Multiliteracies theory extends the notion of literacy well beyond the traditional linear text-based definition of reading and writing (New London Group, 1996). It addresses the saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity and the multiplicity of communication channels and media available in our rapidly changing world. Multiliteracies involve engagement with multiple design modes, linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and multimodal being a combination of the different modes. This research emerged from the need to open a space for students in an international languages school teaching Arabic language to engage in creative, aesthetic, alternative, and multimodal forms of literacy that involve the integration of the various semiotic resources in their meaning-making and design of texts. It is about a lived teaching-learning journey that draws on the concept of living pedagogy and dwelling in the in-between spaces of curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-live(d) (Aoki, 1991). In this research journey, I share the possibilities that opened up when students between the age of eleven and fourteen years old engaged with multiliteracies in an international languages classroom that teaches heritage language.
This research journey also presents how the participative type of inquiry and collaboration between the researcher and classroom teacher contributed to the enhancement of their knowledge and learning about multiliteracies practices. After listening to and discussing a literary text presented by the teacher, students responded by creating their own texts to show their understanding of the narrative genre. They produced multimodal arts-based (Barton, 2014; Sanders & Albers, 2010) and digital based texts (Knobel & Lankshear, 2013). Through a multiliteracies/multimodalities theoretical, epistemological, and methodological perspective (Albers, 2007; Jewitt & Kress, 2008; Morawski, 2012; Rowsell, 2013), and drawing from approaches such as participatory action research (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013), and bricolage (Kincheloe, 2004), I developed this research story through a process of braiding and interweaving of various modes of texts and genres to produce a métissage (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009) of the live(d) narratives of my research praxis. This inquiry offers a glimpse as to how opening the space for creative approaches in the teaching of literacy engages students in the design of texts using both linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic resources and incorporating multiple modes of representation from which they produce arts, digital, and multimodal texts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/40419 |
| Date | 24 April 2020 |
| Creators | Sabra, Houda |
| Contributors | Morawski, Cynthia |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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