Hare, J., Darvin, R., Doherty, L., Early, M., Filipenko, M., Norton, B., Soni, D., and Stranger-... more Hare, J., Darvin, R., Doherty, L., Early, M., Filipenko, M., Norton, B., Soni, D., and Stranger-Johannessen, E. (2017) “Digital storytelling and reconciliation” (pp. 200-205). In P. Tortell, P., M. Young & P. Nemetz (Eds.) Reflections of Canada 150. Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, Vancouver, Canada
All the chapters in this volume share this aim -that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of lan... more All the chapters in this volume share this aim -that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning, and social change. At the same time, most of the authors here remind us that critical pedagogy cannot be a unitary set of texts, beliefs, convictions, or assumptions. Like Pavlenko (this volume), these authors describe local situations, problems, and issues and see responsiveness to the particularities of the local as important in the equitable and democratic approaches they are trying to develop. In seeking to resist totalizing discourses about critical teaching, subjects, and strategies for progressive action, we have used the term critical pedagogies in the title of our book.
Given the large number of students from immigrant and refugee backgrounds in Canadian schools, ou... more Given the large number of students from immigrant and refugee backgrounds in Canadian schools, our study investigates to what extent an open access multilingual digital platform, Storybooks Canada (https://www.storybookscanada.ca/), might serve the interests of elementary school English language learners. Our study drew on insights from 13 experienced language tutors across greater Vancouver, each volunteering for a local organization in an after-school program for multilingual learners. We sought to determine how the diverse stories on the Storybooks Canada platform could be used in classrooms and homes in British Columbia and Canada. We investigated a range of questions, including the following: Is Storybooks Canada a helpful resource to improve student reading? Can Storybooks Canada be used to build home/school partnerships? How can the stories be used within the British Columbia Curriculum? We then did a follow-up study of British Columbia’s English Language Arts curriculum in o...
The central argument of the identity approach to second language acquisition (SLA) is twofold: Fi... more The central argument of the identity approach to second language acquisition (SLA) is twofold: First, SLA theorists need a comprehensive theory of identity that integrates the individual language learner and the larger social world; second, SLA theorists need to address how relations of power in the social world affect learners’ access to the target language community. In relation to the former, a fully developed theory of identity highlights the multiple positions from which language learners can speak, and how sometimes marginalized learners can appropriate more desirable identities with respect to the target language community. In relation to the latter, identity theorists are concerned about the ways in which opportunities to practice speaking, reading, and writing, acknowledged as central to the SLA process (cf. Spolsky, 1989), are socially structured in both formal and informal sites of language learning. Identity theorists thus question the view that learners can be defined i...
Research has found that reading achievement is strongly associated with opportunities for childre... more Research has found that reading achievement is strongly associated with opportunities for children to engage actively with print. This article addresses research on a digital initiative called the African Storybook, which provides a website with over 1,000 openly licensed children's picture storybooks in more than 150 African languages, as well as the official languages of English, French, and Portuguese (africanstorybook.org). The article draws on a 2014 study conducted in Uganda that sought to examine the extent to which teachers and children were invested in the African Storybook stories. Of central interest in this article is the extent to which teachers sought to encourage young children to engage actively with the African Storybook stories. The findings suggest that use of the stories promoted greater ownership of meaning for the young readers, as well as shifts of identity for both students and teachers.
All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of lang... more All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning, and social change. At the same time, most of the authors here remind us that critical pedagogy cannot be a unitary set of texts, beliefs, convictions, or assumptions. Like Pavlenko (this volume), these authors describe local situations, problems, and issues and see responsiveness to the particularities of the local as important in the equitable and democratic approaches they are trying to develop. In seeking to resist totalizing discourses about critical teaching, subjects, and strategies for progressive action, we have used the term critical pedagogies in the title of our book. While each of the authors represented here uses critical lenses to reflect on the teaching and research practices in her or his community, there are important differences of focus across the chapters. We have therefore decided to divide the book into four sections, each with a slightly different emphasis. In doing so, however, we recognize that the distinctions between sections are not clear-cut and that many overlapping themes emerge. Such themes are discussed in greater detail later in this introduction.
