Text I
Nurturing Multimodalism
[…]
New learning collaborations call on the teacher as
learner, and the learner as teacher. The teacher is a lifelong learner; this is simply more apparent in the
Information Age. In instances of best practice, collaborative learning partnerships are forged between
and among teachers for strategic, bottom-up, in-house professional development. This allows teachers
to share in reflective, on-going, contextualized learning, tailored to their collective knowledge. This
sharing also includes the learner as teacher. ELT typically employs learner-centered activities: these can
include learners sharing their knowledge of strategic digital literacies with others in the classrooms.
The digital universe, so threatening to adult notions
of socially sanctioned literacies, is intuitive to children, who have been socialized into it, and for whom
digital literacies are exploratory play. Adults may find new ways of communicating digitally to be quite
baffling and confronting of our communicative expertise; children do not. Instant messaging systems,
such as MSN, AOL, ICQ, for example, provide as natural a medium for communicating to them as
telephones did for the baby-boomer generation. It is not fair for the teacher to treat Information and
Communication Technologies as auxiliary communication with learners for whom it is mainstream and
primary.
Learning spaces are important. Although teachers
seldom have much individual say in the layout of teaching spaces, collaborative relationships may help
to encourage integrated digitization, where computers are not segregated in laboratories but are
interspersed throughout the school environment. In digitally infused curricula, postmodern literacies do
not supplant but complement modern literacies, so that access to information is driven by purpose and
content rather than by the media available.
Adapted from: LOTHERINGTON, H. From literacy to multiliteracies
in ELT. In: CUMMINS, J.; DAVISON, C. (Eds.) International
Handbook of English Language Teaching. New York: Springer, 2007, p. 820. Available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226802846_From_Literacy_to_Multiliter
acies_in_ELT