decisions serve dual purposes: establishing connections with intended audiences while simultaneously expressing their identities as composers. Appendix B illustrates how Tina and Lana strategically employed specific semiotic resources to adapt and reinterpret the informal aesthetic conventions characteristic of their preferred video podcast content. The analysis demonstrates their systematic approach to incorporating elements such as casual dialog patterns, informal spatial arrangements, and conversational gestures while maintaining the disciplinary practices required by the assignment.

The thoughtful way both Gina, Lana, and Tina adapted different aesthetic conventions to serve their rhetorical purposes suggests that students can leverage various discourse communities’ practices to produce sophisticated academic compositions, even when working within different generic frameworks.

Leveraging Semiotic Resources and Their Modal Affordances. The analysis of the think-aloud protocols, screen recordings, and multimodal content analysis revealed how students strategically leveraged different platforms’ affordances and modes’ meaning-making potential when composing their audiovisual essays. Rather than simply transferring written analysis into video form, participants demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of ways different modes could be orchestrated to convey complex literary interpretations. This understanding manifested differently based on students’ chosen platforms and their goals for their compositions. Table 4 provides an overview of the semiotic resources captured in the coding phase organized by what Cope and Kalantzis (2020) referred to as the “forms of meaning.”

Table 4
Participants Use of Semiotic Resources Organized by Meaning Forms

Patricia’s composing process exemplified how students can systematically leverage modal affordances even without strong ties to specific digital communities. Using the VEEDIO video editing platform, she approached each mode as a semiotic resource with specific explanatory capabilities. Her think-aloud data revealed constant evaluation of which modes would best convey particular aspects of her interpretation. For instance, when trying to represent her argument about systemic oppression in America, she explained, “I wanted to use different symbols and pictures to show how people can feel trapped by these systems.” This led to her creating complex multimodal ensembles through strategic layering of visual and textual elements.

As illustrated through her use of music, Patricia also layered sound into her multimodal ensemble to establish a key tension in her interpretation. She began with a strategic juxtaposition: a stock image of an American flag rippling in the wind accompanied her voiceover articulating presumed positive associations with American identity, while a somber piano track played beneath both elements. This intentional layering of contrasting modal resources — optimistic visual imagery and language against melancholic music — reveals Patricia’s nuanced understanding that different modes need not communicate parallel meanings to create sophisticated interpretive effects.

Her orchestration of these semiotic resources established a productive tension that previewed her broader analysis of the disconnect between America’s idealized self-perception and the traumatic experiences documented by James Baldwin (1988) and Frederick Douglass (Douglass et al., 2005), both of which she read in Finley’s class and used to form her interpretation. This multimodal design choice demonstrates how audiovisual essays can leverage modal affordances to create complex interpretive layers that both echo and expand upon traditional academic writing conventions. Furthermore, it exemplifies recent scholarship exploring how meaning transforms when transposed across different modalities (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Kang, 2022).

Another sophisticated example of this layering appeared when Patricia attempted to convey her claim about marginalized Americans feeling alienated from their national identity. She began with a gray silhouette, explaining, “It’s just the form of a body, but it’s not anyone specific,” to represent how systemic oppression affects different marginalized groups. Over this image, she layered what she termed “red, white, and blue tears” to symbolize the emotional impact of being excluded from America’s promises of freedom and opportunity. The timing of these layers was carefully orchestrated — the tears appearing in sync with her voiceover discussing how “having a specific identity in America prevents one from pursuing their true freedom and desire.” This demonstrates how students can coordinate multiple modes to create meanings that would be difficult to convey through language alone.

Figure 3
Multimodal Ensemble Symbolizing Marginalization

Patricia’s use of text features and effects further exemplifies this strategic deployment of modal affordances. While all participants incorporated text to display quotes from their literary works, Patricia used text elements seven distinct times to highlight or emphasize key concepts. Her choice of color was particularly intentional — she said she used green font because “green is generally perceived as being a more accurate form of something color theory-wise… [and] I want it to have more importance.” This sophisticated understanding of color’s communicative potential was further evident in her use of specific colors to highlight particular words based on their thematic significance.

