Multiliteracies

After watching the video about multiliteracies, I would define this as looking at language and literacy from multiple perspectives. The first area that the video talks about is multi that is centered around culture and people. In the world, we have many different dialects and cultures and we need to know how to navigate that. By only teaching one literacy, we are not setting our students up for the real world. This is also valuing the differences that our students come to school with. They also discuss multi in relation to digital modes. With technology, we have multiple modes of communication. We should be combining the different modes. For example, the This I Believe multimodal composition that we are doing, I feel would fit more into this theory. In schools, this would mean breaking away from only teaching and mastering one type of literacy.

Critical Literacies

This theory seems to take a critical look at the world and reflecting on issues that are actually happening in the world. It is taking a look at a word like Thanksgiving and thinking about the different perspectives that this has on all of the different people in the classroom. Instead of focusing on teaching the dominant language, we look at the differences that people bring in and put a critical lens on this. This theory definitely seems to focus on bringing up the issues in the world surrounding us and having conversations about this. One way to do this may be having students read different articles about the same issue. They could then have a class discussion based on the different perspectives and begin to discuss the differences around one issue. Students could then create a reflection based on the discussion.

Cognitive

The cognitive perspective seems much more adapted to brain research. It seems rather than having a set process that every writer uses, the individual writers creates goals based off their own objectives in that writing piece. Instead of offering students only one way, you give students different strategies such as goal setting, visualizing, gathering information, and self-verbalizing. These strategies help writers organize writing in a way that makes sense to them and actually engage in the writing.

Sociocultural

Sociocultural perspective focuses on celebrating all of the different perspectives rather than ignoring them in the classroom. This seems to allow students to take more of a lead and teach/study about their own cultures and backgrounds. In order to start to implement sociocultural perspective, teachers can offer writing opportunities that are focused on social purposes. When using mentor texts, teachers should make sure they are choosing a wide variety of diverse books and stories.

Compare and Contrast

When I reflect on all four of the theories, they seem to try to get away from the traditional way of writing. Instead of focusing on a dominant language and a one-fits-all approach, these theories try to get teachers to look more at the different individuals we have in our classes to help them grow as writers. Sociocultural and multiliteracies seem much more diverse in the different languages you study, as well as cultures. Instead of focusing on the dominant, which I feel cognitive still does, you focus on teaching the differences between languages and making sure students are aware of the differences.

My Current Theory

Right now, I feel my style of teaching relates more to cognitive and critical perspectives. I give students opportunities to discuss issues within the world, but we don’t really dive into the different perspectives in full depth like sociocultural and multiliteracies do. In addition, I offer my students different strategies to complete writing, but we are usually completing very similar assignments.

Expanding

As I continue to grow my style of teaching, I would love to apply more sociocultural and multiliteracies frameworks into my room. For instance, we do a lot of essay writing. However, this is not realistic in the real world. I would like to think about how we could combine different modes of technology to create different types of products that audiences outside of the classroom could see. In addition, I want to take more time to go over different languages that students use. AAVE is huge at our school and I feel we don’t celebrate it like we should.