Chapter 4
Incorporating mindfulness into multiliteracies pedagogy
Contemplative digital social reading and writing
This chapter describes the distinctive state of mind of
Mindfulness (also referred to as Contemplation)
and argues for its inclusion in Multiliteracies pedagogy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015).
Contemplative literacy practices encourage
instructors and learners to focus on the present moment, thereby
deepening our understanding of reading and writing as processes.
More specifically, the chapter reports on a Multiliteracies-inspired
college-level course entitled “Narrating the Multilingual Self”
during which L2 learners of French were guided to tell their
“multilingual life story” (Edwards, 2019). Based on the premise that learners
become the autobiographical narratives they construct about
themselves, the course explored the diverse, intersectional
experiences of French-speaking multilinguals. Following Barbezat and Bush (2014),
contemplative reading and writing activities were employed to
heighten the learners’ awareness of their own multilingual
subjectivities and identities. In contrast to traditional digital
social reading (DSR) assignments, contemplative forms of literacy
oblige learners to “slow things down” by annotating, reading aloud
and reflecting on the meanings and feelings engendered by texts.
Similarly, contemplative digital writing (DSW) activities include
freewriting, journaling, and annotating to promote greater
self-awareness of meaning-making as a personal, creative act.
Article outline
- Introduction
- L2 mindfulness studies
- A French course on multilingual life writing
- A contemplative approach to digital social reading (DSR)
- Framing the classroom as a contemplative space
- #AnnotatedSyllabus
- Contemplative reading activities
- A contemplative approach to digital social writing (DSW)
- Freewriting, translanguaging, and perezhivanie
- Writers annotating their own texts
- Lessons learned
- Contemplative reading vs. close reading
- The efficacy of digital annotation tools (DATS)
- Designing slow literacy
- Conclusion
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References
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Appendix