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!
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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.
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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.