For me, an important site of multimodal communication in my life, as well as my students’ lives during these trying times of the pandemic, has undoubtedly been Google Classroom and Google Meet. Before the pandemic, although several of my colleagues at my workplace used Google Classroom, never had I been more forced to use it than during the pandemic. As a crisis call, all faculty members in my institution were trained in brief sessions in a very short time to dive into the online teaching mode. At first, I, like many of my colleagues, struggled and gasped to breathe in the unfamiliar waters of online teaching in which Google Classroom and Google Meet were introduced to us as an affordable and user-friendly mode of teaching online. I use the Google Classroom Stream for communicating with my students through posting notices as well as using it as a platform for my students to communicate with me and other fellow classmates just like what I am doing on Scholar now. I think this feature of Google Classroom provides a little room for interaction between my students and I as well as among themselves. My students can share their problems regarding academic and technical issues related to their submissions on Google Classroom Stream.

As everyone is familiar with Google Classroom features, I won’t bore by repeating what everyone already knows. I would like to point to the affordances that this platform has given me to start a shift from the notion of traditional literacy to multimodal literacy among my learners who have been more or less used to a culture of traditional literacy.

Using Google Classroom, my learners and I went through a process of immersion in using the technology more frequently than ever. It’s part of our daily lives now. Both my students and I are going through synesthetic processes every day, from written texts to images to videos and audios, and it has now become mundane for us to use this mode for our everyday teaching-learning process.

A multimodal analysis certainly in meaning-making process. In my case, more than ever, by designing and re-designing patterns of everyday communication via Google Classroom and Google Meet, my students and I are constantly creating our own meanings of the world. Often our representations and communications clash, but we seem to recover from those conflicting moments and immediately recover by being immersed with a synesthetic flux of modes – oral, aural, visual, kinaesthetic, spoken, written and even more.

In traditional literacy, however, I wouldn’t see such synesthetic occurrences too often. The cognitive prosthesis of the learners is much richer in multimodal literacies than traditional ones. And coupled with that, I also see what Kalantzis and Cope (2015) mention as a ‘balance of agency’ taking place in our learning communications – my students more empowered by the plethora of affordances to showcase their ideas in the virtual classroom which I noticed missing in my non-virtual classroom communications. My students are much more confident in pronouncing their agency in learning now. I also see a shift in my own pedagogic demeanor, aims, and purposes when I think about how I grew from teaching in a traditional literacy-based classroom to a multimodal one.

Reference:

Kalantzis, M. and Cope, B. (2015). Regimes of Literacy. In M. Hamilton, R. Hayden, K. Hibbert, and R. Stoke (Eds.), “Negotiating Spaces for Literacy Learning: Multimodality and Governmentality” (pp. 15-24). Bloomsbury: London.