#classroom equity

As I have delved into an exploration of what multiliteracies pedagogy is over the last few weeks, it has become clear that a lot of the educational issues that are important to me are integral to multiliteracies pedagogy and multimodal meaning-making. Some of the most important thoughts I bring to my educational practice involve how to make lessons accessible to students, how to engage different sorts of learners, and how to make use of diverse resources. Multiliteracies theory acknowledges the importance of all of these issues and places them at the forefront of pedagogical consideration.

Since beginning this course, there have been three main considerations in my mind. The first is a quotation from an article about literacy education by Christianna Alger. She writes, “effective teaching requires a commitment to engage both head and heart” (Alger, 2007, p. 620). This quotation in particular stood out to me because it applies to both students and the educators who design lessons for them. Educators need to engage the heads and hearts of their students in addition to engaging their own heads and hearts in finding resources, lesson planning, and the in-class process of education. As multiliteracies pedagogy points out, it is essential to inspire students by providing them with interesting content, and it is necessary to also engage their hearts so that they have an emotional stake in their education and a desire to succeed. This is a fairly obvious point to educators; we want students to feel engaged in the work they do in the classroom.

However, when I considered this quotation as it applies to educators, how to think through and apply some of the important and more novel aspects of multiliteracies pedagogy became clearer to me. For instance, multiliteracies pedagogy emphasizes educators being able to make purposeful choices from their repertoires of content and knowledge to create multimodal lessons (Kalantzis & Cope, 2019). When I think about this point in relation to Alger’s quotation, it becomes evident that it is and will continue to be essential for me to check in with myself as an educator and ensure that my knowledge (my head) is up to date on the latest pedagogical theories and technologies available to me. In addition, I need to regularly self-reflect to ensure that my heart is in the right place. I must make the right choices for my students when planning lessons. This involves several considerations, including meeting students’ diverse needs, having the compassion to ensure that my lessons will be manageable without placing undue stress on my students’ mental or emotional wellbeing, and making sure that I come to my classroom as an educator committed to anti-racist and inclusive practices.

That last point about inclusivity leads me to the second concern I have been reflecting on, which is equity in multimodal education. Multimodal pedagogy involves teaching using various forms of meaning-making and allowing students to submit assignments that make use of these various modes too. These modes can be text-based, oral, visual, spatial, and/or gestural (Kalantzis & Cope, 2019). This includes digital content like videos, audio recordings, or digital artifacts, spatial or movement-based activities like those often used in drama, and more traditional written artifacts. However, it is essential to consider the fact that students have differential access to and knowledge-bases concerning technology. Many students, especially those from lower-income families, do not have access to a wide variety of technologies in their homes. I am especially cognizant of this fact, as my mother has been a primary/junior educator in a low-income neighbourhood for over thirty years. She always has to consider her assignments carefully, as most of her students do not have access to technology that would enable them to film videos at home, create audio recordings, or even type assignments. This situation became especially clear in March 2020 when all learning suddenly became virtual. Many of my mother’s students did not have the resources to attend synchronous lessons online; some did not even have access to the Internet at home.

Due to my familiarity with these sorts of situations and their prominence even in our increasingly digital world, I recognize that assignments must provide options so that students can not only use the modes of meaning-making that work best for them but can also use the ones that are most accessible to them. This issue of access is just one of the many equity issues that are at the forefront of my mind. I want to ensure that my classroom functions as a safe space for students of all genders, races, sexual orientations, cultural backgrounds, and socioeconomic classes. I believe in the inherent value and potential of every student and want them all to flourish in my classroom. Teaching using multiliteracies pedagogy, and making use of multimodal pedagogy, will enable me to regularly consider my practices.

Finally, I have been thinking a lot about modes of pedagogy and how to consistently move beyond mere content delivery in my instruction at the secondary level. As Kalantzis and Cope (n.d.) note, there are four approaches to pedagogy. These involve progressive pedagogy, which is about student experiences, traditional pedagogy, which involves overt instruction, critical pedagogy, which is about student analysis of content, and applied learning, which focuses on transformed practice and applying learned concepts to new contexts.

As my main teachable subject is English, I will likely be working in a high school English classroom, which I believe provides myriad opportunities for moving beyond overt instruction. While I recognize that certain topics will require me to deliver a traditional lesson to provide students with the ideas and terminology they need to explore topics in English, I want to focus on critical analysis of texts and the application of ideas to new contexts through discussion in my classes. When I worked as a teaching assistant leading two tutorials on Shakespeare’s Histories and Tragedies, I liked to use multimodal methodologies in my lessons, even though I did not realize at the time that I was using this pedagogical framework. One activity that I found worked extremely well for engaging my small group of post-secondary students was to show them several clips of one scene from different productions of a Shakespearean play. We would then compare these clips to the students’ imaginings of what went on in the scene as they read the plays, and I would record their observations on the board. I had prompting questions prepared to get them talking, but would mostly allow the students to engage with one another and focus on whichever aspects of the production interested them. 

What I found from implementing these lessons was that my students were far more engaged and got a lot more out of the content when they could bring their perspectives to the videos and speak to one another about them. These lessons were very exciting for me and my students. The students told me they liked seeing the videos and were better able to understand the plays by watching scenes, which was something they did not do in the weekly lectures. I enjoyed getting to hear my students’ perspectives on the course content. What this proved to me is that, while overt instruction has its place, students respond very well to activities that ask them to analyze content and apply their knowledge. These multimodal methods of instruction are enjoyable for students while helping them to develop a variety of literacy-related skills. If I get the opportunity in practicum, I would like to try activities like these with my secondary students.

Overall, right from the outset of this course, it is clear to me how important multiliteracies and multimodal pedagogy is for both educators and their students. However, as Alger (2007) notes, expressed commitment to literacy instruction does not always lead to committed action. I plan to keep this idea in mind when I begin my teaching placement in November to ensure that I am thinking about issues of literacy, equity, and engagement, in addition to the development of critical literacy skills in my students as I teach.

References

Alger, C. (2007). Engaging student teachers’ hearts and minds in the struggle to address (il)literacy in content area classrooms. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(8), 620-630. http://www.jstor.com/stable/30139625

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (n.d.). The “how” of multiliteracies: Recruiting four pedagogical traditions [Infographic]. Newlearningonline.com. https://newlearningonline.com/multiliteracies/theory