HQ the French Prof

Reflective Blogs for Multiliteracies Class, May 3 2021  In this module, we learned about designing curriculum using backwards design and about multiliteracies assessments. Backwards design doesn’t seem to be too difficult to understand as this is how I was trained when I taught at Kaplan in 2011, the second school where I taught English Comp, as well as at subsequent schools. (At the first school, I wasn’t given any training, just a grammar book to teach from, the core requirements of the number of essays and the types of essays, and the requirement to assign three additional books of my choosing.) However, it’s worth noting that the course objectives were created by the higher-ups in all schools where I taught, as I imagine they are for English Comp classes at most if not all accredited institutions since this has been part of the accreditation process—to have such things in place. I’m not sure, however, how accreditation works in Foreign Language programs, although I would surmise th

 Reflective Blog Module 2 for Multiliteracies Course, Feb. 28, 2021 In Module 2, I learned quite a bit about the Multiliteracies pedagogy that will be helpful to me as I move forward in my career, creating classroom materials and teaching. I particularly appreciated the examples given of the types of activities shown in  the website we reviewed in M2_2  for the Knowledge Processes described in Allen and Paesani’s (2010) article “Exploring the Feasibility of a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies in Introductory Foreign Language Courses.” Many of the activities I looked at seemed very feasible and some even corresponded closely with activities I have used when teaching English comp. More beneficial than just seeing activities, however, was seeing how they fit into a trajectory of learning, as the assignment M2_2 had us do. I am a fan of Bloom’s modified taxonomy (I believe they still call it Bloom’s taxonomy, but the one we use today was modified from his original by other scholars), so even tho

Reflective Blog #1 from Multiliteracies Course Feb 1, 2021  First, I will explain multiliteracies as I’ve come to understand it in the past couple weeks. It appears to a multimodal way to teach creating and reading, otherwise called meaning making. We want our students to be conversant with various forms of communication, including graphic text, video, audio, body language, spatial, as well as lexical, or language-based communication (The New London Group (NLG), 1996, p. 65)—all this in addition to multiple languages and cultures. For our students to be conversant, we, too, need to be, and thus we need a metalanguage—the description of which I will pick up later—for analyzing and describing the various modes of communication. The goals of such a pedagogy are to foster good community and feelings of equality, removing sources of hierarchies, including between teachers and students (p. 73), in part to prepare students for the changing nature of postFordist business structures (p. 66) as