0 TESOL Quarterly's invitation to write about how my experience as a global citizen informs m... more 0 TESOL Quarterly's invitation to write about how my experience as a global citizen informs my work in local contexts has prodded me into this written retrospection. I had until a few years ago naively kept my two researching strands-West-based teacher education and my ongoing work with teachers and students in India-separate, unwisely maintaining that the two strands (my home community of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, and my teacher education work in the United States) represent different social realities, with each side having little to say to the other. My justification for keeping them separate was prompted by my tendency, among other things, to overfocus on the local. What can I say about caste, gender, or class issues in my home community that will be relevant here in the West? What can I say about TESOL teacher education in the West that will resonate with the local, sociopolitical realities in India (Ramanathan, in press)? The local needs, tools, pedagogic practices, modes of learning, teaching, exams, and bureaucratic hassles are from some angles so different in the two worlds; how does one carry over to the other? But the points of seepage were always there, and the longer I stayed with my India project, the more obvious and intrusive they became. I had begun this exploration about 7 years ago to better understand the struggles that students educated in the vernacular medium (VM) go through when they encounter English medium (EM) colleges. As one who
The end of the twentieth and early years of the twenty-ffrst century have witnessed a burgeoning ... more The end of the twentieth and early years of the twenty-ffrst century have witnessed a burgeoning interest in issues of learner identities in language and literacy education.1 This interest has been accompanied by a shift in the conception of identity which foregrounds the sociocultural ...
Storybooks Canada (storybookscanada.ca) makes multilingual audiovisual stories available in multi... more Storybooks Canada (storybookscanada.ca) makes multilingual audiovisual stories available in multiple languages to promote language and literacy development. Building on a long tradition of freely available, open educational resources, Storybooks Canada provides online, multimodal, mobile- and teacher-friendly access to 40 African stories in 21 of the most commonly spoken languages in Canada (including English and French)—making it possible to support and encourage the multilingualism of heritage language, immigrant, and refugee students. In doing so, the project demonstrates the potential for working against the normalized North-South directionality of knowledge flows to develop a more equitable ecosystem for the mobilization of knowledge.
Research on language teacher identity in the field of heritage language (HL) teaching has receive... more Research on language teacher identity in the field of heritage language (HL) teaching has received little attention, although identity is a central concern in HL education. Our research seeks to address this gap in the research on language teacher identity. Drawing on the Darvin and Norton’s (2015) conceptual framework of identity and investment, we investigate the extent to which Bangla HL teachers are invested in teaching Bangla, and how their investment provides insight into their identity as heritage language teachers. The study was conducted at the community-based Vancouver Bangla School, and the data, which focuses on our focal participant, Mili, were drawn from a year-long qualitative case study. Data sources include participant classroom observations, field notes, interview transcripts, a questionnaire, and educational resources used in the class, which were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings indicate that Mili’s investment in teaching Bangla was deeply rooted in her...
In the field of English-language teaching, there has been increasing interest in how literacy dev... more In the field of English-language teaching, there has been increasing interest in how literacy development is influenced by institutional and community practice and how power is implicated in language-learners ’ engagement with text. In this article, I trace the trajectory of my research on identity, literacy, and English-lan-guage teaching informed by theories of investment and imagined communities.
Hare, J., Darvin, R., Doherty, L., Early, M., Filipenko, M., Norton, B., Soni, D., and Stranger-... more Hare, J., Darvin, R., Doherty, L., Early, M., Filipenko, M., Norton, B., Soni, D., and Stranger-Johannessen, E. (2017) “Digital storytelling and reconciliation” (pp. 200-205). In P. Tortell, P., M. Young & P. Nemetz (Eds.) Reflections of Canada 150. Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, Vancouver, Canada
All the chapters in this volume share this aim -that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of lan... more All the chapters in this volume share this aim -that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning, and social change. At the same time, most of the authors here remind us that critical pedagogy cannot be a unitary set of texts, beliefs, convictions, or assumptions. Like Pavlenko (this volume), these authors describe local situations, problems, and issues and see responsiveness to the particularities of the local as important in the equitable and democratic approaches they are trying to develop. In seeking to resist totalizing discourses about critical teaching, subjects, and strategies for progressive action, we have used the term critical pedagogies in the title of our book.
