Interweaving Freirean Perspectives with a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Convergencies, Divergencies, and Implications for L2 Education

Freirean educational philosophy and a pedagogy of multiliteracies, with its reformulations over the years, have had a major influence on additional language (L2) education. After all, the goal of valuing and building on student diversity as well as of legitimizing minoritized students’ lived experiences so as to promote empowerment corresponds with the concerns of critical L2 education in light of the political, social, cultural, and linguistic injustices perpetuated by L2 education through its early monolingual, monocultural, and native-speakerist foundation. Yet, the ways in which Freirean educational philosophy and a pedagogy of multiliteracies go about conceptualizing and implementing “strategies” to reach such a goal differ in some domains, despite their formative convergencies. These divergencies are not a result of the intricacies of L2 education per se, but rather from how both propositions conceive of education more broadly and from where they depart in terms of their historical-political context. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comparative and contrastive reading of Freirean educational philosophy and a pedagogy of multiliteracies to foreground possible convergencies and divergencies.