Claire Ahn

Claire Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Multiliteracies at the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. She has a decade of classroom experience as a secondary English Language Arts teacher, and continued to guide and mentor teacher candidates as a sessional instructor at the University of British Columbia.

Claire’s research interest centres on multiliteracies. Specifically, she is interested in how visual information is mediated across different platforms. She explored this topic in her SSHRC funded doctoral research examining visual rhetoric in environmental documentaries, and how they might engender awareness and, perhaps, even encourage viewers to act in more eco-conscious ways. Claire is interested in how youth take up visual information. Her MEd focused on the pedagogical value of teaching narrative film in secondary English classrooms. Specifically, she argued that inviting students to critically analyze film could help develop their visual literacy skills. Through her work in film, she also explores how Hollywood-teacher films impact teacher identities.

Claire is also interested in the role of genre, and how viewers’ genre expectations may modify their response to hybrid and ambiguous rhetorical forms. She has started investigating this idea by exploring what she refers to as deceptive media, and how certain genre markers or representational patterns persuade viewers to believe misinformation. Claire has worked with educators of all grades and teacher-librarians in an effort to provide resources and lesson plan ideas around various topics of visual literacy and deceptive media.