Given the large number of students from immigrant and refugee backgrounds in Canadian schools, ou... more Given the large number of students from immigrant and refugee backgrounds in Canadian schools, our study investigates to what extent an open access multilingual digital platform, Storybooks Canada (https://www.storybookscanada.ca/), might serve the interests of elementary school English language learners. Our study drew on insights from 13 experienced language tutors across greater Vancouver, each volunteering for a local organization in an after-school program for multilingual learners. We sought to determine how the diverse stories on the Storybooks Canada platform could be used in classrooms and homes in British Columbia and Canada. We investigated a range of questions, including the following: Is Storybooks Canada a helpful resource to improve student reading? Can Storybooks Canada be used to build home/school partnerships? How can the stories be used within the British Columbia Curriculum? We then did a follow-up study of British Columbia’s English Language Arts curriculum in o...
The central argument of the identity approach to second language acquisition (SLA) is twofold: Fi... more The central argument of the identity approach to second language acquisition (SLA) is twofold: First, SLA theorists need a comprehensive theory of identity that integrates the individual language learner and the larger social world; second, SLA theorists need to address how relations of power in the social world affect learners’ access to the target language community. In relation to the former, a fully developed theory of identity highlights the multiple positions from which language learners can speak, and how sometimes marginalized learners can appropriate more desirable identities with respect to the target language community. In relation to the latter, identity theorists are concerned about the ways in which opportunities to practice speaking, reading, and writing, acknowledged as central to the SLA process (cf. Spolsky, 1989), are socially structured in both formal and informal sites of language learning. Identity theorists thus question the view that learners can be defined i...
Research has found that reading achievement is strongly associated with opportunities for childre... more Research has found that reading achievement is strongly associated with opportunities for children to engage actively with print. This article addresses research on a digital initiative called the African Storybook, which provides a website with over 1,000 openly licensed children's picture storybooks in more than 150 African languages, as well as the official languages of English, French, and Portuguese (africanstorybook.org). The article draws on a 2014 study conducted in Uganda that sought to examine the extent to which teachers and children were invested in the African Storybook stories. Of central interest in this article is the extent to which teachers sought to encourage young children to engage actively with the African Storybook stories. The findings suggest that use of the stories promoted greater ownership of meaning for the young readers, as well as shifts of identity for both students and teachers.
All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of lang... more All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning, and social change. At the same time, most of the authors here remind us that critical pedagogy cannot be a unitary set of texts, beliefs, convictions, or assumptions. Like Pavlenko (this volume), these authors describe local situations, problems, and issues and see responsiveness to the particularities of the local as important in the equitable and democratic approaches they are trying to develop. In seeking to resist totalizing discourses about critical teaching, subjects, and strategies for progressive action, we have used the term critical pedagogies in the title of our book. While each of the authors represented here uses critical lenses to reflect on the teaching and research practices in her or his community, there are important differences of focus across the chapters. We have therefore decided to divide the book into four sections, each with a slightly different emphasis. In doing so, however, we recognize that the distinctions between sections are not clear-cut and that many overlapping themes emerge. Such themes are discussed in greater detail later in this introduction.
