Week 11: Multiliteracies in Classroom

The chosen movie is titled, “Red’s Riding Hoods”. It is based on the popular children’s fairy tale, Red Riding Hood.

One of the reasons for choosing this movie for a lesson is that most if not all students would be familiar with the fairy tale, Red Riding Hood.

The main objectives of the lesson were to highlight to students that gender stereotypes is usually embedded in traditional fairy tales and ways in which the characters were portrayed. Tapping on students’ prior knowledge, the teacher can structure activities that discuss on what they already know about the story and how they feel about it.

To progress to the systematic knowledge, teacher may discuss the features of fractured fairy tales. Teacher could also highlight to students how the Red’s character, particularly her facial expression seems to signal her evil personality. Whereas the wolf’s facial expression is that of a good natured person.

To move to a more critical stance, the teacher may ask students to rewrite the story to make it a less gendered story.

In relation to Singapore’s context, while it may seem ambitious to be able to meet the learning objectives of the lesson, teachers could adapt the lesson structure while modifying part of the lesson to suit her class ability. Teachers could also provide more scaffolding questions to aid students in their understanding especially if students were never exposed to such activities before.

Week 10: Multimodality - Jewitt

According to Jewitt, the affordances of new technologies reconfigure the multimodal aspects of reading and writing in ways that are nearly significant for reading. This mean to say that with the ever changing technology, the way in which information are presented and read will never be fixed instead it will mirror the changes in technology.

As the valued form of literacy of schools is still linguistics, Jewitt claims that schools need to mediate the “in-school” and the “out of school” language. The out-of-school language tends to diverge away from the linguistics aspects of literacy that no longer place the importance of language.

It is interesting to note that the function of written language has instead been “relegated” to function as labels and captions as opposed to the traditional function of language as a mean to disseminate content; termed as decentring writing. The use of written language is being used minimally as seen in the illustration below.

However, the use of written language in games is seen as a sign of identity of the character. More often, the speech by these characters are incomprehensible, however with the inclusion of “voice” “constructs the character as human-like, literate and sociable”(Jewitt).

Apart from that too, Jewitt mentions on the importance of typography in the visualization of word. As writing is seen as a mean to convey information, even if one does not understand the language to make meaning, the placements of vowels for instance have a role to play in meaning making.
Typography, a category of language is use to segregate information. The fonts used seem to suggest the different types of information to be conveyed. For instance, the fonts used below seems to suggest something that is informal or even “childish”.

However, this example shows that the use of the font seems to suggest that the information to be conveyed is something formal and serious (apart from the title that says, formal script).

In summary, there are new and significant ways for reading and literacy. Apart from what had been mentioned earlier, the use of images with linguistic resources allows different readers to have different meaning when reading the text.

Just like the class activity that we did where we have to look at the best and worst sites, it is apparent that the meaning is (re)make by readers through the employment of the different affordances of various modes interacting with one another.

Week 9: Multiliteracies Approaches

After reading the article by Stein and Tan I think that the use of language as a form of meaning making should not be seen as the only way of expression but should go beyond this. Any form of expression of meaning making is inflected with the relations between culture, history, and power that particular communities and institutions have evolved (Stein).

This would mean that all expression as a form of meaning making is specific to culture of the particular community. For instance, in the DUSTY project, the use of slang in the lyrics is specific to the “Black” community and should the meaning of the song should therefore be interpreted from the lens of these people and not from those who have little or no knowledge about the Black culture and community.

In Tan’s article, it was discussed how she see the incorporation of mulitiliteracies as a reconciliation of differences in the education system in Singapore.

While it’s easy to highlight the fallacy of her proposal, however I feel that the incorporation of mulitiliteracies into the curriculum may be beneficial to students here especially to the under achievers. This may provide an alternative platform for these underachievers to “showcase” their potential. Akin to that of the DUSTY project, teachers may try to develop and explore these underachivers’ potential in these areas.

However, one might say that such a project may not add value to these underachivers’ portfolio as the “valued success” is still through the traditional mode of assessment, ie the PSLE for the primary school students. Perhaps, teachers might want to identify ways to incorporate the teaching of content such as grammar and vocabulary through mulitiliteracies. This way, it empower students and allow them to develop a sense of ownership in their learning while the teachers are able to “cover” the syllabus required for the PSLE.

To sum it up, teachers should explore the possibilities of integrating multiliteracies into the curriculum as a strategy to add to teachers’ repertoire.

Week 8: Artifact to explore "true selves"

Think about what multimodal artefact we can get students to create to render them to explore their “true selves”, which are not subjected by the society.

Very often, we are influenced by society to be the person whom the society values. We are coerced to fit into the social “mould” that prevents us to have our own identity. This is inline with Benedict Anderson’s idea where he approaches identity as a sociocognitive construct—one both spatially and temporally inclusive, both enabled and shaped by broader social forces. As teachers we should be conscious of this construct and realized that students tend to conform to the social norms and not let their “true-selves” surface.

However, it is important for us teachers to recognize that every individual is unique and thus we should encourage our students to express themselves freely. Teachers could for instance plan a lesson that allows students to think critically of texts in order to tease out the ideational meanings embedded within. Such an activity will make student more conscious of the ideology around them.

Another way is for teacher to ask students to create artifacts that allow them to explore their true selves. As mentioned earlier, students will tend to conform to the social norm and create something that the teacher values rather than something that identify them. As such teachers may choose to ask students to create an artifact that tap on student’s interest that allows space for expression. For examples, instead of writing compositions and reflections, a teacher may ask students to design graffiti. The project could either be done individually or collaboratively. Graffiti is usually seen as a form of expression that allows students to design, create and interpret freely. In order to explore students’ true selves and not meeting teacher’s expectations, the project has to be made “low-stake”. This would mean that students will not be assessed based on their creation but rather appreciated for what they had designed. I believe this would be an important step to make as it will not put students in a situation where they have to create something based on criteria that will again restrict their exploration of true selves.

Apart from graffiti, perhaps just like the DUSTY project, a teacher could designed a project that require students to write their own song/rap/poetry in order to reflect their own identity. This could be integrated with other subjects such as English (to teach grammar skills), music (to create music) and even art and craft (design props for their video clip). All these will encourage students to “get out of their box” and explore their true identity.