Designers are also able to use the affordances of the spatial mode. When discussing Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Gina positioned herself centrally with their photos on either side. creating a visual representation of being in dialog with these authors. This spatial arrangement supported her interpretation’s emphasis on putting these texts in conversation while also signaling her authority as a scholarly interlocutor. Similarly, Lana and Tina’s decision to position themselves at opposite ends of the frame during their podcast-style dialog created what they called a “conversational space” that invited viewers into their interpretive discussion.

Throughout her composition, Gina demonstrated a sophisticated deployment of gestural resources to illustrate key relationships between characters, events, and concepts central to her interpretation. This was particularly evident when she discussed “the push and pull between marriage and individuality” experienced by both Nel in Morrison’s (1987) Sula and Helen in Baldwin’s (1988) Giovanni’s Room. While verbalizing her argument, she synchronized a deliberate sequence of movements: her right hand enacted a pushing motion followed by a pulling gesture. This intentional integration of gestural and verbal modes of communication exemplified established practices in audiovisual essay composition (Sekar, 2024), while also reflecting broader research in cognitive science examining the embodied aspects of academic discourse (Novack & Goldin-Meadow, 2015; Tversky, 2019). Her strategic use of gesture as an aesthetic tool for meaning-making demonstrated a way students can leverage multiple modes to enhance their literary interpretations.

Applying, Remixing, and Expanding Literary Essay Conventions. The audiovisual essays produced by participants demonstrated how this emerging genre allows for innovative approaches to literary interpretation while maintaining key scholarly conventions. Students preserved essential elements of academic literary discourse — citing textual evidence, employing theoretical frameworks, and building interpretive arguments — while adapting them for a multimodal format. For instance, when incorporating textual evidence, participants maintained proper MLA (Modern Language Association, 2021) citation practices but enhanced them through strategic timing and visual emphasis. Patricia’s approach exemplifies this evolution: she maintained traditional citation formats while using visual design to highlight key phrases that supported her analysis of systemic oppression in American literature.

The genre’s affordances also allowed students to demonstrate their theoretical understanding in new ways. Lana and Tina’s podcast-style discussion of psychoanalytic theory, for example, transformed what might have been a dense written paragraph into an accessible scholarly dialog. While they maintained precise use of theoretical terminology and clear connections to textual evidence, their conversational format invited viewers into their interpretive process. This approach preserved the sophistication of academic literary interpretation while making it more engaging and accessible for their perceived audience.

It also reflected Lana’s and Tina’s understanding a key aspect of authentic literary work is that it is “guided by what has come before and [is] undertaken in community with others” (Rainey & Storm, 2022, p. 266), as well as their preference for collaborative sensemaking. As Tina explained, “You can just have a dialog about it… [and] when you don’t think about it as work, but as a conversation you’re having together, it’s so much easier to enjoy.” The use of the word “enjoy” is notable and representative of the positive affect students demonstrated during observations, think-aloud protocols, semistructured interviews, and even during the audiovisual essay recording process itself. The prevalence of this positive affect across data sets and participants suggests opportunities to apply and remix practices, forms, and aesthetics from digital and youth spaces can lead to increased student investment and engagement in literary interpretation.

Relatedly, students’ design work and audiovisual essay artifacts offered insight into ways the audiovisual essay genre might expand possibilities for literary interpretation in academic spaces. Rather than simply transferring written analysis to video format, participants developed new approaches to building and supporting interpretive arguments.

Patricia’s examination of American identity in Baldwin and Douglass, for instance, maintained a clear interpretive thesis while leveraging the genre’s unique capabilities to create additional layers of meaning through visual and auditory elements. Similarly, Tina and Lana’s video podcast had a clear central argument that was supported by subtopics with textual evidence — it just happened to unfold dialogically instead of monologically or in print. Such innovations suggest how this genre might evolve while remaining grounded in the foundational practices of literary studies.

This analysis has implications for conceptualizing the ways genres might evolve or expand in increasingly multimodal academic spaces. The participants’ work demonstrated that new genres need not abandon traditional scholarly practices to be innovative. Instead, they can preserve and renew essential academic conventions while expanding the available means for producing and sharing literary interpretations.

