Part III Introduction

This course is the third of a three-course program for a microcredential.

I. Theorizing Other Ways of Knowing

II. Multimodal Theory: Don't Play the Butter Notes

III. Creating Multimodal Texts: Production Stages

Supporting the Success of All Students: Schwab's Commonplaces helps you, the teacher, recognize that you are a part of the process of learning and teaching, informed by your knowledge, competency, and biases; recognizing that your students are not extensions of you, but cultural beings like you, will help you lay the groundwork for academic achievement of all of your students.

Building Cultural Competency: Understanding Schwab's Commonplaces will help you see the ways in which contexts, communities, and identities (the milieu) play into what happens in the classroom, motivating a process of further inquiry by you, the teacher, into the cultural ways and lives of your students, and to help you make decisions about materials and curriculum.

Raising Critical Consciousness: Schwab's commonplaces draws attention to the fact that aspects of the educational system weighs heavier than others, that standards and test scores outweigh individual students, their cultures, and their communities, necessitating an intentional effort to break down these systems.

Learning Outcomes

After completing the modules, you will be able to:

• Feel comfortable in engaging in critical practices which means finding the language and frames of reference to examine perspectives and the world around me.  
• Understand that authors read and write from multiple social locations.  
• Recognize that it is a natural and common human behavior to group the people and things we encounter in the world into categories. 
• Theorize practice of design and the production process implementing Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning to humanize all students.  
• Uncover those buried histories that provide a more cohesive and comprehensive understanding of contemporary issues.
• Recognize that as I group the people and things, we encounter in the world into categories that these categories become “single stories” that give us incomplete and simplistic understandings of the identities of others. 
• Understand that “single stories” impact our own identities, and determine how we socially construct narratives around others.