What is Multiliteracies?
In the 21st century, with the rapid development of technology, multimedia has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. The advertisement on the street is no longer a display of words and still images but a short video or animation presented on the TV walls. The contents created from multimodal semiotic resources such as moving images, sounds, symbols, and texts have formed a new meaning-making style that directs how people receive information and communicate meaning. In response to this revolutionary change, multiliteracies competencies have become indispensable for modern citizens and cannot be over-emphasized in our education today. In addition to the two cores of traditional teaching—reading and writing, curricula in recent years have also included audio-visual presentations and multimedia narratives, intending to cultivate students’ multimedia literacy and creativity.
About SDGs
To raise students' awareness of public issues, the multiliteracies course integrates the notion of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations into a problem-based class project. This project guides students to study the problems that our society is now facing and invites students to come up with practical solutions to a self-selected issue with the purpose of improving human life. Furthermore, students promote their developed concepts, practices, tools, or products by creating a short video with a design thinking process to showcase their accomplishments through multimodal presentations. Also, they are engaged in the whole process and finish the task independently and collaboratively, from brainstorming ideas, writing up the content, orchestrating the collected materials, selecting proper sound effects, and voice acting.
About the course
This curriculum includes basic writing and reading skills training, encouraging students to read various materials of different genres and post their reflections on a shared blog. Besides, students are provided with chances to write about topics that interest them, supported by the instructor's instruction on the composing process, detailed comments on the drafts, and one-on-one conferencing. What's more, to foster students' multiliteracies abilities, the teacher incorporates multimedia content into the teaching materials and encourages students to make short videos individually and in groups. In this way, students can learn how to narrate a story through images, words, and audio-visuals, and apply their communication and problem-solving skills during the teamwork.