Newfield (L2ML) - Poetry, Performance and Making in Second Language Learning

Dr. Denise Newfield, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa:
Poetry, Performance and Making in Second Language Learning
Abstract:
My presentation looks back at a lifetime’s South African work in the field of multimodal literacies, returning to and re-turning it in order to understand it better, and to convey its features in ways that might be helpful for scholars, teachers and students at this particular moment in time. This work was carried out under the stars of multiliteracies (New London Group) and multimodal social semiotics (Kress 2010; Jewitt 2014). My own work is included alongside that of many brilliant co-teachers, researchers, students and their students, in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa, in formal language, literacy and literature classrooms, as well as in clubs, community venues and on stages.
The goal of this work has been both political and educational - to oppose apartheid and colonial curricula and pedagogies, and, since liberation, to attenuate the legacies of previous inequitable and educationally unsound systems. We have sought to enhance alphabetic literacy, to encourage semiosic production, semiosic dispositions, and new senses of self, context and the world. Our work has been undertaken at different stages of life and levels of education, in both well-resourced and under-resourced, monolingual and multilingual environments.
My presentation will make a tight selection from this work in order to focus on our reconceptualization of poetry as a multimodal genre, and on the role that poetry, performance and making has played in second language contexts. I shall try to evoke the magic of our multimodal enterprise through examples, while also theorising them. I shall show how South African educators modified the frameworks through a focus on local practices. I also wish to diffract past analyses through philosophical approaches of posthumanism (Braidotti 2013) and feminist new materialisms (Barad 2007) to show the alignments and disalignments between these frameworks and those of multimodal literacies.