WEBCURRICULUM DESIGNS, AND DECOLONIALITIES IN-DEVIR DIGITAL RESOURCES AS TOOLS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING PRACTICES.

Abstract

Webcurriculum design as teaching and learning practices shall be understood as movements created by students and teachers to co-design teaching and learning strategies using digital and analogical resources. The screens of the “interactive” board, smartphones, computers and tablets, and the contents of the web are tools and resources employed to co-construct meanings through network inter-relations otherwise that move beyond the linearity presented by course syllabi or textbooks. Some movements of how webcurricula can be co-constructed, through English language classes and meta-classes, in a Teacher Formation Course will be described and discussed, as well as the experience of dealing with multimodal literacies, translingual practices and some processes of decolonialities in-devir with my students, teachers in-devir, majoring in Licenciatura em Letras.

Keywords
Webcurriculum; Multimodal Literacies; Teacher Formation; Decolonialities in-devir

The analogical framework digitalized

Since the turn of the 21^st century much has been said about the use of digital technologies in teaching and learning. However mesmerized we are, most of us, teachers-in-devir¹, are still employing apps and platforms as projections of analogic textbooks and our linear thoughts, mostly due to our lack of pedagogical ideas and knowledge on how to deal with such digital devices.

The European rationality-modernity paradigm (Quijano, 1992), on the one hand, has taught us to follow sequenced and linear procedures to learn and teach, the same linearity present in the architectures of schools and the plant production lines and the expected types of movements in environments in which procedures are still characterized by the Banking Education (Freire, 1967). The Common European Framework for Reference of Languages reinforces this paradigm, by designing the structure of what should be taught and tested in their respective sequential “proficiency” levels from A1 to C2, based on the construct of a monolingual paradigm that is followed by the majority of the foreign language editorial market.

On the other hand, the 21^st century language students’ profiles shall be considered otherwise². Their previous, ever-since experience with languages, and multimodal literacies otherwise, as players of digital games and the apps, make them co-constructors of imaginary digital lifeworlds (Gee, 1996; 2020), at least in their minds. Bruns (2007), more optimistically, calls these digital natives produsers, i.e., consumers and creators of digital contents, be it a remix or a collective (re)creation of digital contents otherwise, contents that are further shared on the web.

Despite these digital natives (Prensky, 2010; 2012) being raised sliding their fingers on touchscreens, when they reach their school environments, it is still commonplace to see their smartphones or tablets off or, when on, hidden under their desks or behind their standing textbooks, as these screens would disturb the linearity of the teacher-centered pedagogies that “deposit knowledge” in students’ minds, one of the characteristics of the analogical paradigm and framework of the Banking Education (Freire, 1967), to be further withdrawn in the form of examination practices.

The present moment, these first decades of the 21^st century, is a period when some of these subjects of learning, once sitting at their own desks, now decide to become teachers. The decisions they are to make, as teachers-in-devir, can reveal who they are and who they want to become. Will these bodies, minds and souls remain in the 19^th -20^th century or will they create movements connecting their past-present experiences with their present-future possibilities? Would we continue digitalizing the analogical framework to teach or would we learn to co-design inter-relations otherwise with these digital devices?

Frustrated with the pedagogical materials available, which still nowadays consist mostly of the digitizationof analogical screens, pedagogical movements otherwise are co-constructed with my students³, teachers-in-devir, employing the screens and the content of the web, hence, webcurriculum, in order to experiment and learn with the digital affordances and not with the digitized projected materials.

On the one hand, the co-construction of webcurriculum designs makes it possible to deconstruct linearities and “didactic” sequences and reconstruct other movements to enhance learning and meaning makings (Kress, 2005; 2010; Canagarajah, 2011; 2013). Webcurriculum designs deterritorialize the roles of students and teachers in order to reterritorialize, making them agents of their own learning and learning experiences, as well as agents of their teaching experiences, learning and teaching with their peers (Vigostki, 2001) mediated by the world (Freire, 1969).

On the other hand, there is the challenge of breaking some pedagogical paradigms. Although most university students nowadays have lived their lives swiping their fingers on screens, clicking the mouse, and playing videogames, when my students, majoring in English Language and Literature Teaching design their courses and classes, few are the ones who are capable of bringing their own language learning experiences, language learning experiences of their real lives, like surfing the web or playing videogames.

When my students are asked to use the digital resources to plan their classes, the movement initially made by most of them is to transform the videogame or movie snippet into a bookish activity in which learners would fill in the blanks or be exposed to learning grammar and practice sentences that do not belong to them, like the ginger beer⁴ Chimamanda Adichie (2009) mentions on her TED Talk, the danger of a single story⁵.

One of the challenges of Education has always been related to thinking of our students and our teaching and learning environment otherwise. As teachers, we share our experiences in live laboratories, our classrooms and school environments, with subjects and materials we can bring or discover together surfing the web. If we want to move away from the Banking Education (Freire, 1967) and the single story we are told, we need to learn how to co-construct inter-relations⁶ otherwise. This is the objective of this research. To co-design webcurricula, as well as movements and processes of Decolonialities with the affordances of the Digital Culture.

