Social activity and learning de-encapsulation under a multimodal approach in English Language Teaching

Recebido em: 30/11/2020. Aprovado em: 17/05/2021. Publicado em: 16/06/2021. Abstract: In order to attempt to bring language learning practices closer to students’ daily lives, studies regarding Social Activity (Liberali, 2009), under the Social Historical Activity Theory (Engestrom, 1999) have been gaining space in current research (Larré, 2018; Silva, 2017; Zanella, 2017). Accordingly, as an emerging necessity from the context here described and from our society in general, environmental education became necessary, along with interdisciplinary practices, as stated in Brazil’s official curriculum guidelines. In addition, in the 21st century, with the advances of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2001) has become even more relevant in education, being it due to communication, social media, video, and images, for example. In light of this, the objective of this research paper is to analyze the outcome of an environmentally focused pedagogical intervention under a multimodal approach, developed during an internship program in a state school. After being in contact with planetary awareness in English language lessons, students customized ecobags alongside the Arts teacher, in an interdisciplinary way. Students’ productions were analyzed taking into account their multimodal choices when making meaning out of different semiotic modes, and to what extent learning de-encapsulation happened in this process. Results indicate that students were able to achieve synesthesia in their multimodal productions, combining linguistic, visual, spatial and gestural modes. Furthermore, learning de-encapsulation occurred as students made use of the environmental knowledge they acquired in English classes, not only by crossing boundaries inside the school, but also outside its walls.

Palabras clave: actividad social, multimodalidad, desencapsulación del aprendizaje, práctica interdisciplinar Nowadays, especially with the influence of modernity, globalization and advances of information and communication technology (ICT), the English language has made itself more and more present in an individual's routine.
When inserted in an educational setting, one should learn how to use a language in order to constitute themselves as subjects (Leffa & Irala, 2014). Hence, as an active subject, one shall get prepared for being a citizen with independence and autonomy in order to act in the world with the help of a language. However, when it comes to foreign language teaching in Brazilian primary and secondary education, the lessons taught tend to be far from the reality of every day conversation (Rezende, 2011). In the process of English language teaching and learning in state schools, this aspect has been debated regarding the possibilities for students to use language in their daily lives in a way that is meaningful for them (Liberali, 2009).
Studying the English language can contribute to the exercise of active citizenship, besides enhancing the possibilities of interaction.
According to the curricular guidelines issued by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) (Brasil, 2017), learning the English language provides the creation of new ways of engagement and participation of students in a globalized world. The document also proposes the discussion of topics considered important and relevant to students, being one of these topics environmental education.
Environmental education became mandatory with the publishing of the Brazilian's 1988 Constitution and was incorporated to national public policies with the approval of The National Environmental Education Policy. This document asserts that such public sphere must promote environmental and conservation awareness and praxis in every level of education (BRASIL, 1988).
The National Program of Environmental Education (ProNEA) based on the law nº 9.795 (Brazil, 1999) states that environmental education is the action of building social values, knowledge, abilities, attitudes and competences for the environmental conservation (Chapter 1, Article 1 st ). It also affirms that such action should be developed through the production and distribution of educational material (Chapter 2, Article 8 th ). This theme has already been researched (Cristovão et al., 2016;Rezende, 2014;Fracalanza, 2004;Sousa et al., 2001;UNESCO, 1976), approaching environmental education, focusing on its importance in the classroom and the concern about students' and teachers' awareness on the topic. Nevertheless, Brazilian public schools still lack the application of concrete environmental education proposals in basic levels by using English

