Abstract This article explores how immigrant students in the United States utilise multimodal literacy practices to complicate dominant narratives of American national identity – narratives of facile assimilation, meritocracy and linear trajectories. Such ideologies can be explicitly evident in curricular materials or can be woven more implicitly into school literacy practices that privilege individual achievement, devalue cultural ways of knowing, and operate on a paradigm of remediation. Within this educational backdrop, we report on a practitioner research study that invited students in a summer school programme for English Language Learners to share their experiences in multiple formats and media, including comics, and to draw on their cultural and linguistic heritages as sources of knowledge. We feature comics created by two students in the programme (an 8‐year‐old girl of Indian heritage and a 16‐year‐old boy from Vietnam) to understand the potential of visual texts to articulate micronarratives of immigration. We emphasise how students blend semiotic resources in order to represent the complexity of their experiences, convey cultural hybridity and resist singular narratives.
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