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Teachers Co-Constructing Multilingual and Multimodal Digital Literacy Practices: Examining Critical Transnational Professional Development

Abstract
Linguistic, semiotic, and digital diversity is a challenge and an opportunity for language teachers who often wonder: What do we do with all of this? Communicative repertoires (Rymes, 2012), translanguaging (García and Wei, 2014), multimodality (Jewitt and Kress, 2003), multiliteracies (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009), digital literacy (Littlejohn, Beetham, and McGill, 2012), and technological, pedagogical teachers’ knowledge (Kohler and Mishra, 2007, 2009) advocate for including diverse communicative resources in language learning. Nevertheless, studies in the area center predominantly on students or individual teacher cases in English dominant, or dual/multilingual language school contexts in developed countries. This year-long multimodal, online ethnography examines how teachers explore and critically implement multilingual, multimodal, and digital strategies in Colombia. The participants are seven language teachers who tutored undergraduate learners in a blended English as a foreign language program at a private university in Colombia, South America. Teachers meet online and in face-to-face workshops where they use multilingual, multimodal, and digital resources to generate infographics, and short videos for the benefit of other teachers and students. This study revolved around these research questions: a)How do in service teachers’ understandings of translanguaging, and multimodal, and digital technologies unfold during a transnational professional development program? b) What tensions do teachers experience when they discuss multilingual, multimodal, and digital resources in their practice? The data set includes interviews, multilingual notes and transcripts of meetings, and the multimodal productions created by them. Using narrative analysis, post-qualitative Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, this study shed light on rhizomatic and decolonizing pathways of translanguaging and multimodality that teachers create in Global South contexts. It also elucidates new entanglements and possibilities for implementing translanguaging and multimodality for equitable access from a decolonizing perspective.
Type
openaccess
article
dissertation
Date
2020-09-01
Publisher
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License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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Embargo
2025-09-01T00:00:00-07:00
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