Quarantine portraits: pedagogical account of a didactic sequence developed with high school English students

Abstract

The text narrates the experience of a didactic sequence developed in an English course given to first year High School students during the period of remote education in 2020. Focused on the study of textual genres, mainly the ones related to personal information disclosure, namely the “personal profile”, the course has proposed the analysis and the production of images associated to texts/audios about the quarantine daily routine, establishing relations between image composition, space representation and subjectivity expression. In addition to the multimodal perspective, in which we use assistive technologies — such as audio and image editing, and online publishing walls (Padlet) —, the didactic sequence aimed at exchanging experiences between students, offering them the possibility for human connection during isolation, and providing an opportunity to think critically on the language and mobilize the linguistic skills learned during the course. This account, therefore, aims to report on the intersection of two approaches: one of a reflexive character, linked to the processes of spatialization, subjectivation and the notion of discourse; and another more pragmatic, related to the study of textual genres and multiliteracy in the context of language teaching.