Discussion of Findings

In this study, I sought to understand how students take up aesthetic literacies when producing interpretive and critical knowledge with literature in hybrid interpretive communities, the relationship between students’ use of aesthetic literacies and the learning ecology in which they are used, and the semiotic resources students mobilize when composing audiovisual literary essays. The findings presented here address these questions by examining the complex interplay between the learning ecology fostered by the instructor, the interpretive design processes of students, and the audiovisual essays they produced. Figure 3 provides a visual representation of the hybrid interpretive community as a learning ecology based on this study’s findings.

Figure 4
Model of the Learning Ecology

At its center, design work encompasses both interpretive and composing practices that students engage in when creating audiovisual essays. These practices are mediated by aesthetic literacies that connect traditional literary interpretation with multimodal composition. The model illustrates how semiotic resources (including literature, digital platforms, and aesthetic tools) interact with the pedagogic context (characterized by modeling, dialog, and collaborative sensemaking) to shape students’ design processes. These processes ultimately result in designed artifacts that feature multimodal composition, hybrid forms, and critical perspectives. Throughout this ecology, relationships — between teacher and discipline, students and teacher, and students and their own literacies — play a crucial role in fostering authentic engagement with both disciplinary and youth practices. The bidirectional arrows emphasize the dynamic, recursive nature of this ecology, where each component continuously influences and is shaped by the others.

Fostering Aesthetic Literacies in Hybrid Interpretive Communities

Analysis of Finley’s teaching reveals that when educators value both academic and youth practices, students develop the confidence to navigate across different discourse communities and leverage aesthetic tools from various traditions. This finding extends current scholarship on syncretic literacy approaches by providing specific pedagogical strategies that successfully bridge the practices of literary studies with youth literacies and multimodal tools. Importantly, the research offers valuable insights for teacher education programs, suggesting that teachers’ ability to design hybrid interpretive communities is shaped by their relationship to the discipline, their willingness to leverage digital tools, and their ability to create an environment where students feel comfortable bringing their identities and literacies into the classroom.

This research extends Jackson’s (2016) theoretical framework by examining how elements within a learning ecology — specifically pedagogic context, relationships, semiotic resources, and design work — interact dynamically. In Finley’s classroom, the pedagogic environment deliberately balanced rigorous disciplinary knowledge with engaging, playful methodologies and youth-centered literacy practices (Lammers et al., 2022). By demonstrating her own connections to various aesthetic communities and implementing tactile, interactive approaches to textual interpretation, Finley established a hybrid interpretive community where students navigated literary discourse with the same confidence they displayed when exploring connections to contemporary culture and personal experiences.

Finley’s semistructured interview revealed data that echoed a key tension identified in the literature: the division between approaches that prioritize disciplinary practices of literary studies and those centered on digital, multimodal, and youth literacies (Beavis, 2013; Higgs & Kim, 2022). This binary between approaches affects both researchers and classroom educators. As Finley said, “When I started my career, I felt like I needed to figure out where I’m putting my flag. What island will I be on?” However, as she gained experience supporting students’ aesthetic literacies, she arrived at a powerful conclusion: “I realized you could be grounded in a space where you don’t have to choose. You can toggle. You can be in between.”

This realization demonstrates the potential for aesthetic literacies to help educators and researchers overcome tensions between subject-focused, student-focused, and social justice approaches to English education identified by Alston and Byrne Bausell (2022). By emphasizing aesthetic practices used across various interpretive communities, rather than focusing solely on literary or youth literacies in isolation, educators and researchers can better understand the learning that occurs in hybrid interpretive communities and better prepare students to navigate the diverse discourses they encounter in this increasingly digital world.

When composing audiovisual essays in hybrid interpretive communities that emphasize aesthetic literacies, students remix, repurpose, and reimagine semiotic resources from their lifeworlds to produce literary knowledge in new and dynamic ways. Considering this study’s sociocultural perspective, the data analysis did not solely focus on the affordances of different modes or the unique interests of the sign maker but also considered how participants’ understanding of those semiotic resources is mediated by their participation in other discourse communities with unique interpretive practices and aesthetic conventions.

Students like Gina, Lana, and Tina, who participated in fandoms centered around audiovisual media, demonstrated a more sophisticated understanding of the semiotic resources available to them and the types of stylistic choices they could make (Lim & Toh, 2020). Meanwhile, Topher and Patricia consulted the examples Finley shared in class before starting the project. However, Patricia’s experience with the VEEDIO production platform and knowledge of visual literacies offered a distinct set of affordances that she leveraged for her composing.