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language as an instrument of learning. In light of this, I have decided to develop and apply a pedagogical intervention based on the principle of Social Activity, as discussed by Liberali (2009), aiming at individual and collective participation in English classes with a practical result and action that surpasses classroom boundaries involving environmental education.
The process of teaching through Social Activity (Liberali, 2009) emphasizes performing a group of actions to achieve a specific motive/ object, meeting people's daily life necessities.
In these terms, its organization is in line with elements from the Social Historical Activity Theory (Engestrom, 2002): subject, mediating artifacts, object, community, rules, and division of labor.
The outcome consists of an action in the world.
This paper aims to analyze the affordances of learning de-encapsulation through multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantziz, 2000) in the social activity of the customization and distribution of ecobags by students of the 9 th year of a Brazilian state school.
In agreement with this, this study intends to answer the following research questions: (a) How do students make meaning out of the organization of multimodal choices in the customization of the ecobags? (b) Is there any evidence of learning deencapsulation in the social activity here proposed?
This action derives from the multiliteracies proposal based on discussions from The New London Group (1996Group ( /2000. These discussions suggest the development of resources to deal with social-historical differences. For that, multiple ways of reality comprehension, that exist in various ways and media, start being a part of the discussion, elaboration, construction, and implementation of pedagogical proposals of curricular transformation (Liberali et al., 2015).
This article starts with a section of literature review, with theoretical foundation needed for further analysis: Social Activity (Liberali, 2009); Social Historical Activity Theory and Learning De-encapsulation (Engestrom, 2002); Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantziz, 2000) and Environmental Education (UNESCO, 1976). Then, in the methodology section, data collection and data analysis procedures are explained, along with details and ethical concerns from pedagogical activities within the intervention.
Subsequently, results are presented by analyzing the outcomes of the social activity, focusing on learning de-encapsulation and multimodal choices. To conclude this last segment, discussions on practical didactic activeness towards environmental literacy will be shared for upcoming considerations in basic education.

Literature review
The current society has been facing some considerable changes regarding the influence of technology in the means of communication, in social interactions and in social practices. Along with that, the environment has been responding to human actions and advances. Because of these developments, planetary awareness became necessary in education. Due to all these changes above mentioned, measures were to be taken regarding classroom practices and methodologies.
In this section, the theoretical framework will be presented to illustrate and support pedagogical practices that were performed in the intervention described in this paper.

Social Activity
After many years of contributions from several learning theories, teaching practices, methodologies, and approaches, such as Behaviorism (Skinner, 1978), Constructivism (PIAGET, 1980), Social-historical-cultural Perspective (Vygotsky, 2001), a common ground was found in order to fulfill contemporary demands from learners. Kumaravadivelu (2005), for instance, proposes the term Post-method to deal with the advantages and, at the same time, limitations of different methods, proposing the construction of new theories of practice considering the needs to connect theory and practice.
Applying to that, a post-method (Kumaravadivelu, 2005) emerged, which was called Social Activity (Liberali, 2009). In the present social context, language should meet daily-basis needs so one may transform society through a better participation and coexistence. Therefore, the learning process should be meaningful for students, working as a bridge for them to act as active citizens in the world.
In this sense, teaching practices should aim at working with reflections about real life experiences, interacting with social and historical contexts, based on a real necessity (Liberali, 2009).
In the book "Social Activity in Foreign Language Classes", Liberali (2009) explains that a Social Activity allows the creation of Zones of Proximal Development (ZPDs). That is "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). Moreover, as Holzman (2010) highlights, the ZPD can be seen in a collective way, "at other times Vygotsky emphasized more clearly that the socialness of learning-leading-development is collective, that the ZPD is not exclusively or even primarily a dyadic relationship, and that what is key to the ZPD is that people are doing something together." (p. 5). According to Holzman's analysis of Vygostky's work, "a qualitative transformation is a collective accomplishment." (p. 5). In this perspective, language involves teachers and students in meaningful collaboration according to a real necessity expressed by the community.
In this regard, Social Activity acknowledges innovative social and cultural practices, sometimes atypical for students, by implementing different instruments, conceptions, and cognitive processes. All of this allows students to have a new and different perspective of the world. Liberali (2009)  Overall, when one thinks of teaching through Social Activities, it is essential that students have access to real life situations. This can be done by experimenting, roleplaying, questioning, and reflecting ways of dealing with circumstances in life. Such actions may give students the opportunity to understand and transform the world (Richter, 2015). The pedagogical intervention explained and presented in this article was shaped according to this concept, since it emerged from a concrete necessity. Such necessity derived from both social customs (taking care of the environment) and political issues (official documents from the Brazilian Ministry of Education).
Didactic activities found in the lesson plans for the intervention, mentioned in the methods section of this paper, looked for targeting second language acquisition through social activities, involving not only learning the language itself, but also building

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planetary awareness and instigating positive action towards the "life that is lived" (Marx & Engels, 2006) through the English language. Having the purpose of deepening the discussion about teaching and learning processes based on Social Activities, the following section discusses the fundamentals of the Social-Historical Activity Theory.

