This study investigates how the popular science fiction television anthology series ‘Black Mirror’ can be used to introduce first year university undergraduates in a CLIL-motivated classroom to threshold concepts associated with neoliberalism. A multimodal social semiotic approach is utilized and the findings discussed in relation to active learning.
This study investigates how the popular science fiction television anthology series ‘Black Mirror’ can be used to introduce first year university undergraduates to concepts associated with neoliberalism, and act as a trigger for deep student engagement with such threshold concepts that may be difficult to comprehend in the typically monomodal form that is characteristic of most conventional academic literature. While Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is commonly associated with the multilingual classroom where students whose primary language is not English face the challenge of having to learn academic content taught in English, this study is situated in the context of a CLIL-motivated academic writing module where first year university undergraduates, who are mostly reasonably proficient in English, have to learn academic content that is new to them and quite likely out of their disciplinary domain. This learning is challenging as it occurs together with the teaching of academic writing skills necessary for them to function effectively as beginning academics. In addition, many of these students are part of the burgeoning collective of digital natives who typically possess a proclivity for the digital medium. This has implications for the learning material language educators in the CLIL classroom choose to engage such students in learning threshold concepts that would be necessary for them to write reasonably competent expository essays as beginning academics. Therefore, using a multimodal social semiotic approach, this study investigates how certain episodes from the show ‘Black Mirror’, which deals with subjects related to humanity’s relationship with technology in a dystopian future, can possibly be utilized as part of a multiliteracies approach to the teaching of threshold concepts in the CLIL classroom. The findings from the analysis are then discussed in relation to active learning as a pedagogical strategy.
