On our second meeting, we
read and thought about the text “New people in New Worlds” (Gee, 1999) which described
two different kinds of students: one born and raised in a wealthy family and
another one, in a poorer family. Reading this, we could realize that the social
context plays an important role when learning is concerned. So we teachers need
to recognize our students social life before we start our practice, but the
most important thing is that we have to contextualize language for the students
that live in this new globalized world, so they can learn how to speak English
effectively.
To exemplify that, we
studied examples from another text: “Situated and Explicit Pedagogy” (Mills,
2010) from the book “The Multiliteracies Classroom”, which shows a teacher with
a class of students from all over the world trying to make her practice
meaningful. For that, she decided to show the students a claymation movie and,
after that, she asked them to make a movie themselves. In an exercise like
that, the collaboration between students is essential, and that’s why she had
good and bad results. She focused her practice in the world of the technology,
so the students had to use digital cameras to prepare the movement of the characters
in the movie. The instructions had to be very clear, and the concept of
scaffolding had to happen for the work to be done.
The learners had problems,
but at the end the goal was accomplished, she taught the students how to
interact using technology; she could teach other subjects besides English and
the results were fairly good.
References
Gee, J.P. New people in new worlds: Networks, the new capitalism and schools. In COPE, Bill; KALANTZIS, Mary (Ed.). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 1999.
MILLS, Kathy A. Situated and Explicit Pedagogy”. In: ________. The Multiliteracies Classroom. Salisbury, Uk: Multilingual Matters, 2010.
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