Social-Historical Activity Theory and
Learning de-encapsulation Social-historical events and changes have been a topic of study for a long time. Marx (1989) for instance, mentioned the historical and social development of men in his early philosophical studies, having labor as a main bond that connected humans to the world. Vygotsky (1984) follows this line of thought by stating that the human being is dependent on social-historical activities in order to develop his/ her psyche. According to him, the emergence of consciousness is related to human activity through social interactions.
Embedded on Marx and Vygotsky's studies, Leontiev (1992) first used the Social-Historical Activity Theory term by gathering influences from several currents on social and historical modifications. Leontiev believes that a human activity comes from necessities that guide motives oriented by an object (Libâneo, 2004).
In other words, real necessities create a motive for achieving something. This motive requires an object that is present in numerous actions to reach that specific goal. Recent studies regarding this theory enhance social topics such as contextualized activities, social activeness as a means of learning, identity, institutional practices, and social diversity (Libâneo, 2004).
Such processes happen because social and historical factors work as mediators for activities.
In the book Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory, Sannino (2009)  According to Engestrom (1999), the Social-Historical Activity Theory focuses on the studies of activities in which subjects interact with one another in cultural contexts that are historically dependent and coexistent. He also affirms that behind every human action, there is the desire of reaching ways of satisfying their necessities.
According to this theory, subjects wish for an object, therefore they act inside a specific community, with established rules and division of labor. This process does not happen in an isolated way since all the activities are connected among themselves. As Liberali (2009) explains, an activity, sustained by rules, division of labor and community, happens among three basic items: the subjects, the object, and the instruments. Such instruments are found between the subjects that act and the objects or situations in which they act on.
Research has been carried out about the problematic of the distance between schoollife and real-life (Resnick, 1987;Torres Santomé, 1998;Engestrom, 2002); therefore, the need of a curriculum and learning de-encapsulation appeared. According to Liberali and Magalhães et al. (2015), usually, contents in the classroom are usually approached in a decontextualized way, far from the sensible world and isolated; this gap avoids connections and constructions of meanings by the students. Moreover, students end up not acting as operating citizens, being alienated from their own community's concreteness.
Social-Historical Activity Theory emerges from the principle of bringing together the relationship between the school knowledge offered by textbooks and a particular interest/necessity nurtured by the school community (Engëstrom, 2002). Accordingly, learners must have the opportunity to deal with meaningful knowledge that will be useful for them outside classroom walls. By dealing with an instrument and object that is desirable, yet not completely present in the textbook, but adapted to real-life situations, students have the chance to "acquire a further activity while creating it" (Engestrom, 2002, p. 3).
The relationship between traditional learning and a real necessity changes once students and teachers expand the object of learning by trespassing classroom boundaries. It gives space to a context discovery and a practical application of learning because students would be "transforming the activity of school learning itself from within" (Engestrom, 2002, p. 3). This so-called de-encapsulation of learning exploits the existing conflicts and needs among teachers, students, parents, and others involved in the school community. Lave and Wenger (1991) support this theory based on the notion of learning as a gradually increasing participation in a "community of practice". The authors claim that "social practice is the primary, generative phenomenon, and learning is one of its characteristics" (p. 69).
Therefore, learning should be seen as an integral part of a social system, working actively in the community in which it is occurring. To this extent, learning de-encapsulation should originate from a situated issue in need for attention present in a community, resulting in a Social Activity in a coexistent social and historical period.
The intervention in this study focuses on an activity derived from the necessity to work with practical and meaningful environmental education issues in the classroom. The expected result is not only to raise planetary awareness, but also to surpass classroom/school boundaries through learning de-encapsulation in the English language, involving activities in a multimodal approach.