The global south and the “languages” as semiotic resources

Since the publication of the manifesto Pedagogies of Multiliteracies, in 1996, much has been discussed and written about the Multi (New) Literacies⁷ (New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2020; Lankshear & Knobel, 2018), Lifeworlds⁸ (Gee, 1996; 2020) and Translingual Practices⁹ (Canagarajah, 2013; 2020; Garcia & Wei, 2014; Garcia et al., 2018). They compose some kaleidoscopic movements of who we are, as learners-in-devir, and how semiotic resources, including the “languages”¹⁰ considered from the monolingual perspective, afford tools to be used to co-construct processes of meaning making.

At the turn of the 21^st century, digital devices and technologies afford the convergence of analogical and digital screens and bring into these digital worlds translingual practices among cultures and digital inter-relations otherwise. These are social practices and inter-relations that have always existed, the composition of visual, auditory, gestures, graphics etc., to create meaning making, as it happens when we are participating in a face-to-face conversation. However, the graphocentrism, most educational settings still focus on, with an emphasis on the “alphabets”, has discredited other literacies and forms of co-constructing and creating meanings otherwise or made them invisible in many school settings.

The Convergence and Participatory Cultures¹¹ (Jenkins, 2007; Jenkins et al., 2016) that somehow force us to live our multiple and heterogeneous lifeworlds in social media and other digital settings, whether we accept it or not, whether we agree to participate or not, make us create inter-relations otherwise, with other subjects and their avatars, and with the digital devices, their apps and platforms. We need to learn to co-design our inter-relations with other subjects and these digital worlds we are given.

The New Literacies are relevant, not as much due to the technology, but mainly because of the new ethos they entail, by enabling, through discursive actions such as distribution of information, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and participation in contradictory, questioning and innovative discourses, which make possible other identity performances and social reinvention¹².

(Moita Lopes, 2012, p. 208))

In classroom settings, Jenkins concepts of Convergences of Media¹³ (2007) and the Participatory Cultures (2016), when put into practice, would help co-construct the learning environment in which students learn with one another mediated by the contents projected on their digital screens. Creating such educational settings demands quite some effort and time as the Coloniality of Power and Coloniality of Knowledge (Quijano, 1992) persists in the minds, bodies, and souls of most of us, colonized subjects of the 21^st century.

Modernity has created fixed concepts centered in itself. Saito (2021) suggests these concepts be moved and keep moving, as multiplicities of praxis with life (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

Freire verbalizes Education as a practice of freedom. Another concept that is verbalized is that of Culture, “the idea that culture never is, but does” (Thornton, 1988, p.26, apud Heath, SB & Street, BV 2008, p. 7, emphasis added). Transforming the concepts of modernity and postmodernity, from their fixed forms represented by nouns, transforming the concepts of modernity and postmodernity into verbs, that is, transforming them into praxis with life, which may be, in itself, a movement of decoloniality, whose construct interrelates theory and practice, theory as practice, practice and theory and practice as theory, as Mignolo and Walsh (2018) describe and write as theory-and-as-praxis and praxis-and-as-theory.

(Saito, 2021)

Learning to deal with and work with these digital devices in our educational settings has to do with experimenting, trials and “errors”, learning from our “mistakes”, and deconstructing the idea that there is only one possible right answer, and all the other alternatives are wrong. Learning is like life, there is no end. The “end” of life is death, and death is not life. Learning with digital or analogical devices is directly connected to processes that supplements one another (Derrida, 1993), when naïve curiosity becomes epistemological curiosities (Freire, 1996). Rather than fixed forms of an imaginary or ideal world and its subject, as the European modernity-rationality paradigm has colonized the world, the real world consists of moving subjects with their minds, bodies and souls.

The co-constructions of inter-relations otherwise

Learning to read the worlds otherwise has to do with learning to read them critically, i.e., we shall try to listen to and make meanings of other histories, other versions of stories, and perspectives that are not projected on the walls of Plato’s Cave.

However challenging to our colonized minds and our own selves, if we have the intention of co-constructing knowledge otherwise, maybe from the Global South perspective, we need to learn and “teach our students to assume responsibility for their readings. You have to assume responsibility for your reading because your reading will have social consequences” (Menezes de Souza, 2011).

The 21^st century and its Digital Culture bombards us with visual images on all screens, be they analogical or digital, online or offline. We are the onlife subject (Floridi, 2015) who, regardless of being online or offline, live with the screens. The Digital Culture creates affordances for us to create countless movements as we swipe our fingers, click the mouse, or touch the screens. Yet, how much of these movements, visual images and the readings of these digital worlds reinforce the status quo of the colonizers and the paradigm of Coloniality?

In order to try to deconstruct the reading of the world through the unique lense of Modernity, being the universal reading as if one size fits all, this research aims at provoking our language students to reflect upon the multimodal readings they must assume responsibility for. In this sense, the digital resources can be employed as tools for teaching and learning pedagogical praxis through the exploration of multimodalities and literacies of the Digital Culture. Moreover, mediated by movements on the screens, inter-relations otherwise are co-constructed and the co-design of webcurricula and the meaning makings this inter-relations co-construct, hopefully, would these readers of the worlds to develop more critical Literacy practices.