Data analysis also revealed that participants’ engagement with aesthetic literacies facilitated both sophisticated literary interpretations and deeper critical consciousness. Notably, Gina, Patricia, Tina, and Lana emphasized the significance of learning literary theory and applying it to texts from their lifeworlds. According to their think-aloud data, this experience marked the first time students were equipped with tools to identify and critique systemic issues like patriarchy, homophobia, and racism — with results reflecting existing scholarship from Appleman (2023) and Beach et al. (2016). Considering Finley said that these critical and literary lenses had been a pivotal part of her course design, the participants’ creation of audiovisual essays that deconstructed the American Dream, interrogated traditional gender roles, and challenged assumptions about race and heteronormativity suggest her pedagogy helped to further cultivate their critical and literary sensibilities.   Even Topher’s audiovisual essay, which did not engage with concepts from feminism, critical race theory, or psychoanalysis as explicitly as his peers, still demonstrated a desire to wrestle with fundamental questions related to morality, selfhood, and truth — concepts that Eagleton (2003) considered just as essential to the field as their more critical counterparts.

Far from requiring a balance or sacrifice between intellectual depth and creative expression, this study’s results suggest that the cultivation of hybrid interpretive communities can play a vital role in generating forms of intellectual investment and affective engagement resulting in deeper, more nuanced readings of literary works. Regardless of whether preservice teachers land in traditional departments who valorize close reading over all else or progressive departments who center culturally responsive pedagogies, their ability to foster hybrid interpretive communities will serve them and their future students well.

Remixing Semiotic Resources for Audiovisual Literary Essays

The content of participants audiovisual essays more closely reflects the types of questions, topic matter, and interpretive claims found in literary studies, while the form reflects the kinds of audiovisual media students consume outside academic spaces. This extends existing scholarship on how students use multimodal tools to engage their audience cognitively and affectively as well as to enact the practices of literary scholars through their use of various modes of meaning. Participants employed numerous semiotic resources that enabled their interpretive work — using photos to contextualize their interpretation, text features to provide textual evidence supporting their argument, symbolic images to critique oppressive systems, and gestures to signify structural similarities in character arcs.

These findings also affirm more recent scholarship on the nature and function of affordances in multimodal composing. Beyond leveraging modal affordances based on their meaning-making potential and individual preferences, the variety of reasons participants used different semiotic resources — both those voiced aloud during the think-aloud protocol and those I inferred — indicate that affordances are better understood as a rhetorical device that straddles the individual, material, and social forces that shape sign making (Bezemer, 2024). This more expansive understanding of affordances suggests it can serve as a useful concept for analyzing and theorizing aesthetic literacies.

Building on this understanding of affordances, students’ design choices were influenced by the fact they understood audiovisual essays as socially mediated forms embedded in distinct communities. For instance, Gina’s think-aloud and screen recording data suggest that she constructed her audience as fellow YouTube video essayist community members. She used practices, language, and semiotic resources that indexed her membership to that community and explicitly referenced her favorite creators when making design choices. Patricia, however, saw her audience more generally, frequently discussing the importance of communicating “clearly” or her design choices’ “symbolic” potential.

Both examples suggest that students’ membership (or lack thereof) of discursive communities not only influences the repertoire of aesthetic tools they access but also shapes how they construct their audience. This finding builds on existing scholarship articulating the primacy of audience in print (Rubin, 1998) and multimodal (Aleo et al., 2023) composing.

The variety of styles, conventions, and semiotic resources employed by participants reveals that audiovisual essays transcend a single format, offering new expressive and interpretive possibilities that extend beyond traditional academic writing. While the participants’ compositions could broadly be categorized as YouTube video essays, explainer videos, video podcasts, and dramatic interpretive readings, Finley said that other students from her class made videos styled after TikTok trends, creative skits, scene reenactments, and various other forms. This variety builds on existing scholarship that demonstrates the expansive nature of multimodal composing and the deep well of semiotic resources available to students once they realize they can leverage their youth literacies in academic contexts (Jones et al., 2024; Magnifico et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2022). Equally important is that students used the audiovisual essay form to expand what’s possible with literary interpretations — showcasing how the adapted form can create affect, become dialogic, and serve as a context for embodied performance.

