Part E: Multilingual Contexts

There are many great tools that can be used to help create visuals and written dialogue for students when they are writing a story, sharing general ideas etc. Having ELLs use various types of websites to assist with brainstorming ideas and producing final products, allows them to show more interest, and engages them in their learning. Providing opportunity and options for students using their L1 is important, and whenever possible, providing websites to complete a task helps ease the stress of language barriers. Post 1 lesson on how you can support this initiative.

We must practice what we preach and model extensively for ELLs. Modeling advocacy is important!

Depict how you are a superhero advocating for all of the ELLs in the classroom. You must be creative and utilize the learning from the readings to support your statement, theme, and ideas. Please incorporate the diverse learners in your comic. (i.e. you may wish to incorporate FMNI students)

My students regardless of where they are from, always find it interesting that as an adult I still have an inherent love from comics and heroes. I was once able to really bring to life, superheroes for some of my students while others-were not as interested in the extra bit of work required to understand the text (I don't know if it is all cultures that use characters and/or Sanskrit), because the "all capitals" makes the students confused about the word ad sentence structure. Although the students can read it, there were difficulties for some. Most students were interested and reading along with the class while others were just following along.

The class got into discussions of where Superheroes like, Spider-Man and others came from. The inquiry turned into a unit that became focused on the "Myths and Legends". Students throughout the inquiry were interested in how and why some myths and legends lasted as long as we can remember while others were adapted into popular stories and "tales of ..." (Marvel reference).

Later, a semester after- I had a bit of a following in which a few students would approach me for .cbr files of their favourite stories that I used to tell them in class (in regards to comics). One student of the group in particular was a more shy student and not very outspoken but absolutely brilliant. The student has long since graduated made his life something of an adventure from what he tells me now. But he was telling me when the time came for him to graduate that he was sorry. I asked what he could have possibly been sorry for and he said, "I will not go to university and study literature." I told him that I honestly did not know. From what I had understood he was going to study psychology or computer science. He told me had to go with computer science because its what his parents wanted. I did email and speak to his parents about this, and their response was-along the lines of if he really does well with the elective literature courses he will take, then it can be the decision he makes in the future. My student was enthralled and still quite longing the satisfaction to be enrolled full time into literature studies. He is well now though and still loves messaging about the latest and greatest in Marvel's drawing boards.




I will post a lesson that I used but throughout the inquiry I had students preparing a myth or legend of their own. (This was a Grade 10 Academic Class at the time). I have attached a link to the wattpad story where we compiled the class work.