‘Fractalizing’ the MEC: Towards a Theoretical Model for Integrating Multimodal Literacy in Bilingual Teacher Education

The Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle (MEC), originally introduced as a curriculum planning heuristic, aims at disrupting monoglossic institutional spaces by enabling translingual, multimodal, and multisensory meaning-making. Building on the New London Group (1996)’s insights in multiliteracies pedagogy, we reconceptualize the MEC as a dynamic, recursive pattern in human learning processes. This new theoretical perspective positions the MEC as a generative curriculum genre of embedded genres, where smaller MECs can be integrated within larger ones across various temporal and spatial scales—analogous to fractal patterns in nature. This flexibility allows both teachers and students to spontaneously incorporate smaller MECs to address student learning needs both inside and outside the classroom.
Through examples and scenarios, we propose how the fractal pattern of “smaller MECs within bigger MECs” can facilitate lifelong learning processes without fixed hierarchical structures among meaning-making modes. Teachers can be introduced to trans-semiotizing practices, enabling fluid shifts between semiotic modes. By viewing the MEC as a recursive, fractal pattern, teachers and learners can approach learning as a dynamic, trans-semiotizing journey involving comfortably shifting between multiple semiotic modes in recursive cycles. The paper concludes by highlighting the potential of the fractalized MEC as a theoretical model for integrating multimodal literacy in bilingual teacher education.