English Language Teacher Education and the Multiliteracies Pedagogy: Constructing Complex Professional Knowledge and Identities

Abstract

Contemporary literacy practices need to be addressed in school settings. That requires awareness by teachers and students of the cultural and linguistic diversity present in our cosmopolitan societies. In the field of English language teaching (ELT), one way of responding to such demand is engaging teachers with multiliteracies pedagogies throughout their professional preparation. Based on that assumption, this paper reports on a component experience of the Brazilian Government Program for Initial Teacher Education, where, in 2017, three teacher candidates planned and taught three English lessons using the multiliteracies pedagogy framework. It stands as a case study that seeks to identify the impacts of using multiliteracies pedagogy in a teacher education context, in terms of knowledge building and identity work. Teacher candidates engaged in a designing process of multimodal teaching materials and documented their experience in journals. Those items were used as data to investigate the impact of the pedagogy on teachers’ development, focusing on the following elements of design: reference, dialogue, structure, situations, and intention. Research findings suggest the positive impact of that experience, both as a source of professional knowledge and as a fruitful opportunity for teachers to change preconceptions about ELT.