While reading the New London Groups’ article (Cazden et al., 1996) I paused many times to think about my ESL students and how a lot of learning materials they encounter, including digital ones, are predominantly text-based. My students are adult newcomers to Canada, and as their teacher, I have a bit of influence on how they perceive the culture and values of the new society, as well as their role in it. With the technologies of meaning rapidly changing, teaching “mere literacy” is no longer enough. It is my responsibility as a teacher to help my learners embrace their “multiliteracies”.

I was also thinking about my little daughter and the multiliteracies she is going to have in her lifetime, some of which probably do not even exist yet. As her parent, my role will be to support her learning so that she becomes an effective citizen and an active designer of her social future.

With that in mind, I tried to create my presentation to account for the “increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioral” (Cazden et al., 1996, p. 64). Inspired by the New London Group’s discussion of the power of diversity and the importance of maintaining own voice in the increasingly globalized world, I overcame the initial desire to record a voiceless interactive video. Instead, I decided to narrate the video and let my accent be heard, first, because it is a part of who I am, and second, because it adds to the diversity of our learning community.

Creating the multimode presentation proved to be a challenging task. Just finding the way to position my camera to capture only the table and my arms took quite a bit of effort. Next, I added the intro and outro images and traditions, downloaded and cropped a free soundtrack, and applied noise reduction to my audio file – none of which I had done before. All of that was done to accommodate viewers with diverse needs and preferences, by including the video, audio, and textual (open captions) forms of representation. This was also a personal attempt to increase my own digital literacy and become “well-versed in different semiotic modes, visual, textual, and verbal” (Dobson & Willinsky, 2009, p. 298).

References:

Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J., Kalantzis, M., Kress, G., Luke, A., Luke, C., Michaels, S. and Nakata, M. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard educational review, 66(1), pp.60-92.

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 286-312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.