Toward a Critical Multimodal Theory for Online Language Education

• In Event: Autoethnographies of Critical Action Researchers: Trajectories to Equitable Learning Communities That Challenge Neoliberalism

Abstract

In this presentation, I will use an autoethnographic lens to narrate how I, as an educator committed to critical pedagogy, struggled with the industrial dynamics of a large online undergraduate English course (with up to 700 students), which prevented engagement with students’ identities, languages, and cultures. Creating possibilities for critical engagement was particularly important in this course because most of the students were international students who had just arrived in Canada and who spoke English as an additional language. Students’ online existences “transcend single countries, sites, perspectives, or boundaries,” (words from the description of this conference’s vision) and I felt we needed to develop pedagogies that made use of digital borderlessness, through online copying, sampling, re-mixing, and sharing, to help these students negotiate their identities.

In this talk, I will introduce Multiplicity Theory as a critical conceptual framework that can be adopted by digital literacies research. Drawing on my experiences in the said course, I will propose that any research interested in the sociocultural and power-relational aspects of online language education will have to address the fact that digital possibilities multiply all the phenomena that constituted traditional educational settings. This will also include critical dimensions of online language education including factors such as identity, access, power, activism, and social justice (Freire, 1970; Freire, 1987; Janks, 2010; Janks, 2013). In order to discuss the significance of students’ multiple identities, communities, and social existences, I draw upon my trajectory as an international educator, teacher educator, and researcher who has migrated from Iran to Canada to the US and back to Canada.

I taught this course, along with 10 other instructors, in a Canadian university. The course hosted up to 700 undergraduate students. Mobilizing critical action research (Carr & Kemmis, 2009; Morrell, 2006), I documented how the online format of the course and its size rendered critical and transformational pedagogies almost entirely absent from the course. This characteristic created some dissatisfaction and anxiety in the teaching team. After collective reflection on such moments of dissonance, we employed them as an inspiration for rounds of action in order to create space for identity-oriented and transformational pedagogical practices.

It has long been emphasized that “practicing critical pedagogy in cyberspace must build upon sophisticated notions of multiplicity [because of] multiple paths for reading and writing” (Giroux et al., 1996, p. 160). This rendering of multiplicity correctly emphasizes multi-semiotic pluri-textuality (non-written as well as written elements). However, drawing on my experiences, I will show that “multiplicity” in online literacy engagement goes well beyond the notion of pluri-textuality. I will explain why any critical multimodal literacy theory should indeed be conscious of the connection between multiplicity and meta-textual aspects of writing such as identity, culture, community, and so on.

Author

• Amir Kalan, McGill University