Introduction
Before I arrived at GSE, I was an English Language and Literature instructor and examiner for the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum at a private school in Pakistan. Here is how I got here:
Dream Team:
Class of 2019.
Put a pin on it: Fulbright Pre-Arrival Orientation.
Some pandemic
era screenshots
of Zoom classes,
featuring Arthur
Miller, Sophocles,
and my Year 10
class (names
redacted).
Multimodality has strongly informed my teaching practice, especially since 2019, a year that saw me wrestling with Zoom and Google suite for online lessons during Covid-19.
Gradually, annotating texts collaboratively, be it visual texts and graphica such as Persepolis, or classics such as Antigone (image 4 to the left), became less daunting for students as a collaborative exercise. In fact, my emergent understanding of adolescents' digital literacies was shaped in the same classes, as they navigated between software with ease, often prompting me when I got stuck!
Eager to learn more about such pedagogy from a practitioners' point of view, I applied for a Masters at Penn through Fulbright, noting the focus on equity and social justice visible on the program website.
The rest, as they say, is history. You may read my reflectons and crtical essays for further notes on how prior practice offers me current praxis through the courses that I have taken at Penn.
Hence, digital literacy, composition, and employing tools for creative expression are sub-themes of interest to me in the wider field of multimodal literacies.