The web curriculum¹⁴ [...] is developed with the mediatization of tools and interfaces of the ICDT [information and communication digital technologies] and is organized in hypertextual networks open to the establishment of arcs that create new connections between already established nodes, constituted by information and also new nodes that integrate previously elaborated knowledge and knowledge under construction by the learners (students, teachers and other people)¹⁵

(Almeida, 2014).

The de-construction provoked by the co-design of webcurricula makes it possible to co-construct inter-relations otherwise. The apparent linearity of metalanguages, aka grammar, presented by most language textbooks that follow the sequential teaching and learning production line paradigm of the Common European Framework for Reference of Languages, fades and is naturally supplemented (Derrida, 1993) by the curiosity of language students as they become curious and ask genuine questions, and as they reflect upon what they are seeing, can see, and maybe read of the worlds otherwise.

Taking into consideration that my students are majoring in English Language and Literature Teaching, a pedagogical design I have been experimenting to de-construct coloniality discourses by involving my students’ bodies and their senses, my students’ minds and their questionings, hopefully naïve questions that can be transformed into epistemic questions (Freire, 1996).

In order to do so, one of the weekly classes of the Internship Program¹⁶ is conducted in a Public School with Ensino Médio (K-10-12) students with the presence of my students, teachers-in-devir, whose major is English Language and Literature Teaching. During the first 90 minutes, I teach English to those Ensino Médio students, while my students observe the pedagogical practices and the co-constructions of inter-relations otherwise. In the second part of the class, after those Ensino Médio students leave the premises, these teachers-in-devir and I share and discuss what could be observed, our impressions, and I also share my own points of view, changes in the course of actions, and frustrations, if not asked or commented, as they are also part of whom we are as teachers-in-devir.

It is during these meta-classes¹⁷ (Saito, 2017), which correspond to this second moment-movement of the class, that my students, teachers-in-devir, are inquired to discover and connect what has been observed, what happened, and the intention of the language teacher. They learn about the theories as they live and experiment with pedagogical praxis in a real school environment in dialogue with the world we live in and the lives we live (Freire, 1969). “This terrain is rooted in the praxis of living and in the idea of theory-and-as-praxis and praxis-and-as-theory, and in the interdependence and continuous flow of movement of both. It is in this movement that decoloniality is enacted and, at the same time rendered possible” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

Processes of Decolonialities-in-devir also occur as these students, teachers-in-devir, perceive the interest in learning of those Ensino Médio students, who, from time to time, suggest adaptations of the inter-relations created by this language teacher with clear intent of fulfilling their willingness to learn and complete the proposed tasks.

Some of the discourses projected on the walls of Plato’s Cave, discourses that reinforce processes of Coloniality, such as, “students of Public Schools are not interested in learning”, or “it’s impossible to teach an English class in English in Public Schools”, and the like, immediately crumble as these teachers-in-devir observe the very first class of the semester within this school premises.

Two of the moment-movements of this research-practice will be described in this article. The first one relates to the co-construction of a webcurriculum movement in class with the language students from Ensino Médio. The second moment-movement is conducted with my students, teachers-in-devir, during one on-campus class when they participate in an oral activity and then we discuss questions related to our teaching and learning environments by offering pedagogical praxis that could make us, language teachers, deal with heterogeneous and large groups, at the same time this teacher-researcher has the intention to provoke more critical Literacies by making use of multimodal Literacies and maybe, try to break the monolingual paradigm of languages, teaching and learning.

The single-story images and webcurriculum designs

Webcurriculum designs are movements co-constructed with students during the classes using the digital resources and the content available on the web (Almeida, 2014; Saito, 2017). One of these movements co-created by this researcher-teacher in-devir happened during one lesson¹⁸ in which the theme of the unit was food, a quite recurrent topic in textbooks and in English language courses.

Exploring the images Google offers is one way not only to expand the images and vocabulary that the textbook provides, but also to reflect upon what different peoples eat and what images the web actually portrays and shows. Take for instance the word breakfast, which we all understand as the first meal of the day. When we google the word breakfast and click on images, these are the first images that appeared on 04.15.2021:

Image 1
Google Images, breakfast

And somehow Brazilian students tend to expect to see bacon and eggs in a so called “breakfast”, which actually represents an American breakfast, not a Brazilian breakfast. After exploring some of the pictures, the teacher types, English breakfast, and this is the collection of images that appear on Google:

Image 2
Google Images, English breakfast

Most times, when these images are projected the students become astonished as they see beans and tomatoes on the plate, as these are usually eaten by Brazilians for lunch or dinner, not breakfast. And in order to keep teasing them, and maybe deconstruct some paradigms of that single story we are told, I type Japanese breakfast, and pictures of fish and rice, miso soup and pickles, among other dishes appear on the screen.

