Session Information
31 SES 06 D, Strategies for Teaching and Learning English: Classroom or culture?
Paper Session
Contribution
Museum education is not a frequent source of pedagogical inspiration for English language teaching (ELT). Apart from indirect suggestions about museums and exhibitions containing authentic English labels that learners could benefit from, ELT has shown little or no interest in understanding how museums work as educational sites that engage (or fail to engage) visitors in rich learning situations. Nor has the ELT field asked itself what English teachers could learn from museums in order to design meaningful, fully contextualized proposals for their subject. Nevertheless, recent developments in ELT connected especially to multimodality (Early, Kendrick, and Potts 2015; Jiang 2017) and to the material dimensions of literacy (Pahl and Rowsell 2010) have set the conditions for the intersection of museum education and ELT not to sound ludicrous or untimely today. This is precisely what we want to defend in this presentation. Through theoretical and empirical sections, we will try to show that museum education includes pedagogical concepts and practices that English teachers can find valuable to make their lessons more interesting for all learners, especially English educators who wish to develop their lessons directly on a culturally-responsive plane (Hall 2008; Porto 2010).
In the field of literacy studies, theories of multimodality and multiple literacies are enabling further democratization of English education across cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and socio-economic lines (Giampapa 2010). Premised on socio-constructivist and critical orientations, for instance, New literacy studies address literacy as a social practice imbedded in students’ everyday lives through their material and cultural surroundings (Gee 2014). By opening itself to these understandings and translating them into its own specific concepts, ELT may learn how to capitalize on students’ original cultures, languages, and identities in the English classroom precisely by widening the range of modalities, literacies, and languages included in it (Street 2012). Photographs, drawings, scrapbooks, toys, family possessions, and household, neighborhood or community objects may then be invited to the English classroom, together with the actions and literacies that students normally enact around them, and also the multimodal channels—and languages—implied in each case.
Indeed, this focus on multimodality and on the artefactual nature of literacy insists on some of the affordances that the field of ELT has traditionally found in visuals and realia. In addition to this, it may actually pave the way for ELT to establish fresh links with museum education and take full advantage of the latter’s implicit pedagogies. At the end of the day, similar factors to those that enable successful exhibitions may also afford a meaningful English education for all learners. Not surprisingly, Hooper-Greenhill (1998: 23) argued that for museums to succeed in engaging multiple audiences in genuine educational experiences, museum professionals needed to interpret the choices they make in terms of societal power. "Some museums," she said, "are already finding ways to democratize their working practices ... they are introducing multiple perspectives that give sub-groups and difference a voice”. This use of the term “voice” (at some point Hooper-Greenhill also speaks about “narratives”) suggests that a similar strategy may apply to ELT, a field whose learning outcomes are also intensely influenced by learner socio-economic status and cultural capital (Vandrick 2014; Block, 2012). Pahl and Pollard (2010), for example, included an interesting case of a how English literacy and museum education may reciprocally enrich one another. This research took that experience as an example.
Method
In this research, three initiatives were conducted during the 2017-2018 school year at very diverse (socio-economically and culturally speaking) educational centers in the province of Valencia (Spain), to assess the affordances of museum education to ELT. Two of these projects were carried out in high schools (one public, the other charter), and one in a public primary school located in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city of Valencia. Data from the three projects were analyzed within a qualitative research paradigm that drew on individual and group interviews with all students, sound recordings from key sessions, analyses of the students’ work (of the outcomes finally shared in the exhibitions and the work completed during the intermediate phases of the projects), and the authors’ journals, which they kept systematically. Also, photographs were taken at significant moments during the project to record not only the gradual outcomes of the project but also key, ongoing experiences. At the outset of the project, the authors requested special permission from each of the families to reproduce this evidence, which was granted in all cases. Our deductive analysis of the data focused on whether the multimodal and artifactual dimensions that were necessarily involved in the creation of the school museums enabled us to establish stronger links between the English subject and the students’ identities and communities, and thus resulted in more meaningful learning for the English learners involved. Had these links allowed the students to produce work that, despite utilizing English, was inherently valuable for them and their communities? In order to give an answer to this research question, the authors first examined the diverse data collected to filter out the information that was not related in any way to the research question and which would therefore not enter the transcription process which they also undertook. Then, during the next phase of analysis, they shared all the transcripts, photographs, and student work, and individually conducted an initial coding. Quotes from the transcripts were then organized thematically using a Microsoft Excel table which was collectively revised and filled in, and the authors gradually extended the coding process through face-to-face assessment sessions. The most significant evidence and predominant interpretations of the data were thus agreed upon, and they provide the backbone of the vignettes that we will use to convey the essential findings from each context.
