Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Multimodal Literacy in Language Classrooms 325
As far as classroom practice goes this conception of creativity views learners
not as little linguists abstracting rules from data but as designers or
artists who shape semiotic resources into multimodal texts according to
their needs and interests in their particular communicative contexts.
For example, by way of explaining and exemplifying the transition
from literacy to multiliteracies, Cummins et al. (2007: 128–147) describe a
project conducted by teachers and students at an elementary school, 60
miles north of Los Angeles. In project fresa (‘strawberry’ in Spanish) students
were engaged in bringing their family lives into the classroom by
researching the tough farming histories of their parents and grandparents.
The students began by brainstorming their ideas and vocabulary relating
to strawberries and then framed their own inquiry questions based on
their interests – for example, ‘I wonder why the people who pick . . . strawberries
wear scarves across their noses and faces’? Items like these
developed into a jointly constructed questionnaire. Next, the students
interviewed their family members and shared their fi ndings in subsequent
classroom discussions. The data collected were analyzed and represented
in multiple visual forms including drawings, maps and charts. Arguably,
these artifacts demonstrated the students’ high levels of personal investment,
novelty and analytical insight. As a result of the students’ knowledge
construction, they became concerned about pesticides, low wages
and harsh working conditions in the strawberry farming industry. This
concern was actualized, socially, by writing an information report that
was sent to the state governor who promised to open an investigation
based on the students’ fi ndings. Finally, the students’ work was distributed
via the medium of a website dedicated to project fresa.
By way of commentary, the pedagogic design of the project fresa learning
task required students to be the producers of texts rather than mere
consumers of printed material. Particularly, the students’ work designs
featured visual elements (drawings, maps and charts) that both accompanied
and extended their messages in ways that could not be expressed as
easily, or at all, through linguistic resources alone. The resulting process
and production values attained by the project fresa students were distinctive
in the sense that their multimodal texts were the outcome of personalized
learning, local, nonspecialist media production and targeted
dissemination. The genius of this project was located in its vital recruitment
of digital tools and new media. Arguably, these resources afforded
the students hitherto unknown agency and opened up – albeit briefl y – a
multilingual space where cultural, social and political transactions
occurred. Additionally, the students were given unique access to a powerful
means of experimentation, information, communication tools (where
messages were heard and acted upon) and, perhaps, most importantly a
socially oriented purpose for learning that facilitated the expression of
their all-too-often minority and marginalized voices.