Artistic Multiliteracies and Embodied Picturebooks in Teacher Literary Education. The EMLA methodological approach

The speed, uncertainty, and globalization of the current digital era has triggered a major shift in the traditional codes of teaching and learning the Literary Arts. In this regard, many scholars call for the urgent need to design new holistic and sustainable reading models aimed at preparing students to act ethically, creatively, and responsibly as future citizens. Aligned with the needs of the LifeComp (2020) European competence framework, and sponsored by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Formación Profesional y Deportes, this paper presents the findings of the first phase of a research project that emerged at the Universitat de València in the Department of Physical, Artistic and Musical Education Teaching in 2024. With the title ‘Embodied Multi-Liter-Artistic Education (EMLA) for 21st Century Teacher Literary Training. Embodied minds and multimodal narratives through picturebooks’, the study explores the interconnection between artful minds, moving bodies, and multimodal texts in contemporary reading practices through picturebooks. The research design unfolds through two procedures: (a) the design of a conceptual pedagogical framework –coined as EMLA– that blends emerging Arts-based Multiliteracies theories, the tenets of ‘4E’ cognition and Artful thinking dispositions by Project Zero (Harvard University), and (b) a participatory classroom-based intervention to apply EMLA in a Spanish school using the picturebook ‘Lines of Dreams’ by Sineiro and Domènech (2022), edited by Akiara Books. The early results of the investigation reveal an increase of the multiliteracies learning, and confirm the multidimensional benefits of EMLA as a new transdisciplinary framework for 21st century Creative Literature Education.