Language teachers' ethnocultural empathy and multiliteracy resources for low-literacy migrants

What is it about?

The increasingly digital and multicultural 21st-century society requires future teachers to be prepared for the changes and challenges they may encounter. Not only language and digital competences, but critical-thinking and problem-solving skills are needed. Besides, well developed socio-affective abilities, empathy among them, are also key when dealing with others. This is even more relevant when teachers are to work with a non-mainstream population, such as adult migrants with low literacy levels, and to design student-centered curricula or activities. Training future teachers in the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies is a means to integrate multimodal digital instruction and aggregate cognitive as well as socio-emotional features to the education of future language teachers. In this article, we show how effective two digital multiliteracy interventions were in developing future language teachers’ ethnocultural empathy and critical thinking skills when appraising the educational needs of low-literacy migrants.

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Why is it important?

In an increasingly diverse society, with constant migration bringing people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds into the education systems of host countries, language teachers need to be well prepared for the changes they will encounter. Digital multiliteracy resources can enhance teacher training by developing critical thinking skills and ethnocultural empathy for future adult students.

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