Multimodal Literacies MOOC’s Updates

# Update 4 Moving between images and writing

Understanding concepts and transfering them to the reality sometimes is not easy for teenagers.

If the teachers and pedagogical approaches choose to apply the curriculum always under a synesthesic spectrum, it will facilitate to the students the comprehending of the world that surrounds them.

Nowadays, living among the uncertainty of what is really known and what is unknown frightens all of us, when a teacher finds a resource that can express with more assertivity the subject that matters on the task, it helps the learner to get to more interpretations and variations of meaning making.

One of the classrooms resources mostly used are the images. They awaken up our curiosity, our sagacity to comprehend the shapes, colors, the objects and elements being represented on the images. On the other hand, writing about them, forces the students to organize their thoughts in sentences or in paragraphs, subsequently, it makes them built a more complex idea about what is being seen or studied.

When I was in college, while I taught in internship, me and my classmate structured a Project called "We can do it: Woman’s place is everywhere". We talked about how women are present in all spaces nowadays, and how they were conquering spaces that were reserved only to men. One of the activities cointained images from notorious women from all over the world, from Malala to Queen Elizabeth II, another activity was a roleplay adapted from the movie The Stepford Wives, we promoted discussions about the role of women and id there were positions more apropriated to women and why they are considered less capable or inferior to do some jobs that men normally execute.

At the end of the Project, the students should write posters with lines about what they had learned during the activities. We could see, me and my classmate, that they were strongly influenciated by what they had seen ont he images before, leading us to conclude that the visual of the images had a great imapct on how they see and represent other things after they had seen the images.

As a consequence of this influence, now I can clearly see the connection that exists between the writing mode and the visual mode (images). They are strongly connected and have great influence on each other when some meaning making is required from them. This level of synaesthesia makes the connections between different modes, and the understanding and transference of concepts to the reality become more easier for not only teenagers, but for all kinds of learners.

Poster of the project:

Links used in the project "We can do it: women's place is everywhere":

Trailer of The Stepford Wives: http://youtube.com/watch?v=SuAADocdVn0

Emma Watson HeforShe Campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=gkjW9PZBRfk

Ziauddin Yousafzai, father of Malala: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4mmeN8gv9o