Image 3
Google Images, Japanese breakfast

What usually happens at the moments in which those images are projected is that students amazingly start talking about the dishes and the food, making comments, expressing their opinions about those dishes being eaten in the morning, etc. It is not necessary to ask questions like, “What do you eat for breakfast?” or “What’s your favorite dish?” or “What’s a typical dish in Brazil?”. The curiosity these images raise makes the students talk naturally with very little effort from the teacher.

Students are also asked which countries’ breakfast they would like to see, and the movement from one screen to another continues, as they make suggestions or decide to search on their own screens. Moving to countries or cultures beyond the “center”, as a teacher, I would ask which other cultures and countries we could “visit” and learn from.

As a final touch for this sequence of images, Brazilian breakfast is typed (Image 4), and students are asked where they can see their own breakfast. To their frustration, somehow, they say those images are illustrations of hotel breakfast, not what they eat every day in their homes, and as they talk about what they actually eat and how they eat it, their favorite fillings and toppings and other “side dishes”, Image 5 is co-constructed with the students on campus.

Image 4
Google Images, Brazilian breakfast

Image 5
Compilation of Google Images, breakfast in the city of Salvador, Brazil

As students are searching for pictures using their smartphones or tablets, or using the keyboard connected to the projector, or asking someone to type the names of the foods they want to search to compose their breakfasts (Image 5), they are questioned about what language they are typing to find the pictures and why. They are also asked why the pictures of their breakfasts are not there even when we type breakfast in Salvador, Bahia (Image 6).

Image 6
Google Images, breakfast in Salvador, Bahia

This is the moment in which teachers and students talk a little bit about representations of peoples and cultures, and other questions are asked to make students reflect upon why some peoples and cultures and their knowledges are made invisible by the colonizers, the media and Google and the risk of our telling these same versions of the story, reinforcing the Coloniality of Power, Knowledge and Being.

Sometimes these questionings make the students think about the fact that the baianas do acarajé, the local ladies who sell acarajé on the streets, are dressed in white gowns only in touristic places, in contrast to those ladies who sell acarajé in other neighborhoods, who wear ordinary clothes. Further discussion over its relations to the city environment, tourism and neoliberal practices create movements in their minds, and hopefully, some processes of Decolonialities in-devir might occur, sooner or later.

Image 7
Google Images, baiana do acarajé, Salvador, Bahia

However simple and naïve this movement may seem, as we are actually talking about photos on Google Images, clicks on the mouse and fingers sliding on touchscreens, this movement makes the resurgence of some abyssal lines¹⁹ Sousa Santos (2010; 2019) describes as composed of the Sociology of Absences. His concept and proposal of Epistemologies of the South²⁰ include the Sociology of Absences, Sociology of Emergences, the Ecologies of Knowledges and the Intercultural Translation, which is a way to deconstruct and co-construct, re-construct our multiple and heterogeneous lifeworlds otherwise.

Decolonialities in-devir: some challenges

When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.

(Freire, 1969)

As a teacher in-devir in the most African city in Brazil (Fundação Palmares, 2019), a city where 81.5% of its inhabitants consider themselves black or brown (IBGE, 2018), the presence of fiercely marked abyssal lines (Sousa Santos, 2010; 2019) in the territories I move around can be observed. Very often I hear some of my students telling me they do not feel good and welcomed in certain neighborhoods, shops or malls in town. One of the most well-known shopping centers in town is characterized by maintaining two food courts on separate floors for people of distinct skin colors, according to some locals, students of mine.

The Coloniality of Power and Coloniality of Knowledge (Quijano, 1992) present in the architecture of the buildings and the organization of the city can also be seen in texts presented on the media and textbooks used to teach foreign languages. As we move through the digital territories, the tendency to naturalize the status quo of the subalterns and the discourses that permeate these multimodal texts can be easily reproduced by each one of us, teachers in-devir, without our realizing the consequences of our actions. The deconstruction of this Eurocentric modernity-rationality paradigm (Quijano, 1992) becomes a challenge! The oppressors who live inside our bodies and minds naturalize these practices of Coloniality.

Freire (1967) also wrote that “Nobody educates anyone, nobody educates themselves, men educate themselves, mediated by the world” and the world’s mediation shall be considered when attempting to create movements of deconstructions and reconstructions (Derrida, 1993), deterritorializations and and reterritorializations²¹ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2011) of bodies, minds and souls of subalterns, maybe by starting deterritorializing their representations and deconstructing how these bodies of the subalterns are represented and stigmatized by the media and the textbooks we use in class.

Learning to make use of these other Literacies otherwise, i.e., to learn how to make use of semiotic resources (languages and literacies) in order to co-construct meaning-making movements otherwise could be a movement to provoke some more Critical Literacies in our classrooms with our subaltern bodies, minds and souls.

Some of these movements of thought, deconstructions and deterritorializations, reconstructions and reterritorializations of the minds, bodies and souls of the subalterns, are provoked by employing images in pedagogical materials that “indirectly” explore visual literacies otherwise by making visible those who are kept invisible, and by creating some inter-relations otherwise.

Visual literacies and inter-relations otherwise

“Modern society seems to be invaded by the power of the image, since our society produces and consumes images like never before”

(Mizan, 2015, p.271).