These findings support the vision of students as active producers of literary knowledge (Mirra et al., 2018; Rainey & Storm, 2022), demonstrating how hybrid interpretive communities can transform classroom power dynamics by legitimizing students’ interpretive and creative authority rather than reinforcing their role as passive consumers of sanctioned readings and forms. Such practices offer insight into how students might eventually shift, complicate, or even subvert composing norms within literary studies by leveraging a wider variety of semiotic resources than those offered by traditional written essays. This potential aligns with research from scholars like Sekar (2024), Mittel (2019), Grant (2016), and Smarandache (2021), who are already exploring audiovisual essays as alternate tools for academic knowledge production in the humanities. Notably, these multimodal approaches should not be positioned as superior to print, but rather as offering new affordances that expand the meaning potential available to both students and scholars for literary interpretation and expression.

Implications for English Education

This research offers significant implications for teacher educators seeking to prepare preservice teachers for the complex literacy landscape of contemporary English classrooms. The findings demonstrate ways aesthetic literacies can serve as a theoretical framework that transcends false binaries between disciplinary and youth literacies, providing teacher educators with evidence-based approaches to reshape methods coursework and field experiences.

Teacher education programs frequently struggle with deeply embedded print-based compositional paradigms (Hundley & Holbrook, 2013) that limit preservice teachers’ capacity to envision alternative approaches to literary instruction. The students’ audiovisual essays analyzed in this study provided teacher educators with concrete exemplars, demonstrating how multimodal composition deepens rather than diminishes literary interpretation. These exemplars can be integrated into methods courses as models for analyzing how different semiotic resources support sophisticated literary analysis. Finley’s musing on the interpretive and creative possibilities multimodal composing opened for her students suggests that, when preservice teachers examine how students strategically layer color, image, gesture, and speech to represent complex literary concepts, they develop a more nuanced understanding of how modal affordances can make abstract ideas accessible without sacrificing complexity.

The findings suggest a reconsideration of the structure of literacy methods courses. Rather than presenting literary analysis and digital composition as discrete units within the curriculum, teacher educators might design integrated learning experiences where preservice teachers, themselves, compose interpretive audiovisual essays about literary works. This experiential approach addresses the aesthetic dispositions that significantly influence pedagogical decisions (Poyas & Eilam, 2012) by engaging preservice teachers directly in multimodal composition that requires sophisticated literary analysis.

As suggested by Finley’s initial insecurity and eventual embrace of audiovisual essays, teacher candidates can develop familiarity with diverse semiotic modes and overcome concerns about authorial control, fostering greater awareness of the aesthetic dimensions of both literary texts and multimodal compositions. Furthermore, teacher educators can leverage these findings to support preservice teachers’ developing professional identities. The dichotomous thinking that positions traditional literary instruction in opposition to digital literacy pedagogy often creates identity conflicts for novice teachers similar to those expressed by Finley. By analyzing successful instructional approaches that ground multimodal composition in sophisticated literary interpretation and employ critical theory across various textual forms, teacher educators can provide preservice teachers with models for constructing integrated professional identities that honor both disciplinary traditions and evolving literacy practices — or, as Finley put it, allow them to “toggle” between different pedagogical stances and navigate the “in-between spaces” of different discursive communities.

For teacher educators designing field experiences and practicum placements, this research underscores the importance of identifying mentor teachers who create hybrid interpretive communities. Preservice teachers benefit from observing how experienced educators scaffold students’ application of literary theories to both canonical, contemporary, and digital texts, develop pedagogies that invite interpretive depth across aesthetic forms, and cultivate classroom communities that value both literary and youth literacies. Such field experiences provide concrete models of how theoretical frameworks like aesthetic literacies can be operationalized in classroom practice.

Finley’s exploration and adoption of these approaches offers compelling evidence that, with adequate support and scaffolding, early career teachers can learn to create learning environments that value both academic and youth literacies in ways that allow students to transcend traditional discursive boundaries and construct sophisticated interpretations of literature. By reconceptualizing their approaches to preservice preparation through the lens of aesthetic literacies, teacher educators can equip the next generation of English teachers to democratize literary knowledge production in ways that honor scholarly traditions while opening new possibilities for creative and critical expression.

