Reflective Blog Module 2 for Multiliteracies Course, Feb. 28, 2021

 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 though the assignment didn’t specifically call for correlations with the taxonomy, I tasked myself with seeing how the Knowledge Process and the activities correlated with it. It was, thus, refreshing to read this week in an article for my Assessment course, this quote from a Menke and Paesani (2018) article, “Multiliteracies pedagogy provides the instructional toolkit for developing learners’ literacy through activities centred around four knowledge processes (experiencing, conceptualising, analysing, applying) that integrate the study of language forms with authentic texts and align with the practices and knowledge characterising Bloom’s taxonomy” (35). And indeed, as Menke and Paesani indicate, I did find it corresponds quite well. Students build their knowledge and understanding before being asked to analyze and create, which is, I believe, the ideal organization a course should have for students learning new concepts.

            However, the Bloom’s taxonomy is naturally understood to be a step-by-step framework, which corresponds to the manner of representing the Knowledge Process on the website noted above for M2_2 seemed to indicate, yet this organization seems to contrast with the idea that some activities can overlap, as explained by Paesani et al. (2016) in our textbook:  “Indeed … pedagogical acts are sometimes overlapping and … activities can have features of one or more pedagogical act” (43). Additionally, a graphic, whose specific author is not included, was shared in my Assessment class today (2/24) that shows that not only will the processes not necessarily overlap, but also the Curricular Components is not a hierarchical design as the Bloom’s Taxonomy seems to be, which is how I understand scaffolding. So I believe I need further understanding of how both of these frameworks work if both ideas are true: that the processes correspond with Bloom’s taxonomy and they do not form a hierarchical design. I can see it to some extent, but I need to study it and learn more to be clearer about how they work within a classroom assignment/setting.   

            Speaking of materials creation, I also appreciated the mention of the semester-long project, specifically the French travel guide mentioned by Allen and Paesani (2010) as I think working on something for a semester is particularly helpful in students’ learning as scaffolding is naturally embedded in any work process. Plus projects have the added benefit of looking good on students’ résumés.

Additionally, it was helpful to read about some applications for teaching culture by seeing it as part of symbolic competence. Specifically, I liked the idea of students’ adopting roles or personas to play out to help them understand how a person in the culture of interest might perceive things as well as to see what their interactions might be like with the other personae in the class. In my continuing ed class that I taught, I generally didn’t do a lot of overt culture teaching because I wasn’t a formally trained French teacher and the textbooks I used didn’t do much with culture—in part because they were very inexpensive. (I did, at least, share experiences, photos, and realia from my travels to France with my students. Furthermore, just in teaching language and having the notion in my head that I should teach something cultural, I noticed how my experiences with the French language indicated that language itself has many dimensions of culturality.)  Beginning teaching here at the University of Arizona was a bit of an eye opener as to how “better” textbooks approach culture, but their representations didn’t seem quite right to me either.

I think some of this uneasiness stemmed from my having learned some Big C culture things in my high school French learning. Notably my junior year teacher spent several months teaching about the historical movements in painting in France, and I don’t regret this at all. My senior year teacher also taught us a little about modern culture, such as by teaching us a few Jean Jacques Goldman songs and showing us the famous movies Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources (This was in 1990-91.) My limited university classes included Big C French literature: de Maupassant’s Pierre et Jean, Sartre’s Antigone, Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin, etc. But none of this prepared me for the global culture I encountered when I arrived in France. I met people from all over the world there, and probably spent more time talking with Africans, African descendants, and islanders than I did with White French people. Could my high school or university teachers have done better than they did? Perhaps, but I don’t know the solution any more than they did—nor as it seems has anyone determined yet.

However, I do think the intercultural nature of languages and countries is critical understanding for students of a language. In this regard, it seems the multiliteracies framework still has some work to do, in my opinion, to fully address the complexities of teaching multi-country or even multi-region language cultures, but the persona activity noted above is a great idea to start. And, I was glad to read that at least Kramsch (2013) recognized that “a modernist definition of culture is being challenged by a lingua franca like English that knows no national boundaries and by global social actors who contest the supremacy of the native speaker as well as the notion of neatly bounded speech communities” (70) because it’s not only true of English but also of a number of languages: Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, to name the more prominent unbordered languages.

 

Kramsch, C. (Jan. 2013). Culture in foreign language teaching. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, 1(1), 57-78

Menke, M. R. & Paesani, K. (2019). Analysing foreign language instructional materials through the lens of the multiliteracies framework. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 32(1), 34-49, doi: 10.1080/07908318.2018.1461898

Paesani, K., Allen, H., Dupuy, B., Liskin-Gasparro, J., & Lacorte, M. (2016). A multiliteracies framework for collegiate foreign language teaching. Pearson.

Willis Allen, H. & Paesani, K. (2010). Exploring the feasibility of a pedagogy of multiliteracies in introductory foreign language courses. L2 Journal, 2, 119-142. http://repositories.cdlib.org/uccllt/l2/vol2/iss1/art6/