The united nations (UN) has been urging educators to create inclusive and equitable educational opportunities for learners through quality education (i.e., sustainable development goals #4, see www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/). Yet, teaching during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic times required educators' swift pivoting of their teaching methods for learners' effective learning and academic success. As a response to these global challenges in education, two teacher-researchers restructured existing course materials and activities for an undergraduate English communication course through a two-year action research project. This presentation discusses the action research that investigates the effectiveness of newly developed instructional design.
The research aims to develop the equity-oriented and diversity-strengthened instructional design and practices that can facilitate students' advancement of critical intercultural competence and promote inclusive global citizenship, drawing upon the theoretical orientations of cosmopolitan citizenship that embraces 'super-diversity' and transnational belonging (Vertovec, 2009) and Cummins' (2009) transformative multiliteracies pedagogy. The presentation showcases multimodality-enhanced and diversity-embraced interactive asynchronous learning tasks, including 'my cooking show' and 'plurilingual expression corner' that invited learners to exchange their prior cultural and linguistic knowledge, and participate in collaborative advancement in English language learning and transdisciplinary literacies. In 'my cooking show', learners were asked to create a video-recorded presentation of a dish that represents their cultural and/or social identity, provide oral narratives about sociocultural and/or historical backgrounds, and share personal memories associated with the dish in addition to multimodal cooking instructions. They were also invited to engage in an asynchronous multimodal interview forum wherein they leave questions and comments. In 'plurilingual expression corner', learners were invited to introduce English idiomatic and colloquial expressions, compare them across languages in terms of similarities and uniqueness of their usages and sociocultural contexts, and create a video of the conversation using the expressions. In both projects, learners were encouraged to make comments on others' contributions in relation to their own cultural and language practice. Through these multimodal interactive activities, learners are able 1) to practice speech patterns, functions and styles in real social contexts; 2) to engage with others' contributions and establish a strong sense of connectedness as a community of English language learning and as global citizens through intercultural reflections on their own and others' unique cultural practices; and 3) to engage with sociocultural and intercultural inquiries through a follow-up online forum.
With affirmative testimonies from student participants through focus group interviews, reflective journals, and anonymous surveys as well as practitioner reflective notes regarding the two projects, the study highlights that multimodality-enhanced and diversity-as-asset-oriented instructional design create an inclusive pedagogical space wherein students can continuously develop their linguistic and cultural knowledge and deepen their intercultural competence to grow as critical global citizens who in turn can contribute to building inclusive and sustainable humanity for all.
References
Cummins, J. (2009). Transformative multiliteracies pedagogy: School-based strategies for closing the achievement gap. Multiple Voices for Ethnically Diverse Exceptional Learners, 11(2), 38-56
Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. New York, NY: Routledge.