Multiliteracies
As discussed in the previous section, a Social Activity emerges from a real necessity found in a social-historical moment one has been living in. When it comes to our current scenario, it is indispensable to notice that the advances of Cope and Kalantzis (2008) clarify that the term "Multiliteracies" appeared essentially due to some of the changes in our contemporary communications environment. In the past, the term "literacy" could be simply understood as the ability of putting words together in sentences correctly according to standard rules. Now, the term "literacies" (in the plural) is inevitably necessary. Firstly, because English is becoming a global language (CRYSTAL, 1997), so the many kinds of English literacies work in many different cultural, social, or professional contexts.
Thus, these differences have reached high importance in communication (Cope & Kalantzis, 2008). Secondly, there is the nature of new communication technologies, where meaning is built in increasingly multimodal ways; For instance, "written-linguistic modes of meaning attach to visual, audio, gestural and spatial patterns of meaning" (Cope & Kalantzis, 2008, p. 198).
In consonance with this, in 1996, The New London With the "orchestration" of modes (Kress, 2014, p. 14), that is, by integrating different modes together, a new perspective/construction of meaning becomes possible, since they are connected to the "inherent 'multiness' of human expression and perception" (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 423), bringing to surface the concept of synesthesia.
In the Multiliteracies Theory, researchers refer to synesthesia as a way of switching representational modes (parallels) to convey the same or a similar Multiliteracies, Social Activities and The Social-Historical-Activity Theory dialogue in the sense that the ongoing society has been facing social and cultural changes, bringing the urgency of changes in teaching practices. Therefore, the classroom should be considered a place where multimodal activities can be found. Teachers may benefit from enriching pedagogical procedures that innovate the way of teaching and learning (Heberle, 2012).
In this context, more actions should be taken to foster students' "multimodal communicative competence" (Royce, 2007), which involves "the knowledge and use of language concerning the visual, gestural, audio and spatial dimensions of communication (Heberle, 2010, p. 102). A new multimodal literacy is crucial to our insertion in a world where meanings increasingly emerge in many different forms (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).
Accordingly, teachers should follow the evolution of modernity and engage on pedagogical activities that favor students, meeting their needs in a meaningful way and engaging them to participate actively as agents in the world.
As stated by Cope and Kalantzis (2008), learners should learn how to use language to create meaningful and critical connections through it in order to act in the real world. Once a learning process is taken out of students' context, it loses its meaning, therefore, its relevance. This indicates that the teacher should also present a "multiple, inter/ transdisciplinary" (Oliveira & Szundy, 2014, p. 192) methodology, bringing classroom practices closer to the realness of learner's everyday life. Bezerra (2011) talks about "situated practice", which refers to "the need to approach whatever meaning-making resource from the starting point of the personal experiences of students so that they can locate themselves in relation to the study to be done" (Bezerra, 2011, p. 168). It meets with the fact that "meanings belong to culture, rather than to specific semiotic modes" (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2010, p. 102). to participate in its meanings (Cope & Kalantzis, 2008, p. 203). In this view, students in the current educational system should be molded to better adapt to the kind of the world they live now and of the near future. In conclusion, students should be able to understand how these multimodal texts work in order to reach a further meaning.

Environmental Education and Interdisciplinary Practice
Modern generations have witnessed unprecedented economic growth and technological progress, which while bringing benefits to many people, have also caused severe social and environmental consequences.

Nature of the research
The nature of this study is labeled as a qualitative Action Research (Lewin, 1946;Karr & Kemmis, 1986;Tripp, 2005). According to Tripp (2005), an Action Research is "mainly a strategy for the development of teachers as researchers, so they can improve their teaching and thus their students' learning" (p. 2). In other words, an Action research bridges the division between research and practice. The main difference between Action Research and other types of research is that it is carried by people who are concerned with the social situation that is being studied. Elliot affirms that it is a precondition of this research that the "practitioner researcher has felt the need to initiate change" (Elliott, 1991, p. 53). This study was held with students from the 9 th grade of a public school. It was implemented in the subject of English as a foreign language, which offered two weekly meetings of fifty minutes each.

Context, Setting and Participants
The intervention was carried out in a group of 33 students who were between 13 and 16 years old. Although students had access to a textbook,

Pedagogical Intervention
The objective of the pedagogical intervention was to raise awareness about actions and attitudes towards the conservation of the environment, besides working with language related to environmental awareness. During the classes, students showed signs of concern with the environment, for this matter, we aimed at addressing the subject in a critical way during classes. In the final stage, the outcome of the intervention consisted of performing the Social Activity: customization and distribution of ecobags (ecologically friendly bags, made of cotton fabric). In order to achieve the expected result, 10 classes were developed and applied. They aimed at working with specific objectives, as well as specific themes and linguistic practices and competences, as stated in the table below.

