Post 5: Teaching with Multimodal Texts for Social Justice Goals and Integrating FPPL in Unit Planning

Dec. 2nd, 2024

Prompt: For this post, reflect on what we have explored in this course and think about how you can integrate multimodal texts, social justice goals and the First Peoples Principles of Learning (FPPL) into your unit planning. Consider, for example, how you might incorporate diverse texts and multimodal literacies into your teaching practice or which other ways you can ensure that the social justice goals and FPPL principles are being integrated.

Reading Colouring Outside the Lines by Sangu Mandanna, one can sense social justice goals and multimodal texts, which are evident in the literal reading of the short stories about young LGBTQIA+ and intersectional love stories. Incorporating FPPL ways of knowing with this text in particular, I would focus on the specific principles: learning requires the exploration of one's identity, and Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place). Using these two principles as guiding lines when reading this text, students will realize the relationship that stories have with identity and the relationships between themselves as readers and the text.

Additionally, by analyzing the individual relationships between characters in the text, students can draw correlations to their relationships. Focusing on these relationships will lead to social justice goals, such as the LGBTQIA+ themes focused on in some of the short stories and, subsequently, the motivation and necessary action required to achieve these goals.

Giving a platform to diverse narratives will help students connect with the world around them more effectively and purposefully and provide learning opportunities to expand upon their worldviews.