The affective turn in multiliteracies

This article examines how picturebooks can support children’s emotional recovery in the aftermath of the October 2024 DANA floods in València (Spain). Grounded in the affective turn and through the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996), the study focuses on a fourth‑grade class in a flood‑affected school. The objective is to explore how a picturebook‑based learning path can foster emotional vocabulary in an additional language, while positioning the school context as a space of reconstruction. The research adopts an ethnographic design, combining classroom observation and analysis of pupils’ visual and verbal productions. The intervention centres on shared readings of Madalena Moniz’s picturebook Today I Feel: An Alphabet of Feelings (2017), Emily Dickinson’s 254 poem Hope is a thing with feathers, and individual and collective final arts‑based activities, created by a group of students aged 9-10 years old. Findings indicate notable growth in the range and contextualisation of students’ emotional vocabulary in English, an increased use of diverse strategies to represent complex feelings, and the emergence of peer empathy through active listening and post collaborative artwork. Pupils’ high engagement with the multimodal narrative frame and related creative tasks suggests that picturebook‑mediated multiliteracies can nurture emotional resilience in a post‑disaster climate. The study concludes that the use of picturebooks and other multimodal texts offers a context‑sensitive way to integrate emotional literacy into the everyday curriculum in disaster‑affected schools. It also underscores the need for specific teacher training in aesthetic and affect‑oriented multiliteracies pedagogy.