Information and Media Ph.D. Program at Michigan State University

📣 Dissertation Defense Announcement

Join us in supporting Tara Jean Ward Mesyn as she defends her dissertation: Multimodal Pedagogy: A Case Study of U.S. History Teachers’ Media Use and The Vietnam War

🗓 Wednesday, June 17, 2026
🕐 1:00PM EST
💻 Zoom: https://msu.zoom.us/s/93211233358
📍 The first part of the defense is open to the public.

Abstract:
Media and education are two of the most pervasive and powerful institutions through which children construct their worldviews. Despite the frequency with which teachers integrate media into their curricula, teacher preparation programs rarely equip teachers with the multimodal literacy competencies needed to do so critically and effectively—and once in the field, teachers seldom find the time or opportunity to develop their media pedagogy. This case study interrogates that tension by examining how and why high school U.S. history teachers use media when teaching the Vietnam War-era through a multimodal, social semiotic, and discourse framework.

Working with three teachers—Aristotle, Jules, and Eleanor—I collected all curricular materials from their Vietnam War-era units and conducted in-person conversations, walking through and discussing their media choices, sources, pedagogical purposes, and their own relationships with media and art in education. Teachers also completed background surveys, reflexively annotated and recorded their thoughts on specific media they use, and responded to final reflection questions.

Findings suggest extensive and often overlapping use of multimodal media, yet pedagogical methods diverge significantly in terms of their affective approaches and the extent to which they encourage critical inquiry in their students; textbooks still functions as a distributor of dominant, sanitized historical narratives; Vietnamese voices and perspectives are included but marginalized; teachers' media choices—to varying degrees—both reinforce and disrupt traditional tropes; and all three teachers face a depth-versus-breadth challenge in a content area that never stops accumulating.

This study contributes to our understanding of the discourses teachers and their pedagogical media construct around the Vietnam War and foregrounds the critical role those discourses play in shaping students' cultural and ideological perspectives, with important implications for how social studies curricula position students as U.S. and global citizens. It also illuminates the urgent need for a wholistic and contemporary definition of and approach to literacy in teacher education, in-service teacher professional development, and K-12 education.