Teaching Philosophy
In addition to being learner centered, my approach to teaching is informed by pedagogical frameworks which more adequately address the wide range of modes, discourse forms, meanings and histories that learners will encounter in a new language. Particularly salient to this have been approaches often clustered around the concept of multiliteracies--a term coined by education scholars in the so-called New London Group[i], which is meant to capture the multiplicity of modes, media, and codes that characterize late modern, digitally networked societies. Adopting a literacy-based approach to teaching following Kern’s (2000) view of literacy as “the use of socially-, historically-, and culturally-situated practices of creating and interpreting meaning through texts” (p. 16)[ii] represents to me the best way to achieve the goals set by the 2007 MLA report to develop students’ “translingual and transcultural competence” (p. 3)[iii], or the ability to operate between languages and culture, through interaction with target language texts. More importantly it allows me to not teach my students grammar and vocabulary out of context, but rather analyze how the syntactic and grammatical choices made by the text’s author shapes the meaning it tries to convey. To this end, I plan instructional activities using the Knowledge Processes from Cope and Kalantzis’ Learning by Design project[iv], and endeavor to engage students in processes of experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying.
In a third semester of a French sequence for example, I had planned a lesson around the topic of “Café.” In the “experiencing” phase, students were asked to share their experience with coffee and answer questions such as at what time of the day they usually have coffee, where, why and in what type of container (a paper cup? A mug? A cup? A tumbler?). They were then introduced to an image designed by the author of Paris vs New-York[v] who compares “un expresso assis en terrasse” vs “an americano keep walking”. At this stage, the conceptualizing phase, students deduce meaning from a text by looking at what is ‘available’ to them (culturally, linguistically, socially) and refer to the metalanguage of the text. Students are then encouraged to understand the text from a socio-cultural perspective. Finally, in the transformed practice phase, which is also often where assessment takes place, students use the acquired knowledge of the text to elaborate a new text of their own, by adapting of adding to it for example.
[i] The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard educational review, 66(1), 60-93.
[ii] Kern, R. (2000). Literacy and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[iii] Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages. (2007). Foreign languages and higher education: New structures for a changed world. Profession, 2007.
[iv] Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2005). Learning by design. Common Ground.
[v] Muratyan, V. (2012). Paris versus New York. Mosaik Verlag.