Using the Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle to Develop Students' STEM Literacy

• In Event: New Perspectives and Directions in Social Semiotics in Education: Investigating Meaning-Making Potentials

Abstract

One of the main challenges for teachers in elementary and secondary classrooms is to help students understand Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) concepts and literacies. Nowadays, there is an increasing need for children to start developing knowledge-based critical thinking especially due to the many socioscientific issues with mis/disinformation flooding the social media (Zeilder, Herman & Sadler, 2019). Additionally, in the Canadian context with its growing linguistic and cultural diversity, the traditional monolingual and mono-epistemic science teaching methods would not suffice. The British Columbia curriculum for elementary school science stresses the need to teach linking concepts and trans-disciplinary knowledge-based critical thinking skills (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2017).
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic period, elementary school teachers have been required to use an online platform to conduct their teaching. Remote learning environments provide an experience of learning that differs substantially from traditional classrooms. Students have fewer opportunities to participate in discussions and solve problems collaboratively, which reduces peer-to-peer teamwork and decreases exposure to positive and supportive feedback from others. Students have less discourse experiences to use their reasoning skills to participate in democratic discussions on contentious socio-scientific issues, to provide warranted evidence for their claims, and to make their voices heard and recognized. This experience is crucial to further their understanding and learn the STEM contents and problem-solving skills.
It is of utmost importance to find effective methods to better support the learning experience in an online environment. There is a lack of studies regarding the practices of successful strategies to scaffolding students’ learning virtually, especially in elementary school.
Under these circumstances, new pedagogies that tap into the full range of students’ semiotic resources become more important. We adapted the Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle (Lin, 2015), which is a heuristic curriculum genre that helps teachers to plan their lessons by using translanguaging strategies as scaffolding with their students. First, in stage 1 of the MEC cycle, the lesson plans were co-designed with a grade 7 teacher to develop instructional materials. In this process, we drew on a variety of plurilingual and multimodal semiotic resources (i.e., inquiry-based activities using visuals, diagramming, demonstrations, experimenting, videos, animations). In the second stage, students are engaged in reading and note-making tasks with scaffolding. In the last stage, students are scaffolded to transform their experience into a multimodal composition which is an entextualisation process and is facilitated by teacher-researcher co-designed language and genre scaffolding materials. Previous research has shown that multimodal composition offers linguistic minoritized children opportunities to expand their existing linguistic repertoires (Smith, Pacheco & Korosheva, 2020). It also supports students’ identity expression and communicates in empowering ways.
The results of the study showed that the development of this plurilingual and multimodal approach using the MEC contributes to the plurilingual students’ interest in understanding of STEM contents. Additionally, implementing MEC generates positive impacts on the plurilingual students’ collaborative knowledge co-making, engendering continuous flow of STEM literacies development and engagement for plurilingual children who are often marginalized in their classroom.

Author

• Kwok Ying Tsang, Simon Fraser University