One of the constant movements I co-create with my students, teachers-in-devir, is to make them reflect upon the way they employ digital resources in their own classes and in our classes and how inter-relations between subjects and subjects and materials, and subjects and the screens and the web can occur.

Although most of them extensively make use of multimodal digital materials collected on the web, when it comes to transforming these materials into learning tools, the initial movement is to stick to teacher-centered strategies based mostly on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary, practices most of them, most of us, lived as students of languages and tend to reproduce without much reflection.

Breaking some pedagogical paradigms, deconstruct and reconstruct inter-relations otherwise can be unimaginable for those who still have the analogical framework in their minds. One pedagogical tool I designed to make these teachers in-devir themselves find out inter-relations otherwise in the classroom setting is to make them live these experiences with their peers and then, further discuss what happened. Image 8, below, for example, corresponds to a card used to make students interact and talk during one of my classes.

Image 8
English Language III Oral Activity, card A

Image 8 corresponds to Card A. There should be as many cards as breakout rooms where language students are working in pairs. If you have 16 students, you should create 8 breakout rooms, so 16 students would pair up in 8 breakout rooms, and in each room, there should be a different card (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H). As students pair up in breakout rooms they decide if they want to be a letter or a number and this procedure is going to be followed to decide to which breakout room the student should go next. If two students are in breakout room C6, for example, when they finish the task one student will go to the breakout room D and the other will move to room 7.

The students are given the opportunity to interact and exchange information based on the photos they have. After 3 minutes, students are relocated to other breakout rooms, so they are able to interact and talk to different peers using different prompts, different images. While they exchange impressions and talk, their interactions are being recorded for further linguistic explorations, teaching and learning activities, and to review holistic and individual linguistic utterances.

One piece of instrução that is given is the possibilidade of their using words em their mother language when elas cannot promptly remember the word they want to say. This alternated code-switching durante an utterance is descrito by Garcia and Wei (2014) as translingualism. Canagarajah (2013) defines it as Translingual Practices and says that the decisions we make may have a clear intention of stating the social and cultural subject we are.

Translingual Practices and its experiences occur naturally whenever we have contact with subjects who make use of semiotic resources that may differ, or not, from the semiotic repertoire we own, and it becomes a vivid experience whenever we try to co-construct meaning and communicate in our multimodal worlds.

The affordances of the multimodal semiotic tools and resources of the Digital Information and Communication Technologies (DICT) make it possible to explore multimodalities in our real lives and in our teaching and learning environments. The affordances of the DICT, as well as the Translingual Practices break the paradigm of thinking of languages, making a shift from the graphocentric paradigm based on the ABC to a broader sense of how communication and meaning making can occur, employing the linguistic and semiotic resources as tools to create strategies to better communicate and co-construct meaning with other subjects.

Moreover, the translingual perspective of the language, once the monolingual paradigm is deconstructed and reconstructed otherwise, can help include our language learners who are silenced or excluded for not having the resources of this monolingual framework needed to convey their messages. As teachers-in-devir, we shall consider what happens in our real lives and in the real worlds and reflect upon the way we actually use these linguistic and semiotic resources.

By offering this opportunidade for these language estudantes to express themselves beyond the monolingual framework, it is possível to observe what each student is capable of doing, including them regardless of their “language proficiency level”, and seeing what we can or should teach and review, and what kind of individual orientação we can offer to each language student baseada on the utterances they produzem.

As the activity is completed by all the students, as usual, there comes a moment we discuss the activity itself, the meta-class moment. As the discussion gets started, we try to co-design possibilities of working with groups of language learners whose proficiency levels may differ, which is a quite common fact in our teaching environments, although obscured by tentative processes of linearity and homogenization of students in school settings. These processes are reinforced by categorizing a sequential movement of students, according to their age or the content of the textbooks used in the previous term. The Eurocentric modernity-rationality paradigm, which creates universals, categorizations, and homogeneities, can also be one of the reasons why we, teachers, tend to believe that our language learners would, and should all have “similar” language proficiency levels. As a consequence, a sense of not-belonging, “not-welcoming” students is created, usually reinforced by the discourse that they should not be there because they “don’t” know. These heterogeneous groups, however, are the norm and not the exception.

Co-designing inter-relations otherwise has also to do with how we learn and can learn with our peers mediated by the world (Freire, 1969). Vigotski (2001) conceptualizes teaching and learning mediation with the construct of scaffoldings, i.e., mediation tools created by the more capable peer, in order to create movements of thought for the learner to leave their Zone of Immediate Development²⁴ and conquer their new Zone of Real Development.

Creating movements of thoughts and new teaching and learning designs is part of who I am, in the beginning as a learner and teacher of languages, and now, as a teacher of students who seek a Teaching Certification in Languages and Literatures. By situating my students in the position of language learners, the first moment-movement created for them and with them corresponds to the Vigotskian scaffolding concept, which is constructed with the students’ multimodal senses, bodies and minds. When further discussions occur during the meta-classes, these students, with the help of these scaffoldings, can maybe move from their Zones of Immediate Development, and explore their new Zones of Real Development, i.e., what they did not know, but were ready and prone to learn and construct new meanings to their lives and the teaching and learning environments they are situated.