0 TESOL Quarterly's invitation to write about how my experience as a global citizen informs m... more 0 TESOL Quarterly's invitation to write about how my experience as a global citizen informs my work in local contexts has prodded me into this written retrospection. I had until a few years ago naively kept my two researching strands-West-based teacher education and my ongoing work with teachers and students in India-separate, unwisely maintaining that the two strands (my home community of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, and my teacher education work in the United States) represent different social realities, with each side having little to say to the other. My justification for keeping them separate was prompted by my tendency, among other things, to overfocus on the local. What can I say about caste, gender, or class issues in my home community that will be relevant here in the West? What can I say about TESOL teacher education in the West that will resonate with the local, sociopolitical realities in India (Ramanathan, in press)? The local needs, tools, pedagogic practices, modes of learning, teaching, exams, and bureaucratic hassles are from some angles so different in the two worlds; how does one carry over to the other? But the points of seepage were always there, and the longer I stayed with my India project, the more obvious and intrusive they became. I had begun this exploration about 7 years ago to better understand the struggles that students educated in the vernacular medium (VM) go through when they encounter English medium (EM) colleges. As one who
The end of the twentieth and early years of the twenty-ffrst century have witnessed a burgeoning ... more The end of the twentieth and early years of the twenty-ffrst century have witnessed a burgeoning interest in issues of learner identities in language and literacy education.1 This interest has been accompanied by a shift in the conception of identity which foregrounds the sociocultural ...
Storybooks Canada (storybookscanada.ca) makes multilingual audiovisual stories available in multi... more Storybooks Canada (storybookscanada.ca) makes multilingual audiovisual stories available in multiple languages to promote language and literacy development. Building on a long tradition of freely available, open educational resources, Storybooks Canada provides online, multimodal, mobile- and teacher-friendly access to 40 African stories in 21 of the most commonly spoken languages in Canada (including English and French)—making it possible to support and encourage the multilingualism of heritage language, immigrant, and refugee students. In doing so, the project demonstrates the potential for working against the normalized North-South directionality of knowledge flows to develop a more equitable ecosystem for the mobilization of knowledge.
Research on language teacher identity in the field of heritage language (HL) teaching has receive... more Research on language teacher identity in the field of heritage language (HL) teaching has received little attention, although identity is a central concern in HL education. Our research seeks to address this gap in the research on language teacher identity. Drawing on the Darvin and Norton’s (2015) conceptual framework of identity and investment, we investigate the extent to which Bangla HL teachers are invested in teaching Bangla, and how their investment provides insight into their identity as heritage language teachers. The study was conducted at the community-based Vancouver Bangla School, and the data, which focuses on our focal participant, Mili, were drawn from a year-long qualitative case study. Data sources include participant classroom observations, field notes, interview transcripts, a questionnaire, and educational resources used in the class, which were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings indicate that Mili’s investment in teaching Bangla was deeply rooted in her...
In the field of English-language teaching, there has been increasing interest in how literacy dev... more In the field of English-language teaching, there has been increasing interest in how literacy development is influenced by institutional and community practice and how power is implicated in language-learners ’ engagement with text. In this article, I trace the trajectory of my research on identity, literacy, and English-lan-guage teaching informed by theories of investment and imagined communities.
Her research interests are related to identity, power, and language learning. Her work has influe... more Her research interests are related to identity, power, and language learning. Her work has influenced not only us Brazilian researchers and language educators, but professionals involved with education worldwide. Her efforts to bring social justice and fight inequality through her research findings are endless, specially calling out attention to relevant issues as gender, ethnic and social class differences. Norton is a highly productive scholar, her publications include 5 books, 4 journal special issues, and 125 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her current research addresses multilingual literacy for children in African, Canadian, and other global communities. Este é um artigo de acesso aberto, licenciado por Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0), sendo permitidas reprodução, adaptação e distribuição desde que o autor e a fonte originais sejam creditados.
For over a decade, the authors have worked collaboratively to better understand and address the c... more For over a decade, the authors have worked collaboratively to better understand and address the challenges and possibilities of promoting multilingual literacy in Uganda, a country of over 44 million people where over 40 African languages are spoken and English is the official language. This article focuses on the diverse ways that teachers promote early literacy in large multilingual classrooms, and how the innovative African Storybook digital initiative might support primary school teachers in both rural and urban areas. We begin the article with a description of our collaborative work on the African Storybook (http://www.africanstorybook.org/) and one of its derivatives, Storybooks Uganda (https://global-asp.github.io/storybooks-uganda/). Then, drawing on a collaborative study of primary school classrooms in eastern Uganda, we analyze four common strategies that Ugandan teachers use to promote multilingual literacy in their classrooms: the use of the mother tongue as a resource; ...
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