[about 600 words, not counting references]

In my own practice, most especially in a first year seminar that I teach regularly, titled "Learning Across Cultures," I use a variety of approaches from the multimodal literacies playbook to facilitate and support learning. Principally, I use the following instructional strategies: a "design" or "collaborative creation" approach to developing and managing learning processes and generating artifacts that demonstrate learning; alternative pathways to practice skills and develop knowledge; and promotion of collaborative work in groups that the students manage themselves (a "learning environment of productive diversity"). In the following paragraphs, I address the latter, primarily.

I assign work to small groups that I have formed (typically comprising four learners). The groups are chosen for diversity of language background, socio-economic class, national and regional/geographic origin, and schooling (a mix of public and private schools, a mix of Catholic and non-religious schools). [My university is a private, Catholic institution in the Northeast U.S. and many students come to my institution from parochial schools in this region. I mix them with learners from other countries and regions of the U.S.] Once the small groups are formed, I have them split into pairs. Students interview each, noting their commonalities and significant differences of background and life experience.

I then ask them to reassemble in groups of four to do their work. They are tasked with processing -- that is, reading, comprehending, analyzing and explaining -- a challenging, substantive text. They read individually first, mostly at home. I ask them to attend to two things as they read, (a) to be aware of the strategies and mental processes that they use as they read and (b) to link major ideas in the reading to their own experience and knowledge. During the outside-of-class reading, they contribute to group notes using collaborative digital tools, also outside of class. Then, in class, I have them discuss and reprocess what they -- collectively -- found as the main points of the reading; they also discuss how they arrived at those conclusions and ways in which these ideas are relevant to them as learners. That is, they review their individual understandings, along with their group notes, and they come to consensus about the most important points in the text, while also evoking how the ideas connect to their various life experiences and how their different cognitive pathways during reading led to nuanced differences in understanding. See the visual representation of these steps below:

As students engage in this multi-step process, their comprehension and their intellectual appreciation of the reading shifts slowly, gaining in nuance, detail, and richness. To complete our processing of the reading, I have each of the small groups report out to the rest of the class. Over time, everyone in the class comes to realize that by sharing perspectives, by viewing the text from a variety of socio-economic, cultural, educational and other stances and formative backgrounds, they all come to a much fuller, more complex understanding of the principal ideas and the qualities of the text. They also come to appreciate the strength that can be found in diverse perspectives and life experiences. The goal is to develop learner metacognition and student appreciation for inclusivity during learning.

Their group "notes" can take many forms, including video, audio, digital drawings and other images, as well as text. This allows each learner to use his or her preferred modes of expression to communicate meaning to their collaborative workgroup and, in many cases, to the rest of the class. This is a multimodal variation on the approach called Collaborative Strategic Reading.

In effect, I am asking learners to read for content (specific kinds of evidence, cogent theoretical frameworks, critiques of ideas, etc.), but I am also encouraging them to notice ways in which different learners have differing strengths, divergent perspectives, and varied strategies for learning. They learn from each other. They cooperate and, in so doing, acquire richer, more varied understandings of a range of complex and challenging texts and theories. They realize that there are many effective ways to learn and many good modalities for expressing ideas. Most students reflect deeply on this experience and use it to enrich their understanding of what "learning," "collaboration," "cultural difference," and "diversity" are. 

Reading List (for further exploration)

Kim, S., & Slapac, A. (2015). Culturally responsive, transformative pedagogy in the transnational era: Critical perspectives. Educational studies: Journal of the American educational studies association, 51(1): 17-27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2014.983639

State of Queensland (Department of Education). (2002). A guide to productive pedagogies: Classroom reflection manual. [PDF version is downloadable here: https://instituteforeducation.gov.mt/en/Documents/Mr%20Sean%20Zammit/Productive%20Pedagogies%20Classroom%20reflection%20Manual.pdf.]

Thibaut, P., & Curwood, J. S. (2018). Multiliteracies in practice: Integrating multimodal production across the curriculum. Theory into practice, 57(1), 48-55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2017.1392202