Furthermore, as all images portrait only people of color, my students, most of whom are also black or brown, observe and comment on the photos in a moment between the language class itself and its meta-class. The students mention they like the way they are represented, positively and as real people, instead of the most common subaltern positions. By interacting with this pedagogical material as they experiment with languages, their teaching and learning strategies are expanded as well as their repertoire of pedagogical materials and the interactions we can co-create with them.

As the semester moves, my students, teachers-in-devir, and I discuss the difficulties we face to find photos of subalterns in not subalterned situations. Concerning those two photos of Image 8, for example, whenever they mention the fact that those photos illustrate who they are, I share with my students, teachers-in-devir, my feelings and the difficulties to find photos of black people doing ordinary activities since the media and textbooks mostly portray white people only. I share the hardship of trying to find a photo of a black woman or man driving a car, and not driving a bus or a truck, or as an Uber motorist. I always tell them an anecdote that happened in 2018 when I was searching for a photo of a black family having a meal in a good restaurant. At that time, I could not find such image. I could find pictures of black people eating in a fast-food restaurant, lining in an all-you-can-eat restaurant or the like, but not in a fancy restaurant.

Visual Literacy, in the context of visual culture, allows us to analyze the way that images refer to the world in which we live. Visual culture is interested in the processes we use when looking at an image. Generally, a speech is created on the image that turns the visual representation into verbal representation. This verbal representation reveals the social aspects of the visual field and proves that images are part of our mental world. [...] We are interested in how images affect people socially, as visual objects mediate social reality and have the power to change values and perceptions of the world. Thus, learning to interpret images becomes an important means of understanding social reality.

(Mizan, 2015, p. 272)

By exploring visual literacies with my students, teachers in-devir, as they digitize or use digital resources, I would hopefully expect some of them would become more aware of the choices they make, of images, videos, texts, and maybe participate in processes of decolonialities, decolonialities in-devir, being aware of the fact that coloniality will be accompanying our minds, bodies and souls for good, as well.

Last, but not least, when these students, teachers-in-devir, design, plan and share pedagogical materials that mediate their language learning and language teaching practices, hopefully, these processes of creation would also help them imagine other ways of teaching and learning languages and their semiotic resources, other ways of inter-relating with other subjects and the materials and objects we make use of, and maybe, learn to read the worlds where we live otherwise.

Food for thought

Rather than calling this last section “Final Considerations”, considering the incompleteness of our beings, as human beings (Freire, 1996), incompleteness that makes us “unfinished” beings and in constant change, I do hope this article has provoked some movements of thought on how to think of language teaching and learning otherwise.

The affordances of the Digital Information and Communication Technologies has provoked some abrupt and major changes in our lives, and we are still trying to learn how to negotiate meanings with one another making use of these digital devices. The Theories of Multimodal Literacies and the Participatory Cultures, although part of our everyday social lives, needs to be explored and experimented in our teaching and learning environments, hopefully more as a digital resource than the analogical framework being digitize.

In order to share some of the experiments I have been sharing with my students, teachers-in-devir, pedagogical materials, employing digital resources and exploring visual literacies as tools for teaching and learning practices, were designed. The movements and analysis of the breakfast images, for instance, shows one possibility to explore digital materials available on the web, or not, and how language students can learn as they surf the web searching for data beyond the single story told by the hegemonic Global North paradigm. The second movement, the pedagogical cards with black and brown people only, besides being designed to provoke my students’ readings of the world “by themselves”, also creates movements for further discussions on representations of the subalterns by the media and textbooks. The participation in a language learning activity as such could inspire my students, teachers-in-devir, to design, plan and co-construct knowledges from the Global South perspective, using digital resources as tools for teaching and learning practices.

Last, but not least, these movements of the thought, by deterritorializing and reterritorializing “universal” concepts, by deconstructing and reconstructing paradigms, intends to maintain dialogues with all the knowledges, the Ecologies of Knowledges of diverse peoples and cultures. Decoloniliaties-in-devir is connected to the possibilities of teaching and learning to read the worlds otherwise co-constructing inter-relations otherwise and provoking a more critical reading of the worlds we live in and the lifeworlds we perform.

