“Please Teach Me like A Kindergartener”: Multimodality for Resilience in A Community Adult Literacy Program

• In Event: Toward Trauma-Informed Care in TESOL: A Multimodal and Multisemiotic Approach

Abstract

In recent decades, Canada has emerged as one of the world’s most sought-after destinations for immigrants. Amidst this significant influx, the Canadian education system faces unique challenges and opportunities in integrating immigrant students. Various policies have been designed to support the diverse needs of immigrant learners (Cheng & Yan, 2018); however, the focus on adaptation and integration into Canadian society may cause unintended effects and further re/traumatize immigrants, particularly those speaking English as a second language (ESL).

This paper presents a case study of an English language instructor who, with her knowledge of multimodality, attended to issues of language, symbolic power, and legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1991) and implemented critical pedagogy (Freire, 1993) in a community-based adult literacy program in Canada. The instructor is a recent immigrant and speaks Chinese as her first language. The students, with most of them from oppressed environments like Afghanistan, are immigrants and ESL learners. This literacy program features posthumanism and employs multimodality as a means of developing academic literacies. The multimodal approach is believed to facilitate comprehension and reduce anxiety by providing multiple avenues for literacy development beyond traditional writing-based literacies, which generally pose challenges for ESL learners. By integrating multimodality into a trauma-informed pedagogical framework, the instructor aimed to create a supportive, inclusive learning environment that fosters a sense of safety and confidence in learners.

Drawing on the instructor’s reflexive fieldnotes (Emerson et al., 2011) and personal reflections, we explored the implementation of the multimodality-facilitated learning and its impact on building a trauma-informed learning space. The findings reveal the potential of multimodality in trauma healing (Molloy, 2016) and in building an inclusion-oriented learning environment. For example, at the beginning of the program, one learner expressed concern about learning English traditionally, saying, “I can speak and understand English very well, but I am a kindergarten student in terms of reading and writing.” This highlights how the perception of language literacies as testable and compartmentalized items can subject learners to an identity of inferiority, exacerbating their sense of inadequacy and exclusion, thus reinforcing the desire for native-speakerism (Lin & Motha, 2020). To avoid a deficit positioning of her students and activate their existing knowledge repository, the instructor utilized multimodal elements such as wordless graphic novels and digital stories to help learners decipher and construct meaning (Dallacqua et al., 2015). The multimodal approach recognized and addressed the emotional and psychological barriers learners may face. By integrating multimodal resources into learning in an adult literacy program, this paper aims to draw TESOL educators’ attention to the healing power of multimodality that helps learners feel more confident and less fearful about (mis)understandings, thus fostering a freer and more open interactive space for learning.

Authors

• Amy Yicun Jin, Simon Fraser University

• Chunhong Liu, Simon Fraser University