A practice involving explicit instruction, critical framing, and transformative intent that intentionally includes multiple modes (linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and other multimodal approaches).
Published in Chapter:
Multimodal and Community-Based Literacies: Agentive Bilingual Learners in Elementary School
Ruth Harman (The University of Georgia, USA) and Dong-shin Shin (University of Cincinnati, USA)
Copyright: © 2018
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-3955-1.ch011
Abstract
In recent decades, high-stakes school reforms and draconian budget cuts have constrained the autonomy of public school teachers in developing multi literacy approaches with emergent bilingual learners (e.g., English-only laws, high stakes testing). This chapter describes the community and multimodal instructional practices of two urban elementary school teachers/ researchers, developed in the context of a professional development initiative. Using critical, sociocultural conceptions of literacy and qualitative methods of investigation, the paper investigates different aspects of the teachers' writing instruction (i.e., community involvement; genre-based instruction; digital literacy; and multimodality); it also explores how the writing processes of focal bilingual students incorporated these practices. Findings show that this approach positioned bilingual learners as agentive text makers. In addition, the second-grade students developed a heightened awareness of audience and context. Implications are discussed, including the pressing need for teacher collaboration, robust school-university partnerships, and innovative multimodal approaches to literacy.