Notes

• 1
  In Mille Plateaux,Deleuze and Guattari (1995) precede some nouns with the word devir, devir-man, devir-animal, devir-woman, as a zigzag way to show we are always in the process of becoming otherwise. In the English translation, A Thousand Plateau, Massumi (1987) opts to translate devir as becoming, and we can read becoming-animal, becoming-man, becoming-woman. When we take into consideration the construct of Modernity, its concepts, and its linearity, becoming-man, may refer to someone not being adolescent anymore and “becoming” a man. However, becoming-man, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is not limited to neither an “end” in itself, nor a gender issue, as anyone can be/become a devir-man, becoming-man. Devir or becoming are processes in constant change, whose movements are somewhat deconstructed and reconstructed, sometimes randomly, by those of us who are in the process of “becoming”. In one of my former writings (Saito, 2021), inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, a decision was made to use the prepositional phrase in-devir, to reinforce through the use of the preposition in that in-devir is a never-ending process. Therefore, teachers in-devir, for example, regardless of how long we have been teachers, can be understood as constantly living multiple and heterogeneous processes of becoming teachers otherwise.
• 2
  The meaning-making of the word “otherwise”, positioned after a noun or a verb, shall be constructed by the reader as an “adjective used to show that something is completely different from what you think or from what was previously stated [or] as an adverb, different or in another way” (Cambridge Online Dictionary) and not as a conjunction, as it is most often referred to. “The word otherwise, […] intentionally positioned after nouns, verbs, or clauses, aims at provoking the reader to rhizomatize reading possibilities otherwise. When we imagine the design of a book, for instance, we immediately think of a book made of paper in a rectangular format, the most common book format in our Western Society. It is possible to imagine other designs of books, and some of these semiotic images that occur in our minds are designs of books that we have already seen at some time in our lives, such as books in different shapes or different materials. However, when we talk about a book design otherwise, at least momentarily, we become intrigued to imagine something we do not know exactly what it could be. An ice-cream flavor otherwise presents possibilities of flavors that can go beyond the flavors we know, the other flavors, maybe leading us to imagine unknown or never-imagined flavors. (Saito, 2019)
• 3
  Most of my students are majoring in English Language and Literature and/or Teaching Certificate in English (Licenciatura em Letras).
• 4
  On her TED talk, Adichie says that when she was younger and she wrote stories of her own, her characters would drink ginger beer, even if she had no clue what it was or tasted like, as most of the characters of the stories she used to read drank ginger beer. She repeated in her stories what she read, and believed it was “true”, or should be “true”. Likewise, in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato narrates how the shadows projected on the walls of the Cave were believed to represent the real world despite none of them having been there.
• 5
  Available on: https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg Access on 2021.07.04.
• 6
  Inter-relations here refer to the interactions and how we relate to other subjects, subject with subject or subjects. It also refers to how we relate to the objects around us and the world we live in, i.e., the experiences we live and how we relate to what surrounds us. Inter-relations refer to the way we read the worlds we live and how we inter-relate with these worlds, their subjects and objects and how meaning makings are co-constructed together.
• 7
  The Theories of Multi (New) Literacies started as a response to the advent of the digital devices in the end of the 20^th century and turn of the 21^st century. The New London Group (1996) coined the term Multiliteracies, which was later called New Literacies by Lankshear and Knobel (2011) and Cope and Kalantzis names it Literacies (2012). The Theories of Multi (New) Literacies refer to the affordances of the digital resources (Gibson, 1977) and the use of semiotic resources to construct meaning-making.
• 8
  James Gee participated in the writing of the Manifesto Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, where he coined the term Lifeworlds, “spaces for community life where local and specific meanings can be made – can flourish” (Gee, 1996), i.e., lifeworlds refers to the construction of multiple representations of our own selves, be it in the social media (public life), professional or academic sites (working life), or private life. “Just as there are multiple layers to everyone’s identity, there are multiple discourses of identity and multiple discourses of recognition to be negotiated” (Gee, 1996). Lately, Gee (2020) has endeavored into the studies of discourses and lifeworlds, as the inter-relationships between subjects and semiotic resources in the digital worlds and our lifeworlds has become more and more intertwined, blurred, and characterized by discourses of its own.
• 9
  According to Canagarajah (2013), we are translinguals, and not bilingual or “native speaker” of a homogeneous mother “language”. The Modernity-rationality paradigm constructs “acceptable knowledges” and readings of the worlds based on binarism, like the “native/non-native” speaker, categorizing “languages” as owned by certain social groups and considering the translingual competences all of us have, as an error and not as a bonus.
  Translinguals treat languages as semiotic resources that they can mix and mesh in unusual patterns to construct meaning”.
• 10
  The construct of “languages” by the European modernity-rationality paradigm (Quijano, 1992) emphasizes the monolingual paradigm of “languages”, characterized by being “homogenous” and universal. Saussure (1917) constructed the base of Linguistics by studying langue, and decided not to consider parole in his studies, as parole presents and represents the languages in use, their linguistic and semiotic resources used as social practices to construct and make meaning.
• 11
  Participatory Cultures (Jenkins et al. 2016) are related to inter-relations among subjects, in which participants, regardless of their “status” within a group, take turns to share ideas, points of view, suggest, provoke changes, etc. One example in the digital environment is the fanfic, like the groups of fans of Harry Potter, who create Fandom websites, virtual spaces where participants can share and express their artistic creations and engage in the co-construction of stories, collaboratively, continuing the Saga of the characters, or changing it, including new characters – movements characterized by the transformation of authorship as we know, in which participation and collaboration is part of it. Social Medias also create affordances for subjects to gather and “work together toward larger civic, political, economic and cultural goals (Jenkins, 2016).
