Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

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• lwchan // Dec 3rd 2012 at 11:38 pm

  I’d just like to say – “My sentiments, exactly!” This humorous cartoon sums up in a most succinct manner my feelings on most days when I am working to put together a lesson plan that includes various multimodalities. Since September, I have learned much about the twenty-first century learner (myself included) and the ways in which they engage in effective learning. However, all jokes aside, I would like to take this time to mention that as a teacher candidate, I am excited to know that the future of assessing and evaluating student learning lies in multimodal-based assignments and projects – brisk alternatives to the traditional written essay.

  Though I am yet able to metamorphosize into a teaching dinosaur, I would like to share a simple but memorable “teachable moment” I encountered during my short practicum at David Thompson Secondary School. My SA assigned me to teach his English 9 class twice. His only piece of instruction was that I was to teach the students how to write an expository essay. The rest was up to me. I was so inspired by the autonomy my SA had bestowed upon me and I grabbed at the chance to try something new.

  I did not exactly reinvent the wheel to teaching essay writing, but I wanted to “hook” the Grade 9s in with an engaging topic. I decided that they were to write on the topic of “Beauty”, and while my SA advised that the topic may be too abstract for some students to wrap their aheads around, I wanted to give it a go and get their critical thinking juices flowing with some visual images on the topic of “Beauty”. My mind immediately thought back to Dana’s presentation on “Visual Media” in September and our class discussions on the importance of visual literacy and the ways in which images impact youth, or people of any age for that matter. I then decided that my rationale for getting the students to write an essay on “beauty” was to encourage them to question and re-think their own perceptions and definitions of beauty as they live and grow up in a society that tends to value only certain kinds of beauty.

  To my delight, the powerpoint presentation I put together was a success and thoroughly engaging to the credit of learning how to use simple imagery to incite a lively discussion on beauty with Grade 9 students. In my slides, I included images of different representations of beauty throughout history in different cultures from Chinese foot-binding to Burmese neck rings. The slides also moved into modern/Western representations of beauty as seen in the images of One Direction and Justin Bieber. In also included an assortment of commercials and the You Tube parody “Adobe Photoshop” posted on our class blog (by Rita) which garnered a lot of laughs from the students.

  In the end, I seemed to be able to get my lesson across to the students. Most students were able to compose the in-class essay without glaring concerns. Next year, I will teach the same group of Grade 9 students The Hunger Games, which will also be an excellent and apt opportunity for me to integrate media literacy into the curriculum. It is a topic that excites me and that I am passionate to speak to youth about, and I know I have done well when I am able to encourage students to see and appreciate ideas from a different perspective other than their own.

  I will post the powerpoint and lesson plan that I used as soon as I figure out how to do so! It was a great use of two 80-minutes classes (which really could have been stretched out into more), if I do say so myself 🙂

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