Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS) Professional Development Day: Manitoba School Library Association (MSLA) Conference.
By Morgan Arksey
School library professionals from across the province of Manitoba gathered virtually on October 22, 2021 for a series of sessions highlighting multiliteracies and the ways that we can best support students in learning across the many modes of meaning making. Event organizers Brandi Bartok, Michelle Barclay, and Alison Bodner brought together a wide range of professionals working in art, theatre, outdoor, archival, and music education, as well as renowned local storyteller Leigh-Anne Kehler, to provide an engaging day of virtual presentations that encouraged attendees to expand their definition of literacy to include visual, spatial, gestural, and audio modes through activities involving art, theatre, stories, music, found items, and the natural world. After completing the sessions, members were gifted with many resources shared by presenters, as well as links to review the sessions.
While views of literacy have traditionally been quite narrow, it was invigorating to see a day planned on literacy that highlighted the many ways that we make meaning from the world around us. As the new Manitoba K-8 ELA Curriculum document reminds us, language and literacies are context dependent. What follows is an account of highlights and memorable moments from the day’s sessions and how they encouraged participants to consider multiple ways of knowing. It became clear throughout the day’s sessions that literacy across all these modes of meaning making requires close observation, highlighting the importance of helping students slow down and truly connect with the world around them, whether through theatre, art, music, nature, or the items that surround them.
Theatrical Literacy
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are inter-fused the better.
Henry James
Participants started the day in a session on theatrical literacy led by Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s Ellen Peterson, who has been a student and teacher of theatre for 35 years as a playwright, actor, teacher and dramaturge. Her reminder that literacy is what helps us give shape to our own knowledge and that we construct knowledge just as much from social, visual, and tonal cues as we do from the written or spoken word alone was the pitch perfect note for starting our day. She continued on to explain that theatre is about creating a community and sharing stories with each other; this seems especially resonant in this time of continued pandemic restrictions, and attendees left the session with several practical theatre exercises to put in their toolkit to help build theatrical literacy, but also help students be more aware of the story that their bodies (and the bodies of others) are communicating. Tableaus and vocalizing activities are appropriate for all learners and provide community building in this world where we need to relearn how to be around one another.
Deconstructing the Visual; Using Artworks as Pedagogical Provocation
How do we teach children to read an image, to care about an artwork that at first glance has no connections to their lives?
This is the question that Pembina Trails School Division middle years art, ELA, and Social Studies teacher Allison Moore put to educators at the start of her session. I think it’s a question that all educators grapple with in many ways. What followed was an intense and thorough hour-long crash course on how to look at art. Art is an amazing source of opportunities for inquiry-based questioning, a chance for exposure to deeper analysis, and a way to expose students to the figurative nature of images, just as we would to figurative language in a story or poem. Her notes and strategies on building visual literacy are included in this issue and are well worth your time.
Musical Literacy
How can we “use music and song writing as a means of supporting multiliteracy in our schools and making literacy accessible to a variety of learners”?
Kieran West is an accomplished musician and educator and his presentation focused on the importance of engagement in our school experience. He openly shared how he struggled in school and how he was completely disengaged with school, his peers, and teachers.
Kieran spoke about the Multimodal Learning model and the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Framework and that both are pivotal to student engagement and equity. The multimodal learning model uses multiple modes of communication (VARK -Visuals, Auditory, Reading/Writing, Kinesthetic) thus recognizing the diversity of our students and the different way in which they learn. The Universal Design for Learning Framework (UDL)is a framework that is designed to help all students obtain success. Its goal is to improve and optimize learning based on the scientific insights of meeting your students where they’re at. As Kieran stated, the key benefit to multiliteracy, multimodal learning model, and the UDL framework is that they all foster equity in the classroom. Kieran provided many examples of how music literacy fits seamlessly into these models. Through several activities Kieran also gave us the opportunity to share how we connect to songs and music and how it is a powerful way of connecting our students to curriculum.
Kieran also spoke about decolonizing our classrooms and learning about the nature of Indigenous cultures; this is something Kieran feels passionate about. As an example a major nation in our province is the Cree Nation. Although the Cree language is sometimes written, their stories are usually told through music or oral tradition. By recognizing this we can hopefully make our classrooms more culturally appropriate for our Indigenous students and take a small step towards reconciliation.
Learning and the Land – Learning in the Outdoors. Our Naturalistic Superpower
Young people naturally find relationships with all living things, but often adults need to work on it.
Session three was led by past outdoor educator, resource teacher and current humanities teacher/teacher-librarian at the Pembina Trails Alternative High School, Chris Roe. Roe spoke of the immense importance of Land Based Education and its culture, affirmation of identity and the health and hope that it can provide. The foundation of the session were three interviews that he conducted with former Outdoor Education teacher Dean McLeod, Bob Burns, a middle years French Immersion teacher who moved his classroom outdoors for the 2020-2021 school year, and Pahan Pte San Win a Lakota, Cree and Métis Elder, social worker, and author. All emphasized the need for us to engage and connect with the natural world. It will make us uncomfortable at times but that will encourage our patience and problem-solving abilities and have ripple effects into all aspects of our lives and relationships.
Storytelling and Memory Building
Connecting experiences through the senses.
Long before the written word and for as long as there have been people with the ability to communicate, there have been stories, and the day’s next session with noted Manitoba-based artist in the school and storyteller Leigh-Anne Kehler reminded us that storytelling is a sensory experience. She encouraged us to pull story from our lived experiences and use those stories to delve towards the more fantastical. These stories can be created from sensory based moments that are relevant to all. For example, think about a time “when you smelled something that made you lean forward and wish that you could smell it forever” or “when you touched something, and you had to pull it back immediately.” She encouraged participants to share their experiences and guided their thinking to provide the best storytelling possible, providing an excellent model for how to support students in the process.
Object Literacy
When we look closer at the objects that surround us, what unspoken tales do they tell?
Our final session of the day was led by Anya Moodie Foster from the Manitoba Museum, who took us through some skills and strategies for encouraging deeper observation of the items that surround us; items that tell us stories that we must observe closely to ascertain. These skills of close observation and changing perspective provide opportunities for inspiration, information, and the development of historical thinking skills. She highlighted some of these strategies through a closer look at the “You are on Treaty Land” exhibit, which uses pipes, pipe bags, and treaty medals to tell a story of treaty to broaden the conversation. Many lives are omitted from written records, but the objects left behind are witness to them.
Upon completion of the day, and upon further reflection, it becomes clear that a key element of literacy across many modes is the skill of observation, patience, and awareness; themes that continually resurfaced throughout the sessions. All of these literacies provide us with a way to understand and respect the world around us more completely.
Thanks again for the MSLA PD Day team for putting together a day that encourages us to see the benefit of literacy outside of the book.
Morgan Arksey is a middle years teacher-librarian at Arthur A Leach School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is passionate about community-building, technology, and the power of story. When not “teacher-librarianing”, he is probably sharing memes on the internet.