Multimodal Communication in Post-Pandemic Classrooms: Reflecting Upon Bilingual Education From the Global South

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 2:30 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogies for Equitable Access: Reimagining Multilingual Education for an Uncertain World (Table 12)

Abstract

Colombia is a country regarded as part of the Global South, which entails low economic resources and less industrialized development than other nations. However, it is also a diverse territory, considered by its National Constitution as a multilingual and multiethnic context. More than 60 languages coexist in the national territory, and although they should be recognized as part of the context, they are not. Consequently, these and many other characteristics offer the opportunity to reflect on multilingual and pedagogical practices that enrich the perspective on plurality in the nation and aim at the recognition of others as a part of an intercultural process that values diverse ways of thinking, being and acting. In our country and around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic brought many different challenges, since social distancing and the different situations that this disease caused, forced us to change the perception and practices of life as we knew it. In the case of education, remote learning became the basis for classes around the globe, and both teachers and students were faced with many different challenges related to communication and other processes, which were once innate components of their classrooms and learning environments.

These situations were experienced by teachers all over the world, and for us, the stakes were quite high, since the success of our lessons relied upon the effectiveness of the communicative strategies we used in our classes, being part of a Bilingualism program in a university from Bogotá, Colombia. Adding to the challenge, we had to deal with the difficulties that most students had because of the technology and connectivity restraints they experienced. In a country where only about half of its population has access to connectivity and technological devices, remote and technology-mediated learning became a constant struggle for both teachers and students. This translated into the design of spaces that aimed at the development of communicative activities, which in turn promoted students’ engagement and investment in the lessons and in the improvement of their proficiency level in the foreign language. Because of this, we focused on the promotion of more communicative environments and a more effective learning climate. We did so through the implementation of multimodal communication activities in bilingual classrooms, which resulted in the design of a Decalogue, a set of ten recommendations, hat leads the ways of establishing effective and assertive communication between teachers and students. This Decalogue mainly describes aspects such as engagement, the ethics of communication, social justice, solidarity, and students’ agency, among others, to guarantee a safe interaction inside the classrooms. This, in fact, might help students feel comfortable and motivated to participate in the bilingual classrooms, and could potentially help them to improve their subsequent language skills.

Authors

• Wilder Escobar, El Bosque University

• Lorena Caviedes Cadena, Universidad el Bosque

• Fabián Benavides, Universidad El Bosque