Analysis of multimodal choices
In regards to the first research question here Therefore, the action of copying can be congruently outlined with the concept of intertextuality (Bakhtin, 1999;Fairclough, 1997)

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The categories Boundary Crossing, Recipient, Motives and Overall Meaning encompass answers from question number 5 on the Intention File: "Who do you want to give your ecobag to? Why?".
Correspondingly, Meaning (written mode) is related to answers from question 4: "What message do you want to send with your ecobag?". These elements seek to identify and justify the application of the content seen inside the classroom, to "real life" situations outside the classroom.
According to the intention files' answers and through pattern detection, one aspect is present in every ecobag: the overall meaning being a gift.
After hearing in the proposal of the environmental project, that students would present someone with their ecobags as a way of raising awareness in society, they started viewing the production/ customization of their project not only as an instrument to environmental care, but also as a gift to someone they admire greatly. This added a larger meaning to LD, because students could personally connect to the Social Activity, bringing a more meaningful purpose to it. In addition, this process combines with descriptions of gestural representation, also present in A Grammar of Multimodality (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 4) for such representation "may take the form of feelings and emotions" (p. 4), with a "visible sentiment" (p. 8).
In consonance, LD occurred in several forms in this social activity. One of them was the interdisciplinary practice. Besides bringing benefits to both subjects, this practice allowed students to mix and experience knowledge involving different forms and concepts, extrapolating English classes' walls. In this matter, students dealt with modes in linguistic and artistic ways, with the help of two teachers specialized in two different areas, but making meaning together, and working collectively with the students.
LD also happened with the distribution of the ecobags to individuals outside the English classroom. Moved by affection and eagerness to make a difference, students bestowed their dear ones with materials produced by them, with a specific knowledge, carried with a meaning. This allowed the project to reach a more sensitive meaning, making more sense to students' reality and daily life, in which they were able to use language as a means of social practice and agency into the world.
De-encapsulation builds on the notion of an ecology of knowledges (Santos, 2006) as central to environments where creativity, innovation and transformation flourish. De-encapsulated practices challenge pre-established truths and value multiculturalism, through an open and continuous process of construction and deconstruction, which results from the interactions between people of different cultural backgrounds. It is not limited to the acceptance of various cultures but is characterized by a movement of appreciation and approximation between them, a disposition which should also be addressed in schools (Freire, 2003). (Liberali, 2017, p. 96) In summary, this social activity was analyzed in a double perspective, taking into account the research questions which aimed at exploring the affordances of multimodality and learning de-encapsulation in this environmental project.
The first question regards the ultimate meaningmaking process of students while dealing with multi-semiotic ways of representation. Through an orchestration of modes, students were able to choose visual representations, such as colors, shapes, and texture, alongside with a linguistic representation (the slogan), and spatial representation, by placing elements in strategic positions on the ecobag to pass a specific message. Overall, most students were successful in accomplishing a multimodal meaning in this task.
Moreover, the second research question addresses the classroom boundary-crossing that the projects attained. By carrying the purpose of approximating school's subjects to students' daily lives, learning de-encapsulation played an essential role in this task. Students thrived in making use of the environmental knowledge they had acquired in English classes, since it reached not only spaces inside the school, but also outside its walls. This happened within English Language and Arts interdisciplinary practice, as well as with the distribution of the ecobags.

Conclusion
This paper aimed at describing and analyzing the outcomes of a pedagogical intervention 16/18 Porto Alegre, v. 12, n. 1, p. 1-18, jan.-dez. 2021 | e-39671 emerged from a real-life necessity from the school community and students from the 9 th grade of a state school. This necessity is here characterized as a Social Activity (Liberali, 2009), aligned with the principles of the Social Historical Activity Theory (Engestrom, 1999). In the proposal, students were in contact with environmental education, slogans, and campaigns from all over the world, encouraging the practice of critical thinking and planetary awareness inside the classroom.
Furthermore, the results from this research indicate that students managed to deal with several multi-semiotic modes of representation and, as a result, assemble a multimodal meaning.
In the process, they customized ecobags, with the help of philanthropical grants and the enriching interdisciplinary practice with the Arts teacher.
Based on the analysis of the findings, students benefited from such practices and were able to create meaning and project them outside English classes' limits.
On the other hand, having concluded this research, internship period, and, therefore, data collection period, I concluded that maybe recording videos of classes from the intervention might have been more profitable since it shows the process with more details and accuracy.
Perhaps the process of choosing how to deal with resources and combining them in their ecobags would have been better analyzed and portrayed through image and sound recordings.
All in all, this research may work as an invitation to other researchers, teachers, and teachers in-formation to reflect upon the implications of having interdisciplinary practices taken out of school curriculums and put into practice. Besides that, environmental education needs to gain more space in classroom practices; there is no doubt of the impacts caused by society in our planet. In addition, readers might consider bringing English classes closer to students' daily routine, in a way that is meaningful for them, deriving from an outgoing necessity. This way, learning is used not only inside English classes, but also in the active community of the school and city where they live.