Limitations and Future Research

Despite offering insight into how students compose audiovisual literary essays in hybrid interpretive communities, several limitations should be considered. The exploratory nature of this study means it emphasized understanding relationships between factors in a particular learning ecology. While I recruited students from various races, genders, and academic capacities, participants came from a well-resourced college preparatory school with access to advanced technological resources and innovative pedagogical approaches. Additionally, the small sample size (n = 5) and relatively short timeframe mean the dynamics observed represent only a fraction of potential practices that might emerge in other contexts.

These limitations suggest several directions for future research. Studies might examine how students leverage different semiotic resources when composing audiovisual essays across various digital platforms and school contexts, extending scholarship on multimodal composition. Researchers could investigate how different student populations take up these practices in a range of school settings. This work could build on frameworks exploring hybrid approaches to literacy instruction (Gutiérrez, 2014; Jones et al., 2024), while examining how aesthetic literacies support culturally responsive pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014).

Additionally, comparative studies examining students’ composing processes across traditional and multimodal forms could yield valuable insights into the affordances of audiovisual essays for English education. Such research could explore the relationship between affect and interpretation (Levine, 2014) while contributing to emerging scholarship on video essays in academic contexts (Mittel, 2019; Sekar, 2024).

Most importantly, future studies should examine how these approaches might be implemented in teacher education programs to support preservice teachers in creating hybrid interpretive communities that democratize literary interpretation and knowledge generation through the use of digital tools. This research is particularly vital given the growing presence of academic content in digital spaces and the need to prepare English teachers to support students in both consuming and producing sophisticated multimodal compositions. Understanding how to scaffold these practices while cultivating an intellectually enriching ecology of learning will be essential for developing pedagogies that bridge traditional and emerging forms of literary interpretation.

Conclusion

This study addressed a persistent challenge in English education: how to bridge disciplinary literacies with the dynamic digital literacies that shape students’ lives. Through examining how students compose audiovisual literary essays in hybrid interpretive communities, this research demonstrated productive ways to synthesize these seemingly disparate approaches. The findings revealed that when learning ecologies are designed to both honor students’ existing practices and invite them to take up the tools of literary scholars they can see themselves as meaningful members of disciplinary and discursive communities instead of students doing perfunctory, decontextualized work.

The participants’ compositions stand as compelling evidence of this possibility. Their audiovisual essays showcase complex literary interpretations brought to life through the strategic orchestration of images, sounds, and spoken words. More importantly, they demonstrate ways aesthetic literacies can provide a framework for recognizing continuity between literary practices and the careful curation of semiotic resources in digital composition. Educators can foster vibrant interpretive communities where sophisticated disciplinary learning coexists with creative expression by creating learning ecologies that honor both disciplinary traditions and students’ digital practices.

These findings also corroborate existing research suggesting teacher education programs might benefit from providing opportunities to navigate digital discourses in ways that reflect the type of learning experiences they might design for their future students (Jerasa et al., 2024). Programs might engage preservice teachers in composing their own multimodal interpretations to understand the theoretical and practical affordances of different modes. Through examining successful implementations of hybrid interpretive communities and designing learning experiences that merge literary interpretation with digital meaning-making, preservice teachers can develop more nuanced understandings of how to support critical and interpretive knowledge production across modes. This preparation should include opportunities for educators to theorize their own positionality within literary studies and digital discourse communities as they develop their teaching practice.

This study provides a window into what is possible when educators recognize students as cocreators of knowledge capable of participating in literary discourse through multiple modes and media. For teacher educators, this suggests the importance of helping preservice teachers develop pedagogies that embrace both continuity and change — maintaining the rich traditions of literary studies while expanding the available means of participating in that tradition within secondary spaces. In doing so, educators might create more inclusive and dynamic English classrooms that prepare students for meaningful participation in our increasingly multimodal world.

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Appendix A
Gina’s Use of Video Essayists’ Semiotic Resources

Appendix B
Tina’s and Lana’s Remixing of Video Podcast Aesthetics