• 12
  “Os Novos Letramentos são relevantes, menos pela tecnologia, mas principalmente pelo novo ethos que acarretam, ao possibilitarem, por meio de ações discursivas como distribuição de informação, compartilhamento de conhecimento, colaboração, e participação em discursos contraditórios, questionadores e inovadores, o que tornam possíveis outras performances identitárias e a reinvenção social.” (Moita Lopes, 2012, p. 208)
• 13
  The Convergence of Media relates to the intersections of the new and the old media, like the television, the printed press and the blogs and web sites, whose discourses and textual genres tend to converge.
• 14
  In this work, I choose to write webcurriculum and its plural form webcurricula as an independent lexicon, spelled as one word instead of a compound noun. Almeida (2008, 2011, 2014) writes web curriculum separately, with the word web in italics. However, the corresponding works in English refer to the term web curriculum as Web-based Curriculum, and the word Web Curriculum is associated with the programming of the world wide web, its binary codes, the development of networks (web) and their drawings (designs). Technology Education is also used as an umbrella term that encompasses a multitude of perspectives on the use of technologies for educational purposes, whether in programming (coding), in technical instrumentalization or even in its languages ​​(literacy), or with some of the critical purposes presented in this work, which some authors call critical technology education (Saito, 2017). For this reason, the option to spell it as one word, webcurriculum and webcurricula is preferred in this work.
• 15
  “O web currículo [...] se desenvolve com a midiatização de ferramentas e interfaces das TDIC [tecnologias digitais da informação e comunicação], e se organiza em redes hipertextuais abertas ao estabelecimento de arcos que criam novas ligações entre nós já estabelecidos, constituídos por informações e também novos nós que integram conhecimento previamente elaborados e conhecimentos em construção pelos aprendizes (estudantes, professores e outras pessoas)” (Almeida, 2014).
• 16
  This course, part of the Internship Program of this university, is called Estágio Supervisionado de Língua Inglesa.
• 17
  The meta-class is a “class” inside another class, and as teachers-in-devir, students of the course Estágio Supervisionado de Língua Inglesa, discuss what happened and how it happened, we have the chance to create dialogues between the theories and the practices.
• 18
  This lesson was first taught at a language school with adult beginner students, and later it was also taught in an on-campus class for university students, majoring in English Language and Literature Teaching, who were taking the course English Language III.
• 19
  Abyssal line is a concept coined by Sousa Santos (2010) which is used to describe the economic, social, cultural, political, and linguistic divisions between the Global North and the Global South. Coloniality maintains this status quo of the abyssal lines within territories of the Global South. The concept of race, which segregates bodies according to the color of their skins, is another abyssal line that allows who can and who cannot, who is entitled to and who is not entitled to.
• 20
  The Epistemologies of the South (Sousa Santos, 2010) discusses the domination by the Global North and marginalization of knowledges of the Global South. The Sociology of Absences refers to the wisdom and knowledges of the Global South that are kept invisible or silenced if not marginalized as “non-scientific” to the global cognitive injustice. The Sociology of Emergencies corresponds to this movement that tries to make the invisible, visible and give voice to the silenced. In this article, the use of images and the way it is being employed and discussed in class has the intention to bring into discussions the invisible and the silenced bodies and minds, the processes of Colonialities and Decolonialities, having in mind that all of them co-exist and inter-relate in our globalized planet. Sousa Santos’s proposal for the Ecologies of Knowledge is connected to the co-construction of knowledges from the Global South perspective. He proposes that Knowledges otherwise also participate in the Ecologies of Knowledge and that other Knowledge paradigms be constructed by the Global South, so that we can live in more harmony and solidarity with other peoples and the world, what he calls the Intercultural Translation.
• 21
  Deleuze and Guattari (2011) explain deterritorialization as a line of flight, a movement of abandonment of a certain territory that can belong to the territory of ideas or concepts, society, politics, etc. In this work, deterritorialization refers to critical reflections on 19th and 20th Century concepts of language and language teaching and learning practices that would provoke movements otherwise. Every movement of deterritorialization implies in movements of reterritorializations by the co-construction of other territories. In this work we are trying to deterritorialize the bodies and minds of the Banking Education and reterritorializing in the unknown territories we are co-constructing. This is just possible due to the agencies (machinic assemblages) of bodies and collectives of enunciations. In order for this reterritorialization to occur, Deleuze and Guattari also describe the necessity to create new lexis, so we can describe these new movements of the thoughts.
• 22
  Author: monkey business. Available in: https://br.depositphotos.com/231743216/stock-photo-adults-talking-multi-generation-family.html Accessed in 04.15.2021. Stock Images. Photo without royalties.
• 23
  Author: mimagephotography Available in: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/mimagephotography?searchterm=black%20guy%20driving%20car Access on 04.15.2021. Shutterstock. Royalfree.
• 24
  The concept of Zone of Immediate Development is better known as Zone of Proximal Development in the books printed in the 20^th century, most of which are translated from the French or English versions of Vigotski’s work. In 2001, however, Bezerra translates Vigotski’s work directly from Russian, and he explains in the translator’s prologue the reasons why Zone of Immediate Development would be a better translation instead of Zone of Proximal Development.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Jan 2022
• Date of issue
  Sep-Dec 2021

History

• Received
  16 Apr 2021
• Accepted
  15 June 2021