Developing Intercultural Awareness Through a Pedadogy of Multiliteracies

Abstract

The language classroom as a space for reflection, interaction, and enactment calls for language teaching and learning that makes meaning and prepares intercultural communicators who value local knowledge, are sensitive to diversity, and are aware of their global community. This work aims to examine the role of a pedagogy of multiliteracies in the development of pre-service teachers' intercultural awareness. This study was conducted with a group of 12 pre-service teachers at a state university in Colombia. It was based on a pedagogy of multiliteracies, through the knowledge processes, approached from a qualitative interpretive case study perspective. The findings indicate that connecting personal experiences to those of others through global literacies and multimodal tasks helped develop intercultural awareness in relation to issues of ethnicity, gender, physical ability, and social class, thus expanding participants' limited nationalist perspective and taking them to embrace a more intersectional view of others.