Expected Outcomes
The three school museums that derived from these experiences drew on multimodality and artefacts for their learning processes and outcomes. In all three cases the multimodal and artefactual nature succeeded in creating a fully-contextualized curriculum where English could be used with a purpose and within a rich, material setting. First, the museum organized in the charter high school was framed in a Content and Language Integrated Learning approach through which the students used academic content and academic English around issues arising from the Natural Sciences curriculum. The final “Natural Disasters Museum” brought together the learners’ hand-made artefacts and multimodal presentations about earthquakes, oil spills, floods, hurricanes, draughts, and volcanoes. The exhibition was hosted by the “Natural Sciences museum” of the city of Valencia so the students could showcase and explain the outcomes to friends, families, and real museum visitors. The other two museum projects developed in more disadvantaged contexts and organized themselves differently. Rather than focusing on academic English literacy, multimodality and artefacts allowed the researchers to bridge the gap that separated the students’ identities, cultures, literacies, and languages from the English language classroom. Accordingly, the second project, held at the public high school, revolved around music since the students shared the many ways in which music was important for them by showing artifacts and multimodal texts related to music. These were exhibited in the high school hall. Likewise, the museum project set in one of the most disadvantaged primary schools in the city of Valencia gave the chance for their multicultural students to combine English and the arts by creating identity self-portraits and collecting photographs they had taken from their school, household, and communities, and hanging and decorating them on a huge board with English captions around them. All this work was displayed in the neighborhood public library.
References
Block, D. (2012). Class and SLA: Making connections. Language Teaching Research, 16(2), 188-205. Doi: 10.1177/1362168811428418 Early, M., Kendrick, M., & Potts, D. (2015). Multimodality: Out from the margins of English language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 49(3), 447–460. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.246 Gee, J.P. (2014). Literacy and education. New York: Routledge. Giampapa, F. (2010). Multiliteracies, pedagogy and identities: Teacher and student voices from a Toronto elementary school. Canadian Journal of Education, 33(2), 407–431. Hall, J. (2008). ‘Language education and culture’. In S. May, & N. Hornberger (eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education, 2nd edition, Volume 1: Language policy and political issues in education (pp. 45-55). New York: Springer. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1999). ‘Education, communication and interpretation: towards a critical pedagogy in museums.’ In E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), The educational role of the museum. Second edition (pp. 3-27). London: Routledge. Jiang, L. (2017). The affordances of digital multimodal composing for EFL learning’. ELT Journal 71(4), 413-422. Doi: 10.1093/elt/ccw098 Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2010). Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Pahl, K., & Pollard, A. (2010). The case of the disappearing object: narratives and artefacts in homes and a museum exhibition from Pakistani heritage families in South Yorkshiore. Museum and Society, 8(1), 1-17. Porto, M. (2010). Culturally responsive L2 education: an awareness-raising proposal. ELT Journal, 64(1), 45-53. DOI: 10.1093/elt/ccp021 Street, B. (2012). ‘New Literacy Studies’. In M. Grenfell, D. Bloome, C. Hardy, K. Pahl, J. Rowsell, & B. Street, Language, Ethnography, and Education. Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu (pp. 27-49). New York: Routledge. Vandrick, S. (2014). The role of social class in English language education. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 13, 85–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2014.901819
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