Honouring ESL students' lived experiences in school learning with multiliteracies pedagogy

Abstract

The increased presence of technology in school communities and children's lives poses a challenge to traditional teaching and learning tools. The present case study examines ways in which a classroom teacher, Marnie, conceptualised the use of a multiliteracies pedagogy (MLS) and a multimodal approach to elicit the lived experiences of her English as a Second Language students. Marnie's pedagogical approach was used to enhance her students' understanding of a novel with themes centred around life and death. The findings indicated that through her intentional implementation of pedagogical steps within the MLS framework, such as situated practice and overt instruction, the students were able to critically frame the content used in the creation of their digital photostory project and, as a result, have a transformative learning experience. This article has a two-fold approach: sharing of the digital storytelling project of students' experiences alongside a description of Marnie's instructional practice through the framework of multiliteracies. Presentation in this manner divulges an in-depth exploration of the pedagogical approach in which the literate lives of students can be shared through digital texts.

Keywords:

• multiliteracies
• multimodality
• adolescent literacy
• critical literacy
• ESL learners

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for their generous support of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.