Listen to my “What’s in my bag – the riddle edition” recording above!
When redesigning this task, I immediately thought about how mode-bending lends well to upholding Universal Design for Learning principles: Multiple Modes of Expression, Representation, and Meaning. For all learners, and not just those that require accommodations, there’s a great value in allowing learners to contextualize and redesign their learning into a product that’s meaningful to them. The New London Group (1996) states that the “redesigned” is unique product of human agency that is concurrently influenced by cultural and historical patterns of meaning (p. 76). This is definitely apparent in how I chose to go about redesigning Task 1 using a new mode. I’ve always enjoyed riddles as far back as I can remember. As soon as I began reading and was able to check books out from the library, I would often gravitate toward the joke and riddle books. A contributing factor to this could have been my 3rd grade teacher using riddles often in the classroom, to engage and motivate students in different ways. I can see how this teacher took what the New London Group refers to as overt instruction, and linguistically redesigned the mode of engagement to build on prior knowledge, scaffolding toward new knowledge acquisition.
I decided to redesign my original task auditorily, utilizing both riddles (linguistic design) and sound effects (auditory design) to engage listeners in a different way. I think the riddles inject a personality and ‘voice’ into the task that wasn’t available before. They also paint imagery into the listener’s minds, changing their experience with the task.
Benefits and Challenges
Changing the mode of a production can give learners with strength in multiple intelligences (Gardner) additional ways to integrate learning in a more personal way. For example, transforming a vocabulary list into a recognizable song could help those with musical intelligence to integrate concepts in a way that’s more meaningful to them. A potential challenge of mode-bending might be that references may not be culturally situated or accessible for learners from different backgrounds, making it difficult to make meaning for some. For instance, in cultures where vehicles are not commonplace, or a person has auditory impairments, my riddle that references car keys would not be received in a way that meets the listener where they’re at. This underscores the value of designing for a variety of modes of meaning making, or Universal Design for Learning.
As a note for this task, I did employ a bit of help from ChatGPT to help me with a few of the riddles. I also used royalty-free and open-sourced sound effects from PixaBay.
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (June 18 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
Pixabay (n.d.). Pixabay – Royalty Free Sound Effects. Retrieved June 18, 2024 from https://pixabay.com/sound-effects
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.