Multiliteracies, Pedagogy and Identities:Teacher and Student Voices from a Toronto Elementary School

Abstract

In this article, I draw on an ethnographic case study of one Toronto elementary school, as part of a Canada-wide action research project: Multiliteracy Project (www.multiliteracies.ca). I have explored how Perminder, a grade-4 teacher, developed a multiliteracies pedagogy, drawing on her own and her students' identities and linguistic and cultural forms of capital to create learning opportunities for all students to access the English mainstream curriculum. Alternative pedagogical choices included students' creation of multimodal dual language "identity texts" (Cummins, Bismilla, Cohen, Giampapa & Leoni 2005a), and identity work, expanding literacy practices valued within Canadian classrooms.In this article, I draw on an ethnographic case study of one Toronto elementary school, as part of a Canada-wide action research project: Multiliteracy Project (www.multiliteracies.ca). I have explored how Perminder, a grade-4 teacher, developed a multiliteracies pedagogy, drawing on her own and her students' identities and linguistic and cultural forms of capital to create learning opportunities for all students to access the English mainstream curriculum. Alternative pedagogical choices included students' creation of multimodal dual language "identity texts" (Cummins, Bismilla, Cohen, Giampapa & Leoni 2005a), and identity work, expanding literacy practices valued within Canadian classrooms