Initial Feelings 

In a roundabout way, the task, “What’s in your bag” had us uncover parts of ourselves without asking the cliche: “tell us a little about yourself?…”.

Instead, the task did not really ask about ‘us’, but about our bag. However,  we communicated more about who we were with the items in the bag. Most of us utilized the linguistic and visual mode (picture and written word) as the way to  best communicate our identity (at least I did). SO for this task I wanted to express the same person, with the same bag. But the modes I chose this time were linguistic, audio, visual, and gestural. In an effort to illustrate my identity in a multimodal way, as the New London Group (1996) suggest, “all meaning-making is multimodal” (p.81) I decided to see if my bag would become ‘more’.

Preface

It is easy to look at Task 1 and quickly dismiss my bag as a “Mom” bag. This almost eradicates my identity and lumps it with existing stereotypes. So to communicate WHY the bag is a mom bag I had my oldest daughter open my bag (as their favourite cartoon was playing) and tell ME what the objects were and how they were used. I will pick through some of the moments and discuss their accuracy and perspective when discussing ‘Mom’.

  1. “Here’s some pens for mommy’s computer” (0:22). Interesting that she throws the bag away. I secretly think she hates when I am doing work so it irritated her to see the pens. This gesture alone communicate more than the linguistic. In fact, this relationship of linguistic and gestural reflect the intertextuality The New London Group discusses. It is this “intertextuality [which] draws attention to the potentially complex ways in which meanings are constituted.” (p.82). In other words, from the these items tell us about her feelings, and part of my identity. She even pretends to do ‘work’ and gets mad when I try and interrupt! This also reminded me of the Hass (2013) reading from a couple weeks back where he suggests that when “text is  seen as autonomous, it is viewed either as nonproblematic and neutral ….” (p.21) if one were to just hear the audio of my daughter they would see it as the neutral reality, but adding gestures warps the text and the meaning.
  2. “It’s a water bottle (1:22). – My daughter never uses the term “water bottle” when she speaks to me- she always says agua. I literally didn’t know how to react to this. This made me think of  the readings from earlier this term from Boroditsky. I witnessed my daughter switch languages on camera. She did this because she thought the audience was ‘not’ family and therefore ‘not’ in her buble. As Boroditsky (2011) points out, “the
    way we think influences the way we speak” (p.65) and for my daughters she was ‘speaking’ to the outside. Again, her intonation and voice play a crucial role here- she is deliberate in saying ‘water’ and not correcting it when I asked three times- this is all communicated through gesture and linguistics.
  3. “Nene’s Medicine (Nickname for her sister) Although so young, My oldest daughter knows her sister has an allergy. What was crazy about this is she tries to remove the cap of the EpiPen. I think she has seen videos on YouTube as we have watched tutorials. She knows the medicine helps her sister and watching her struggle with the cap shows her fierceness. It also makes me think that she sees it as her duty to protect her.This gesture and linguistic hybridity again reflect the importance of the medicine for our family’s well-being. 

 

The Wrap-UP

After I completed the assignment, I realized how much of my  bag is my life. However, it seems my children see my life as being very much connected to this program.  In fact, it seems that anything outside of their life is really this MET program. This made me really consider the time I am spending working, and not with them. Yet this also made me think of how assessment works in my own practice. I know I limit students at time with work they can produce, and sometimes I prefer certain modes without considering others. This has lead me to reconsider some of my old-school ways and rethink my own design elements- in the classroom. The New London Group (2011) discusses the four components of pedagogy and situated practice discusses teachers guiding a community of learners. I think this represents what this task is all about. Each learner comes with a ‘mode’ they are attuned to, that they best use as communication and expression. The more we notice the modes, the more meaning  educators will see.

References 

Boroditsky, L. (2011). How language shapes thought. Scientific American, 304(2), 62-65.

Haas, C. (2013). “The Technology Question.” In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy. Routledge. (pp. 3-23).

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.