ABSTRACT
Today’s students comprise a range of cultures, ethnicities, languages, gender and social class, and they bring these rich characteristics with them into the classroom. Yet often, the content of the curriculum, the materials integrated within academic lessons, and the pedagogical interactions between students and teachers do not reflect these assets. This creates an unfortunate mismatch between the lives of students outside of the classroom and what is expected of them inside the classroom. In the process, a potential resource for student learning remains untapped: using students’ multifaceted personal and cultural assets to maximize learning in the classroom. A focus on these assets opens up possibilities for variability in the language of academics, enhancing opportunities for the content of the curriculum to be more accessible to students. Since multiliteracies represent the multiple modes through which students can communicate and learn, they foster diversity as a resource for learning. In this chapter, we explore the potential for multiliteracies to enhance culturally responsive approaches to classroom instruction.
